Know When to Hold’em: Playing the Diabetes Blame Game

It is the eighth annual Diabetes Blog Week, started by Karen from Bittersweet Diabetes and today is day 3 –  The day one topic is here about expecting the unexpected and day two is here about the costs of diabetes. Today’s prompt is one I am very passionate about and have written, spoken and shouted about –…

Read More

Counting the Costs of Living with Diabetes

It is the eighth annual Diabetes Blog Week, started by Karen from Bittersweet Diabetes and today is day 2 – well I just scraped in as it being day 2! The day one topic is here about expecting the unexpected and today the prompt is about the costs of living with a chronic condition (I prefer not to…

Read More

The Surety of Expecting the Unexpected

It is the eighth annual Diabetes Blog Week, started by Karen from Bittersweet Diabetes I participated a while back now and given I am back on the D Blogging seat, thought I would hop on in and join. I am looking forward to reading and connecting with diabetes bloggers across the world this week. The day one…

Read More

A Life That Just Gets Better!

Guest Post by Annabelle Leve Hi, let me introduce myself! I was diagnosed with T1 diabetes in 1977, at the age of 11 years. I was admitted to the Royal Children’s hospital (Melbourne) almost in a coma. I stayed in the hospital and was ‘trained’ to look after my condition over 2 weeks. I was embarrassed…

Read More

Why Living with Diabetes is Like Climbing Mountains

It is totally normal to have up and down days, no matter who you are. Life is a multitude of feelings and emotional reactions and thoughts. You push yourself too hard, too little, into corners, and you come out fighting. You take paths that you later realise were not the best, you change tracks and…

Read More

Comparing, Deciding & Letting Go

Having worked on the interwebs now since 2001, a verrrry long time ago in the lifetime of the interwebs, but not that long ago in the lifetime of the world, I have seen a lot. A bit like the way the management of diabetes has changed so much since I was first diagnosed in 1979,…

Read More

How to Handle Easter with Diabetes

What does Easter mean to you? For me, this time of year is full of my memories of many years, stretching way back to before I had type 1 diabetes, down along the pathways of my life and out again, snaking over hills filled with images of family, seaweed fights at our beach shack, hunting…

Read More

Bells, Buzzers, Beeps and Whistles

Sometimes I feel like my life is a series of bells, buzzers, beeps and whistles….the constant beeps of the blood glucose machine as it tells me it is on, and then that it is ok to add a drop of my blood. The beeps of my insulin pump as I take a bolus, and the…

Read More

The Wonderfulness of Being Broken

Do you sometimes feel broken? Or have you been told you are? And how does that make your feel? The definition of broken includes “reduced to fragments; fragmented; ruptured; torn; fractured; not functioning properly; out of working order”. The word broken presumes the existence of a whole. And the expectation that a whole is far better…

Read More

Eating Low Carb For Type 1 Diabetes

When I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1979, the dietary rules (yes they were RULES) had a “forbidden foods” list of all the things that contained sugar – (all the best stuff for a 12 year old) and then there was a “free list” ALL the meat and cheese and fat, oh and…

Read More

Finding My Voice

Welcome to the new chapter of my diabetes journey and hopefully, ours together. This is the first blog post on the new version of my diabetes blog – Diabetes Can’t Stop Me. I have lived with type 1 diabetes since 1979, when the extreme weight loss I had been experiencing, shifted from delight at being…

Read More

Time for change – new logo, new name!

As we have now closed the Diabetes Counselling Online charity and counselling services, I have decided that it was also time to rebrand! This website is now my personal blog and business and Diabetes Counselling is a big part of where we have come from. However from here on, the site is called – Diabetes…

Read More

Why People With Diabetes Are a Bit Like Ducks

You would think that after 37 years of life with type 1 diabetes, I would have it all sorted. It is something you get, learn about and manage, right? (cue injecting into oranges here). In some ways that is true. Once you get the basics of managing diabetes, once you understand how it works, what…

Read More

A Final Hurrah! Time For Change

Hello there diabetes friends. A lot has been happening around these parts. As you may remember, our last grant for our online counselling services ended in July last year. For the past 12 months we have once again operated solely as volunteers, as we have done many times in the past 15 years, since I started Diabetes…

Read More