Yesterday was #dayofdiabetes, an initiative from Chris from A Consequence of Hypoglycaemia. You can read about it here!

I didn’t really get involved yesterday. I was feeling pretty blah about my diaversary and I didn’t want to live tweet just how blah I was feeling. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t follow along.

Here is what I learnt when I was scrolling through the #dayofdiabetes tweets last night as I was wide awake, hypo:

Diabetes is freaking boring! No seriously.

Like, really, REALLY boring.

Now this shouldn’t really come as a surprise to me. I live this thing. All the time. I know the drill. I know what it takes. I get it. (Or THIS, as @Diabetes Heroes most eloquently tweeted!)

The aim of the day is absolutely not to get people feeling sorry for us or thinking that we have things so, so tough. It’s a day where we try to live tweet our life with diabetes and take a moment or two to actually document each and every detail of life with diabetes.

You may think that we do that already. That between the blog posts and the Facebook pages and the Twitter chats that there is a lot of diabetes documentation already happening.

But what the #dayofdiabetes social media flood shows is just how much we DON’T say about our lives with diabetes.

We may talk about hypos (see my tweet at exactly 12.58am last night) and being burnt out; we may talk about campaigns and programs and experiences with healthcare professionals; we live tweet from conferences and participate in tweet chats. And we have our special brand of diabetes humour that we share too.

However, these things in no way give indication of the minutiae of diabetes. Those minute-by-minute things we do, the decisions we make, the mindless and almost-reflex-like way we reach for devices to push, press, inject, click – all to help us manage our condition.

If you don’t have diabetes, Google ‘#dayofdiabetes’ and have a look through some of the things people have posted. It may give you some insight into just what the daily grind is all about.

And if you do have diabetes? There’s lots there for us as well. For me, I find exercises like this so comforting.  Knowing that others feel the same frustrations about doing the same things, or that the thoughts that pass through their heads at certain points mimic mine makes me feel connected.

This is awareness-raising at its simplest and best. I wish that healthcare professionals and those responsible for developing diabetes policies could read the feed from yesterday. Perhaps this could be submitted as part of the consultation process for the development of the new Australian National Diabetes Strategy! I can’t think of a better way to provide a glimpse into a day in the life of someone with diabetes and what we need!