It was when Kerri Sparling of Six Until Me told me she had to get a special pouch sewn into her wedding dress for her pump that I started to really understand what living with diabetes is all about.
“Diabetes doesn’t stop just because it’s my wedding,” Kerri explained to me as I sounded puzzled on the phone.
Diabetes is a chronic illness. It’s with you all the time. The math needs to be done while you’re running a 10k or eating a buffet. The carbs have to be counted while you’re having a BBQ or out on a road trip. Your insulin has to be measured whether you’re camping or canoeing.
It. just. doesn’t. stop.
Since that conversation with Kerri nearly a decade ago, I have learned so much more about diabetes. I understand the pressures it puts on families, parents, kids, and everyone in the community around the person living with T1D.
If you know someone living with T1D or a friend is a parent of a T1D child, please have them put June 6 into their calendar for an important Twitter chat Diabetes Management In Summer: Camp, Trips and Travel with #ContourNextOne.
This Twitter event will include tips and tricks for kids and counsellors managing diabetes at summer camp, as well as tools and items have on hand to make diabetes management easier when the family is traveling.
With summer just around the corner, parents are planning their next vacation, summer camp enrolment and road trip. With this change in schedule, it can become difficult to manage a family member’s diabetes through proper meal planning and activity schedules.
That’s why I love running with Team Diabetes and raising money for Camp Jean Nelson, one of Diabetes Canada’s D-Camps for T1D kids.
The camp counsellors at D-Camps are a little different than the usual cast of youth that would shepherd cabins at a summer camp, and yet they’re exactly the same. D-Camps is a camp for kids with Type 1 diabetes, so the camp officials are health care professionals and people living with diabetes themselves, but they are the same s’more roasting, campfire song singing, stay up late, rope climbing fans that are at all summer camps.
Diabetes doesn’t take a day off. It’s a 24/7/365 illness that requires you to think like a pancreas before you exercise, before you eat, before you do anything that many of us take for granted. That’s why being extra prepared for a busy summer away from routine is so important.
The hardest part about trusting other people to look after your kids is trusting they will know what to do and understand the results. That’s where a device like the CONTOUR® NEXT ONE meter and CONTOUR® Diabetes App can help.
The CONTOUR® NEXT ONE meter features smartLIGHT technology to quickly indicate if a reading is above, below or within target range to help people with diabetes better manage their condition. The technology displays a green screen for normal blood sugar levels, yellow for high and red for low.
This makes it easier for children, teachers, coaches, and everyone who plays a role in the team of people it takes to manage diabetes to help. The system also features a wireless-enabled smart meter that links to a mobile device via Bluetooth to see results on the CONTOUR® Diabetes App and the new My Patterns feature that uses results from the meter to identify patterns in blood glucose readings, suggests possible causes of changes and provide guidance and personalized advice to help address it.
Please join us on June 6 for the Twitter chat Diabetes Management In Summer: Camp, Trips and Travel with #ContourNextOne.
This post is sponsored by Ascensia Diabetes Care Canada Inc.