Day 25 of the WEGO Blog Challenge we are to write about "How have your goals as a Patient/Advocate/Person evolved?"
Most every aspect of my professional career in the Technology sector, especially early on as a Programmer, involved completely understanding every task of any given business Model, in order to effectively transition those manual tasks, to an automated (Computer) one. If I didn't understand how something worked, including thought processes inherent, I couldn't write code.
So that day in 1992 when we went home with a diagnosis of [Type 2] diabetes, my first intuition was to learn as much as possible, so I could be the best Caregiver possible.
Fast forward to about 2007, when along with a [new] different diagnosis of LADA, I also found the Diabetes Online Community (DOC). Cure Cure Cure Cure Cure. That's all I saw at first...everywhere. My job became simple right? I knew the end game (Cure) was what I had to work towards. At that very moment, I transitioned into being an Advocate of everything having to do with the helping find the Cure. As I set out on my new journey, I quickly realized I would have ZERO chances of being the one to find the Cure, and the more noise I made about wanting the Cure, was time I could spend actually having an impact in how to positively live our life with diabetes, on a personal level.
That's when I transitioned from Advocate to PERSON. I couldn't do a darn thing to help find the Cure, there were thousands of Researchers spending TONS of money. I, as one person, couldn't touch that, but what I could do was advocate for the PERSON, the Diabetic, the Person With Diabetes...whatever you prefer to say, along with those whom are directly affected as well.
Diabetes is already invisible enough, and sadly many affected choose to live in silence. Those are the people we need to reach. Living silently with an invisible disease, is what we can change at the PERSON level.
