About the Author

Like the host of a documentary, or lead singer in a band, I end up taking credit as author of this site. As you may have guessed, there is much more to the story.

So who am I?

Simply put, I'm a diabetic. If you've been diagnosed with diabetes, then we are alike. Our symptoms, the severity, perhaps what led to our disease, even the treatments we take may be different, but bottom line - our bodies cannot process blood sugar correctly. Without treatment we are in real trouble.

Yup, that's motivation enough to learn more, but then I thought about it in an other light. My grandmother was a diabetic, my mother was recently diagnosed, and I was surprised with the diagnosis about a year before her. Genetically speaking, that means my children and the children they have are at risk as well. Pretty scary thought.

So I decided to find out everything I could about this disease, and soon realized just how difficult it was to condense what I found into something I could actually understand.

A goal started forming.

What if I could "get it"? What if I could write it down in simple English for my children and grandchildren to refer to, should the need ever arise. And so it began.

But I didn't get far before I realized several things ...

First, there are a lot of us out there. An old Navy best buddy, a brother-in-law and several co-workers were quickly added to the diabetes list I definitely wanted to help.

Second, there was more information available that I ever dreamed existed. Much of it was nearly impossible to get through without a PhD, or at least needing one sitting next to me. I needed help, or this project would never happen.

Enter Mom and Dad

Yes - I am blessed with having both parents still with me, and to top it off, they live just across the street. Now these guys aren't just your normal moms and dads either. My father, for example, is a retired biology teacher with a pretty good background in managing Long Term Care facilities as well. He still reads micro biology and organic chemistry text books for pleasure and is fascinated by the possibilities science brings to the area of curing disease.

Not to be topped, my mother is a retired registered nurse for both clinical and emergency room care situations. She was also licensed for patient care as a personal nurse and caregiver in private homes before finally hanging up the white hat. In other words, places I don't like to be now (doctor's office, emergency rooms, surgery rooms, etc.) were part of her daily life for many years. She knows medicine, how to administer it, why you should or should not worry about symptoms, and what to do when everybody else (like me) panics.

They are the backbone of this site. I took the time to learn how to build a website with SBI, and they ground me in what matters in the world of diabetes, (they have the harder job by the way). We all do research. We all write. They help me understand medical gibberish, and I help them understand what we need to do to get it on the web. Finally, we all labor over making sure what we have is a) need to know, not fluff; b) makes sense, to the best of our ability, and; c) is as light hearted as we can make it. There are plenty of biology texts you read if you want to take a nap (sorry Dad), so our goal is to present it in a way it can actually be read.

Some of the information is interesting. Some of it is fun to know, and some of it is just downright scary. But our goal is to provide what I, my family, my immediate friends, and I hope you, a growing group of new friends need to know, when you need to know it. We are, after all united by a common bond for staying healthy.

We could use your help

This is a growing, hopefully evolving website, limited only by the number of hours in a day we can devote to the task, and by our imagination on how best to commit what we've learned to the keyboard. We plan on being around for a long time, so there's no panic to get it all done in a day, so to speak, but I do recommend checking back often for updates, (or click on the orange RSS button in the left margin to get updates as they happen).

Most of all, I invite you to email us with any comments you have on what we could do, should do, or even should have never done, to make this site more useful to you. If we have made a mistake from a simple typo to a glaring content error, please tell us. Our mail and email addresses are shown on the Contact Us Page. Please feel free to use them.

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