Hi all! Well I say that – I’m not planning to actually let anyone know this blog is up until there are a few posts to see, so at the moment I’m talking to an audience of zero. However, for those of you who are reading this in retrospect, I’ll give a bit of background about who I am and why I started this blog.

My name’s Nic, and I’m a 30 year old woman who’s had type one diabetes since 16 years of age. I was born in NZ and have lived here all but nine years of my life – two of them in Sydney and seven of them in London.

As I’ve got older (mainly from my late 20s) I’ve been ever more driven to understand my diabetes and be as informed as possible so I can make the right choices and stay in the best health I can. I’ve never been one to sit still, and never one to hold back from anything fun or spontaneous – so to say that there have been times in the last 14 years when I’ve been a shocking diabetic would only be honest. I’ve gone for months on end without doing a single blood test. I’ve eaten all the wrong things, drunk what I liked and smoked. My weight has gone up and down, and I’ve indulged in exercise obsessively and sometimes not at all. I am human.

That’s one of the main things about this condition which is difficult. If we were all robots who did exactly the same thing day in and day out, maintained precisely the same weight, stuck stringently to the rules and never did anything different, we’d be A grade diabetic champions with HbA1c results worthy of a medal. We’d almost be as perfect as our non diabetic mates!

This blog is about diabetes wrapped around LIFE. Not the other way around. Making the condition work alongside you rather than rule you. While I find diabetes frustrating, and wish I could have a day off every now and then, I reckon we’re pretty lucky to have a condition which is the subject of so much research and technological advancement.

Welcome to my blog – I am looking forward to having a two-way dialogue with you all once I go public.

Nic