Diabetes lobbying and my own Fiscal Confusion

If you’ve been paying attention to the big diabetes advocacy and lobbying groups, you know that Congress passed the Special Diabetes Program, also known as the SDP.  This program allocates $150 million of federal funds towards diabetes research.

If you’ve been paying attention to my state Governor, you know that he openly chastised the House of Representatives, specifically one of his own political party leaders, for delaying a vote on the $60.4 billion Hurricane Sandy Relief Fund. “There’s only one group to blame,” he said, “for the continued suffering of these innocent victims.”

If you’ve been tuned into any television, video, or online media as 2012 came to a close, you know about the metaphorical financial precipice from which the United States was about to tumble.  I don’t know all the details, but early morning on January First, we were caught in the middle of a free-fall and temporarily brought us back to relative safety.

Sheltering our children

I made it a point on Friday to make sure I was home in time to see the school bus arrive and for my Kindergarten-age son to step off. I hugged him a bit longer and a bit tighter than usual, and picked him up as he exclaimed that he’s now taller than me.  We looked  at our tall shadows and made gestures that made it seem like our shadows were bumping into each other.

Before long, on the way from the bus-stop to our house, I put him down.  I can’t hold on to him forever.

A reminder of vulnerability

Earlier this morning, the Diabetes Research Institute (DRI) reported the death of Miami-area TV news anchorman Joel Connable on its Facebook page.  Being from the northeast, I had never heard of Joel and wasn’t aware that there was even a TV news personality who had Type 1 diabetes, so I quickly turned to Google to find more information.

It’s sad.  So very, very sad.  He got married just two weeks ago, and instead of a honeymoon, his bride is now planning a funeral.  It’s sad when somebody dies, but it really hits home when the person dies because of diabetes.

Hypo behind the wheel, the sequel

Today, the Star-Ledger published a follow-up article to the one I discussed in Monday’s post. For those of you paying close attention, the new article is published online here.

State officials are calling for an investigation of the training procedures.  Not of the incident, but of the existing training procedures.  This sounds like more bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo to me.  Why investigate the training they currently have?  Just adopt a training program that has already been accepted and applauded in a different jurisdiction. They’re out there. The rules of misbehaving pancreaii don’t change when we drive across the state-line.

Hypo behind the wheel

There it was. On the front page of the Sunday Star-Ledger. An all-too-familiar headline:

The article continued on Page 4.  And on Page 5. Clearly, this was a big story. And it’s a story we’ve heard before. A man is found in his car slumped over steering wheel. When confronted by police, he responds incoherently. Police beat the man into oblivion. Medics arrive and check his blood sugar: 26 mg/dL.

I don’t need to tell the story, you’ve probably heard it before. Perhaps you’ve lived it, though I pray to God that you haven’t and that you never will. This man, ironically, had developed a training program for the Philadelphia Police Department on spotting and handling the symptoms of hypoglycemia a few years earlier, but the New Jersey State Police, who were on the scene at this particular time, had never had such a program.