#DBlogWeek ’13 – Day 2 – Petitioning the FDA

It’s Diabetes Blog Week again! For the next six days, I’ll be participating in the Fourth Annual Diabetes Blog Week (my second; you can find last year’s posts here). I’ll be taking cues from  Karen and her assembled guest topic-suggesters Bitter-Sweet Diabetes.

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Today’s Prompt: Recently various petitions have been circulating the Diabetes Online Community, so today let’s pretend to write our own. Tell us who you would write the petition to – a person, an organization, even an object (animate or inanimate) – get creative!! What are you trying to change and what have you experienced that makes you want this change?

NOTE: This is not a real petition. I suppose it could become one, but without credible citations and fact-checking, it is nothing more than my own airing of personal grievances.

Hope, anxiety, and the search for Enlite-nment

I admit it. I’m one of the people that has put a big emotional investment on hope. I think everyone hopes for something, but the extent to which we rely on that hope, and and to which it makes us happy or sad, anxious or angry, motivated or despondent, varies.

In this particular case, my hope has led me to inclinations of the latter of each of the three pairings (sadness, anger, despondency).

Why? Because I’m not hoping for something that hasn’t been discovered yet (well, I am, but that’s not what upsets me). I’m hoping for something that is available to the most of the free world (you can even order it in Canada, apparently), but not in the United States.

I’m talking about the Medtronic Enlite Continuous Glucose Monitoring Sensor.

Why is it that those of us in the States are stuck using a primitive sensor with a needle that is terrifyingly large and readings that are (sometimes) terrifyingly inaccurate? (sometimes, this happens)

Even though I somehow forgot to bolus for Saturday’s breakfast, this should never have happened: