In recent years blogging has become passé in the Diabetes Online Community (DOC) and replaced by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms. I still miss the informative and heartfelt posts of my peers and would love to see a resurgence in real writing about life with diabetes. There is no doubt that over the past couple of years I have joined the decline. My most recent post was published 10 months ago! In general I feel as though over the last nine years I have said it all and no doubt I am now mired in laziness.
(There are a still a few active diabetes blogs in my Feedly Reader such as The Savvy Diabetic, Diabetes Stories, Diabetogenic, Embrace, and Scott’s Web Log. But there used to be well over a hundred.)
I am not 100% ready to abandon Test, Guess, and Go. Amazingly I still have readers and Google links my posts to searches for things like Tandem occlusion alarms. I periodically get emails from people wondering if I am okay since I haven’t written in so long. Once in a while I have diabetes friends on Facebook or in real life who tell me how much they miss my writing. I still pay over $100 a year to WordPress for a premium blog and the url. If I knew how to back up my content on a free blog and just pay for the url, I might do that. But it is easier to just pay the money and stay with the status quo.
There are things about my blog that should probably be updated. The name of the blog mostly refers to testing blood with a meter. Test, Guess, and Go. Test it with a meter, guess what the heck is happening, and then go on with life. The evolution of CGM technology from a cra*pshoot number to a mostly trustworthy technology has changed the landscape of my diabetes. I get numbers every 5 minutes and graphs with trends. Alarms vibrate or scream if I am going too low or too high. A Tandem pump adjusts my insulin in response to these numbers. I suppose that I could change the blog name while keeping the same url but then I would have to redo the header and graphics. I could change the WordPress theme but I am terrified that everything would go up in a puff of smoke and disappear. Remember I am 70 years old. Although I am somewhat tech savvy, I remember the early days of PCs when it was easier to get a new computer than figure out how to fix a problem.
If I really wanted to move my blog into the future, I would need to update the information provided in many posts. Quite a few links I previously shared are no longer active. Some of the information is outdated. For example I started my yearlong Countdown to Medicare series before CGMs were reimbursed by Medicare. In a nod to my present life, I did update my thumbnail photo to show my pandemic ponytail.
One thing that I would like to figure out is how to make my older posts more accessible. If someone wants to read my early posts (and some of them are really good IMO!), you have to click on a month and year. No way to start at the first post and read uninterrupted to the present. But will I do that? Probably not.
I don’t know how much I will keep writing in the future. But I still have strong opinions on things diabetes. I wake up most days trying to do better and rarely get into too much of a funk about my d-life. My doctor thinks I am doing great and I work at accepting what I hope is “good enough.” I truly am in awe of how difficult Type 1 diabetes is to manage and how well most of us do. I feel a strong connection to my fellow seniors with diabetes and hope that I have words of wisdom for younger people affected by diabetes.
I am still here today. I have started working on another post to publish soon. After that I don’t know. Thanks for reading!
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For those who read my blog from 2013-2015, I want to share the sad news that Sue from Pennsylvania passed away unexpectedly this spring after a fall. Sue wrote passionately about her crusade to get Medicare CGM coverage for her husband and I strongly believe that her emotional writings are one reason that seniors now have access to CGM technology. Thank you, Sue. You truly made a difference and I was privileged to know you.