The Corner Booth

My watch said 10:56p, and as I walked toward the glass gas station door, the time written on the glass told me closing time was in roughly 4 minutes. Though the glass, I could see the gas station attendant mopping up around the counter. The shiny wetness told me he'd already cleaned the floor in the two food aisles where I planned to beeline toward once going inside. As I pulled the door open, he tossed a semi-annoyed look at me and the black dress shoes I was tracking inside. "Did I make it?!" I asked, glancing at my watch for no reason except to show him how concerned I was with the time. He didn't respond, but I really didn't care because this wasn't a pleasure visit to the gas station. No, I had a mission. And the vibrating Dexcom G4 on my belt reminded me that there was a more critical point to all of this. The 48 on my Dex receiver and CGM in the Cloud connected Pebble watch reminded me of the more critical point to all of this, the nightcap ...

This month is a big milestone in my world with diabetes, as it's the 10-year anniversary of when I first found the Diabetes Online Community (DOC), and my discovery of the mantra, "I am not alone." At the time, I was in my mid 20s, newly-married, and had just started experiencing mild neuropathy in my feet. I was in desperate need of finding others who could share similar real-world experiences, rather than textbook medical advice or horror stories about how bad things can get. Turning to the Internet (which we did even in 2005!), I found a woman on the East Coast who was about my age and telling her own diabetes story online. That was Kerri (Morone) Sparling at SixUntilMe , and for the first time when reading her personal posts, I felt a connection to someone who truly knew what I was going through -- maybe not neuropathy specifically, but just real life with diabetes. Thanks to Kerri, I soon came across another longtime type 1 named Scott Johnson in Minnesota, who was t...