New Year or Old Year – It’s Still Diabetes to Me
Health Column by Jennifer Michaud, BScN, RN, Diabetes Officer with the North East Local Health Integration Network (North East LHIN)
January 27, 2015 - As a new year begins, I can’t help but to think back on my own journey which began just over a year ago when I decided to get tested for Type 2 Diabetes.
It’s such an important first step. And it’s one a lot of us avoid because it will mean changes … changes like eating more vegetables, avoiding sugars, finding ways to put in 30 minutes of exercise a day, and taking the time to see specialists to get your eyes, feet and even gums checked. All those extremities that are so vulnerable to blood flow.
Changes that aren’t fun in the short term but that in the long run can prevent the bad stuff … like amputations, heart attacks, and blindness, to count a quick few.
In thinking about New Year’s Resolutions, there is one hard fact I cannot escape. Whatever I resolve, it will not change the fact I have diabetes. At the same time, all the changes I make can help me avoid the bad stuff and feel healthy in the meantime.
Where last year at this time, I threw myself into a hard sprint — I wanted to outrun diabetes as fast as I could — I now see it as a marathon. There is no outrunning it, but there are definitely ways to jog alongside it.
So my biggest resolution is this ….that I get to a place where I don’t have to make a resolution for change. That I just have these healthy habits ingrained.
Over that past year, as the North East Local Health Integration Network’s (LHIN) Diabetes officer, I’ve also had the pleasure to work with all the “helpers” — the nurses, the doctors, and the diabetes educators — who are supporting the runners, walkers, or rollers on their own personal diabetes marathons.
People like Minnie Jeffries who retired this year, after forty years of nursing on the James Bay Coast – the last decade focusing on diabetes education. I know Minnie leaves a big hole that the Weeneebayko Area Health Authority (WAHA) and its stellar team of diabetes educators are working hard to fill.
During the transition, WAHA invited Nurse Practitioner Barb Kiely and registered dietitian Shabnam Jabrani to the James Bay coastal communities of Moose Factory, Moosonee and Fort Albany to transfer some of this valuable knowledge.
While there, they spent some time with a visiting pediatric endocrinologist, seeing first hand a blood sugar crisis in a newborn. At a “Supper and Learn” event in Fort Albany they made an insulin presentation to staff and clients – one participant newly diagnosed that day.
Then later at Peetabek Health Services, they presented on “Dash for Good Health” on the need to reduce salt intake and incorporate substitutes, and “Don’t Let Diabetes De-feet You” with foot care advice.
Barb and a chiropodist (foot specialist) will be returning to these remote communities in February 2015 through the support of the LHIN.
You’ll hear more about their adventures and my own in 2015.
For more information: Contact Lara Bradley, North East LHIN Communications Officer, at 705-674-1492 or [email protected]
