Seeking Diabetes health information - my experiences.

So, if I look back to when I first started taking ownership of it in any meaningful way, so, you know, when I was a early teenager, to be brutally honest, it was probably my mum, because my mum has a medical background. And, you know, thanks to having looked after me for a decade's worth of diabetes. If I couldn't work something out, I was pretty sure my mum could. Since then, I think there was a period in my life, particularly when I was at university as a teenager, where like basically every other teenager, I decided I was going to do things my own way and not listen to anybody else, which went wonderfully well for everyone. Where, you know, frankly, my level of engagement with my condition very much just fell away. And I think that was temporary. But there wasn't really much I was doing in terms of trying to, again, kind of keep myself informed as to what was going on and, you know, what the impact of diabetes could be and how I can control that. Moving into my 20s and sort of adult life, to put it that way. One of the things that I was always very reticent about when I was much younger was going into education programs run by doctor's surgeries and hospitals because you do sometimes, and I may be alone in this, get a bit cynical about the idea that you're being advised about diabetes by someone who doesn't have it, who has been studying it for three years and you've had it for 20 and you can kind of feel well how much of you know you don't deal the doctor doesn't deal with the day-to-day realities of having an illness like this and that can create some I don't know what the best way to describe it is resistance or slight resentment to getting that sort of advice but if you can get a sort of swallow your pride to put it that way and sort of engage with with these sorts of programs as I did a couple of years ago I went and did a almost a diabetes refresher course over a week which was run by my local hospital and sort of sat there with other diabetics. Some of them had it for 50 years, some of them had it for five months. And that sort of program actually was really quite a strong trigger for me to re-engage with it. And so since then, I follow bits of literature and things that comes out from the diabetes practice that ran that course for me. When things come up on the exciting side in terms of new treatments and things like that, do some web research but I suppose the one thing I would say to everybody is you should look wherever you want for information about sort of you know what's coming down the path diabetes wise but if you've got real concerns about something that's currently going on or you're just not understanding why something you're trying isn't working in terms of controlling your blood sugar or something like that there isn't really a substitute for going and talking to someone who's actually in you know in the profession dealing with this day-to-day they They may not be living your life, but their experience across a range of diabetics is going to be invaluable. So re-engaging with the health service at large was probably a real turning point for me in actually understanding and working out what information I needed and what would be useful for me.