November is Diabetes Awareness Month.  As I write this on Thursday, in the US, it is Thanksgiving Day, prompting this week to become Diabetes Blessings Week.  Mike encouraged me to participate and share what diabetes has blessed me with–as a person without diabetes.

I don’t know if I can call diabetes itself a blessing–it is still a relentless, incessant, 24/7 job of micromanaging.  I don’t know if I can call diabetes a blessing because I am on the outside of it.

Yet, I do know that I have many times felt the pure impact of good things that would have never happened to me if I didn’t have asthma, and I know that many of my friends feel the same about their diabetes. And I do know the beauty of the Diabetes Online Community–the people, the love, and the hope, which are every bit as relentless as their circumstances try to be. These people encourage me every day, they make me smile, they have been with me through good and bad . . . these people are my friends.

Diabetes has blessed my friends with perspective, with determination, with perseverance.  It has blessed them with a greater sense of knowledge about themselves and about what they are capable of getting through, pushing past and climbing over.

Diabetes has blessed us with community. I have never encountered a health community like the DOC–supporting one another through diabetes in its many forms, but also in life.

Diabetes has blessed me with stories. With perspectives of others enriching my own.

With love. With hope.

With friends . . . nearby and around the world.