It’s Diabetes Awareness Month! I said I’d be more active about posting things last year but that kind of fell through, so here’s a simple one to start us off: this is what a morning of a complete pump and sensor hardware change-over looks like supply wise.

I need a small army of adhesive products to keep my continuous glucose monitor attached to my body for seven days as intended, hence the skin tac wipe, the CGM tape, and the medical tape, which I’ll use to cover any remaining gaps between CGM tape and sensor and also -

-to fortify the top and bottom edges of my tape against friction from my various pairs of pants throughout the work week. I teach preschool so I’m always bending, squatting, dancing, and running after my students, and even with the help of the skin tac wipes my tape usually -

- doesn’t stay put without extra support. The sheer amount of effort it took to keep my sensors in place, often to no avail, before I added the sticky wipes to my sensor insertion routine combined with executive dysfunction kept me from wearing sensors for over a year.

Considering that the sensor working together with the pump is the draw of the insulin pump that I have, it sent me into a huge management slump in my first year on the pump. The fact that one little wipe stood on the line between a high and in-range 90-day glucose average -

- for me is pretty illustrative of everything else that comes with T1D. We’re constantly living, eating, managing comorbid conditions, and budgeting on a tightrope. We’re manually performing the function of an important organ on a minute to minute basis.

This month and always, extend an extra measure of patience to and withhold your judgement regarding diabetics in your life, and ask yourself: if compelled overnight, could you perfectly make the changes that we’ve all had to adjust to - and are constantly adjusting to -

- because the changes don’t stop in the first three months after diagnosis, most of us make changes to management on a month to month basis. I have T1D, but every diabetic is deserving of the same support. And none of us are fans of non-diabetic scrutiny.