LIVINGLIVING
sound like 'just' anything! Also, at this
time I was having problems overnight
with control; one time my partner could
not wake me up in the morning and she
called an ambulance. That happened
on one other occasion too. It was all
becoming more of a trial. It was around
this time that I discovered the forum on
www.diabetes.co.uk. I looked around that
for a while, just growing my understanding
of other people's experience of living with
diabetes."
In 2010 Street was extremely relieved
to be told that the retinopathy in his
eyes had receded. "It was at this time
I put my first post onto the forum," he
says, "It was distressing to read about
how many people were struggling with
the condition. The 'internet of diabetes'
was a depressing place, yet my own
experience had not been too bad. I'd
lived a pretty good life, I'd won a Tae
Kwondo competition, played cricket in
Jamaica. I thought that having Type 1
should not stop anyone from achieving
their ambitions."
On the www.diabetes.co.uk
forum he moved from contributing to
being a moderator. He says, "I found I
had to keep repeating the same things as
many of the questions were on the same
issues, asked by someone who'd not
seen the earlier replies. It occurred to me
that doing a blog could be a better way to
do this. I'd put the answers up on there
then link the repeat questions back to it,
so I did not have to copy and paste the
same answer again and again.
Social mobility
"I started writing about diabetes on my
blog www.diabettech.com on 24
December 2014 when I reviewed the
FreeStyle Libre. I was an early adopter
of this novel technology and was curious
about variations of data and experience
that I was reading about online. I was
prepared to undertake some sort of
experimentation on myself. I would wear
a sensor but maybe change which insuIin
I was using in order to see what effect
it had on my control. The Libre sensor
was a tipping point for me, leading to the
blog and to what I do now, which is to
write about insulin action and diabetes
technologies."
When he started his blog, Street
didn't participate in the Diabetes Online
Community on Twitter or Facebook, that
came about after he started blogging and
when, also in 2015, he became involved
in GB.doc (where .doc stands for diabetes
online community not, for any Americans
reading, the Department of Correction). He
says, "I think I joined the diabetes online
community on social media just before it
I used N=1, which is a way to say that the experiments were
being done only on one person, myself "