Anyone with a chronic illness, such as diabetes, cancer and so on, has a wealth of support groups they can join - both online and in their own communities (depending on where they’re located, of course.)
Nevertheless, many diabetics still feel very much alone, because people in their own immediate circle don’t know they’re diabetics, or don’t know what it entails.
Someone wrote a letter to Diabetic Health about this:
The Loneliness of Diabetes - Letter from a Reader
Here’s part of it:
Diabetes is a lonely disease. People don’t realize that everything affects your blood sugar. If I had cancer, all of my friends would be around caring for me, at least by asking how I am. But because I look great and exercise, am a wife, mother and president of the PTSA, attend church functions and socialize, people don’t remember or know that I have a disease that affects every minute of my life.
Healthy people - people with no chronic diseases, don’t really want to hear about other people’s problems. If they never hear the word “diabetes”, they think, they’ll never get it. And of course there’s the danger of being perceived as a hypochondriac or a whiner, rather than as someone who is simply trying to discuss an important part of their life in a mature manner.
People in general need to be educated about the symptoms of diseases, from diabetics to epileptics to manic depression, so that when they witness them (as for example the woman having an anxiety episode in an airport who was left in a room, hands cuffed behind her back, and when they checked on her a few hours later she’d somehow strangled herself to death. The situation quite probably would have been different if she’d been treated with a little compassion, but that seems to be a rare commodity these days.)
