[acb-diabetics] for the ladies

[Patricia LaFrance-Wolf]

I went to one of these conferences in San Diego last Fall.  It was very
interesting.



Brandy Barnes and her daughter, Summer 

Diagnosed with diabetes <http://www.diabeteshealth.com/>  at age 15, Brandy
Barnes went on to a successful career as a pharmaceuticals salesperson, but
she deeply missed having other diabetic <http://www.diabeteshealth.com/>
women in her life to whom she could relate. Finally, after a difficult
pregnancy <http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/pregnancy/> , long thought,
and prayer, she founded DiabetesSisters (www.diabetes.sisters.org), a North
Carolina-based nonprofit organization that provides education and support to
women of all ages with all types of diabetes. DS offers conferences,
websites, blogs, and a "sister match" program, all designed to lessen
feelings of isolation and deepen bonds of connection among women with
diabetes.

Diabetes Health publisher and editor-in-chief Nadia Al-Samarrie recently
spoke with Brandy about her inspiration for launching DiabetesSisters. 

Nadia: You started DiabetesSisters as a social networking site. Did you plan
to manage it from home?

Brandy: Well, I actually started it when I had a full-time job. I was
working at sanofi-aventis at the time, as a pharmaceutical sales rep. So
when I started it, it was going to be a side project. First, I just wanted
to see if women would be interested in visiting the site and talking to one
another. I also wanted to know if it was just me who saw a need for this or
if there were other women who felt like me.

Nadia: Did you think that your site would be a place where people could come
and meet, or did you visualize yourself as a hostess who would introduce
them to one another and help them connect? 

Brandy: I was thinking that I wouldn't necessarily connect them, but that
they would be able to connect with each other. When I was pregnant
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/pregnancy/> , I felt very lonely and
isolated. I looked everywhere I could, on the Internet, in my community, and
even at my doctors' offices for a resource that would help me connect with
other pregnant women who had diabetes. I kept asking, "Can't I just talk to
another woman who has been through a successful pregnancy with diabetes?" I
realized that there had to be a place where women like me could come and
share experiences.

Nadia: What was your process in arriving at the name and concept?

Brandy: What happened was that about a year and a half after my daughter was
born in 2005, I started to feel this sort of internal pull. I was really
trying to figure out what I really should be doing with all of the skills
and gifts that God had given me. Was I doing the right thing with them? Was
pharmaceutical sales the place where I was really supposed to be using them?

I started to feel that God wanted me to do something that was bigger and
better. But I just didn't know what it was. I did a lot of praying. I filled
out a lot of strength-finder questionnaires to identify my strengths and how
I could put them all together to benefit the most people. Then one day,
driving down the Interstate, this whole concept came to me. I actually
pulled off the road, got out my little legal note tablet, and just started
writing it all down.

After I had written for about 20 minutes, I just sat back and took a deep
breath, thinking, "Okay, how in the world would I possibly do all this?" I'd
written down things like "Women's Forum?" "Buddy Match Program?" and "Annual
Retreat?" Those were things that we later did, but at that time they all
seemed impossible. I thought, "How in the world am I, Brandy Barnes, going
to do all this stuff? How will we be able to make it so that women
throughout the United States can find us, know us, and be a part of this?"

Nadia: Did you act on your ideas right away?

Brandy: No. At first it was a bit overwhelming, so I took that notebook home
and crammed it in the back of my drawer. I sort of hoped that the idea would
just go away.

Nadia (laughs): You were hoping your calling would go away?

Brandy: Well, I was thinking maybe I could forget about it for a little bit
just so I wouldn't feel so overwhelmed by it. Instead, I found myself
thinking about it every day. I'd get excited thinking, "Oh, gosh, we could
have this retreat and all these women would come!" I could visualize it. And
I could just feel my heart like beating really fast, like, "Oh, my God, this
sounds so exciting!"

I kept trying to figure out ways to actually make it happen. But I had a
full-time job, a two-year-old, and a husband, so there wasn't a whole lot of
extra time in my life. Still, about a month later, right around
Thanksgiving, I pulled the notebook out and took it down to my husband. I
asked him to just let me talk about this idea I'd been thinking about and
see what he thought. Before I could even tell him the whole thing, he was
saying, "This is what you need to be doing! This is so what you need to be
doing!"

Nadia: What a wonderful response!

Brandy: Yes. I had been thinking he was going to say something like, "This
is way too much stuff for you to do." But he was very supportive and said
that what I had in mind was right up my alley. I said I didn't know how I'd
find time to do it, and he simply said, "Look, I know you-you'll figure it
out."

So I went to meet with my endocrinologist
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/health-care/endocrinology/> , John
Buse. He had been like a career mentor to me, and I wanted to see what he
thought about my idea. He not only thought it was a great idea, but he also
encouraged me to be careful about how many people I discussed it with
because he was afraid somebody might steal it! For him to say that told me
that I had a good idea. By the way, John later became our very first board
member.

That was in November 2007. After that, during December and January, I was
very busy getting the website built and making sure it had the features I
wanted it to have. We launched on January 31, 2008.

Nadia: Aside from pregnancy, what other unique challenges do women with
diabetes face?

Brandy: Even though I was diagnosed very early, at age 15, I went through
all of high school and part of college not knowing that hormones play a huge
role in your blood sugar
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/monitoring/blood-sugar/>  level. Once
I knew that, I started to really pay attention to things like the day my
period starts because I know that I'll wake up that morning with low
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/complications-and-care/low-blood-sugar
/>  blood sugar. It's just like clockwork: I'll have low blood sugar that
morning, and then sometime later that day my period will start. Until
somebody brings it to your attention, you don't ever really notice the
effects hormones have on your blood sugar.

Nadia: Are there any patterns to blood sugar levels? Do some women
experience low blood sugar before their period, while others experience high
blood sugar or no fluctuation at all?

Brandy: Some women will typically have low blood sugar levels, while the
pattern for others will be high blood sugar. It's an individual thing. Women
can have similar patterns, but almost never exactly the same. Each woman,
once she becomes aware of the need to find her pattern, can find it fairly
easily by tracking what happens around the start of her period.

Nadia: How do you handle the tension that sometimes exists between type 1s
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/community/type-1-issues/>  and type
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/community/type-2-issues/>  2s?

Brandy: Well, we focus a lot on the similarities between type 1s and type 2s
because there are so many things we have in common. As for the tensions, at
the beginning of every conference we address that. I remember that at the
very first conference we had, you could just feel the tension in the room
because type 1s and type 2s don't normally come together. Each group had
been told for so long that its disease was different from the other group's
and that because they were different, neither group needed to know about the
other.

But what we really know is that there are so many things we have in common:
No matter what type of diabetes you have, you need to know what your blood
sugars are and you need to know how exercise
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/fitness/exercise/>  impacts them.
Whether you have type 1 or type 2, you need to know the patterns related to
your hormones, medications, and pregnancy-all those things are the same
whether you have either type of diabetes. I wrote this whole list of things
that I'd always read at the beginning of every conference to make people
realize that we have a lot in common although we'd been told for so long
that we didn't.

One of the things we do to break down the big wall that's been built is to
ask a question in a survey that we pass out at the end of each conference.
We ask people to rate, from 1 to 5, with 5 being "always true," the truth of
the statement, "Women with type 1 and type 2 can support each other in their
diabetes journey."

So far, 97 percent of the respondents have rated it 5, "always true." We've
had to address mutual support head-on from the beginning and let people know
this is what DiabetesSisters is about. That percentage is very gratifying.

Nadia: Thanks, Brandy.

  _____  

Categories:Blood Sugar
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/monitoring/blood-sugar/> , Brandy
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/community/brandy-barnes/>  Barnes,
Diabetes <http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/community/diabetes/> ,
DiabetesSisters
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/community/diabetessisters/> , Hormones
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/research/hormones/> , John Buse
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/research/john-buse/> , Pregnancy
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/pregnancy/> , Sanofi-aventis
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/products/sanofi-aventis/> ,
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/complications-and-care/tension-between
-type-1s-and-type-2s-/> 

 

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