There definitely needs to be a more organised and structured education plan that all diabetics are automatically referred to when diagnosed and can access for updates if needed.
I was diagnosed with type 1 when I was 8, I spent a week in hospital being taught about carb counting and how to inject, had a hypo induced so I'd know how to recognise one in future, and had to suffer the horrors of my parents & random step-parents learning how to inject (luckily they've never had to do that again!). But the carb counting info was pretty basic, I was told that 1 unit of insulin would deal with 10g carbs or 1 "exchange", which is a ratio that really doesn't work consistently (not for me anyway), and the dieticians talked to me, not the psychotic stepmother that did all the cooking, so it was very little help.
Evidently things have changed a bit in the last 22 years, but I feel that I only get updates accidentally! For example, I recently learned that I shouldn't be injecting in my arms - how long have they known that and why didn't anyone tell me? And the diabetes nurse says you don't have to count the carbs in parsnips - how my childhood xmas dinners would have been improved if I'd known!
Anyway, after obsessively carb counting for a while, I turned into a teenager and it all went a bit wrong. Especially after I heard that carb counting wasn't really neccessary - nobody ever explained that one. Now that I'm 30, I'm trying very hard to properly get it all under control, but it's hard when everything you think you know turns out to be a bit misguided! The dietician keeps promising to teach me again how to count carbs, but that's not really what I need to know. I can easily look up carb values and I cook everything from scratch so I know exactly what's in my food. I need to know how carbs relate to insulin dose, and how it all interacts with blood sugar levels. For example, how come an identical breakfast two days running can leave me hypo one day and with a blood sugar of 14 the next day? But they won't tell me that without a food diary, and they keep sending me away because I've had a cold for ages and she thinks that's affecting my results enough to make all this tedious food diary stuff pointless. So I still haven't a clue really.
I want to get on a DAFNE course or something similar, but it doesn't seem to be available here. SO anyway, the point of all my ranting is basically that something like the DAFNE course needs to be made available for everyone, and some basic level of diabetes education should be compulsory for the newly diagnosed - my friend wasn't even told about always carrying emergency carbs and about testing before driving (and always testing if you feel a bit wrong). So he had a massive hypo, drove here with a blood sugar of 1.9, and was acting completely bizarre. He only tested after I hassled him, and luckily I always have lucozade, as he had no food at all. This is the basic stuff we should all be told as soon as we are diagnosed, but sadly not everyone is, and they're probably the ones that have car accidents! :shock:
