Happy anniversary to meeeee. Today, I have had type 1 diabetes for 16 years. Exactly half of my life. Woahhhh.

I feel simultaneously old, and fortunate today. I remember when I was 16, thinking I was pretty onto it and sort of grown up, and now I’m DOUBLE that age – crikey! The fortunate bit – I don’t have a single diabetes complication to date (despite doing my best to ignore my diabetes for many years in my late teens and twenties), and I am now fortunate to have a regime which (on the whole) works really well for me and is limited in its invasiveness in my life. I’ve been through many regimes – clear + cloudy from a syringe twice a day; moving through to pre-mixed insulins from ‘dial-up’ pens; onto four injections a day; to using Lantus as a long-acting; to doing ‘on-demand’ injections based on food intake and blood sugar-lowering requirements; to an insulin pump. I’m sure in my lifetime I’ll try and adopt many more regimes, and I hope to continue living healthily with my type 1, and continuing to manage it well enough to make it as small a part of my life as possible.

At the DNZ conference they were giving certificates for 50 years on insulin. I’ve got a ways to go – my hat goes off to those of you who already have that certificate or are near to it!