When I think back to myself at age 17, I think, “Wow!  You’ve come a long way, baby!”  I mean, I have learned so much since then, been through so much, and gained so much wisdom about life since then and…..Diabetes has gotten so much easier since then.  On one hand, it would have relieved so much worry if I could have told myself, “Don’t worry…You will get to see lots of advancements in diabetes in your lifetime.  In a few years, you will be wearing an insulin pump that will revolutionize your life.  You’ll have a meter that requires only a small drop of blood and gives you your results in 5 seconds.  You’ll find a wonderful man in college who loves you just as you are, diabetes and all.    You’ll have a beautiful, healthy daughter.  You’ll find your life’s work helping others with diabetes.  You will still travel to foreign lands, and yes, you will have one of those scary low blood sugars, but you’ll learn from it and make adjustments.  You’ll get to wear a highly technological continuous glucose monitor to help you see patterns in your blood sugars.  Heck…you’ll even go to one of the leading endocrinologists in the world.”  Yes, it would have been nice to know those things in advance.  I was just a small town girl from Hickory, North Carolina who knew nothing about diabetes before diagnosis, knew no one else in town with diabetes, received very little diabetes education and started out with a horrible endocrinologist who could have cared less about me because he was on the verge of retirement.  But, I must admit that if I knew all of that stuff was inevitable I might have slacked off in my vigilance over my diabetes care.  And that’s where a huge part of my wisdom has come from…..meticulously monitoring my blood sugars to understand how certain foods and certain kinds of exercise affect me, learning to recognize what a low blood sugar and a high blood sugar feel like, thinking ‘outside the box’ to find new places to put my pump, and gaining confidence in my own ability to control MY diabetes.  The end of the song very accurately conveys my thoughts (and hopefully, yours too!):