My choice was easy really. It's just not because Dave seems to be an all-round good egg. It's not just because he writes posts that make me smile and think, "Really? Me too!". It's not just because Dave is always to be seen encouraging others on Twitter, offering cheery advice and support. It's a connection which is more specifically a fluke of timing. It's an example of how the DOC works in making you feel less alone. Less isolated. More supported - even by people you have never met face to face.
Dave and I first bumped into each other via mutual Twitter contact and blogger BigPurpleDuck (Hi Emma!). She was enthusiatically recommending insulin pump therapy to me at the time and for a long time I was stubbornly resisting. It transpired that Dave was similarly unsure about the whole pump thing, and it was good (at that stage) to feel like I wasn't the only luddite in town. We'd been for diagnosed roughly the same amount of time, I think, and had many genuinely laugh-out-loud funny exchanges of tweets about the merits (or otherwise) of turning to the "dark side" of TeamPump.
Even though we were not really watching what each other were doing particularly closely, and just following our own clinic appointment timescales at different ends of the country we ended up, through an extraordinary fluke of timing, beginning on insulin pumps within a few days of each other. Which meant we could also compare notes about those first few weeks of the experience.
I'm not even sure Dave is aware of Diabetes Blog Week and don't think he is participating, but pop on over to The Tangerine Diabetic and say 'Hi'.
