I wanted to wish everyone a Healthy, Happy, and Prosperous 2009. I know 08 was a tough one, but the future is ours to make what we will of it. I believe that there is a lot of opportunity out there right now and in the upcoming year if we only choose to find it. There will be a lot of millionaires made this year…I’m thinking we should all be one of them.

The older I get, I realize what is truly important to me…..My God, My wife, My family, My friends, My health, My belief in myself and others, Good Mentors, Passion for whatever I am doing, Humor, Teaching/helping others to be more, Learning new things, and the understanding not to take myself too seriously.  I know that when any of these are not going right, my life is not going right.

 As most of you know, I wrote The Joy of Diabetes and published it in 2008. It has been a true blessing to be involved with and work with so many great and interesting people in every aspect of Diabetes-publishing-marketing-internet-sales-P.R.-Development and the like. What an amazing industry…and a truly helpful group of diabetics who care.

Sometimes folks look at me funny when they hear Joy, and Diabetes in the same sentence.  I believe they are thinking “excitement and elation”…that’s more like Happiness…

Joy is about Peace and Confidence…..That is what I strive for and what I strive to help others find also.  I think it is safe to say that I have found Joy in my situation.

 I wanted to thank everyone whom I have worked with, been friends with (hopefully both), been helped by, and who have intersected my life in 2008.

 I look forward to finding Joy in this year of 2009. I look forward to you being Joyful in 2009 too…..

 I hope that you, your family, your work, your business, your finances, and your health, are all that you hope for this year. Best wishes………Keep going…………Peace,   Bob

 Ok…I gotta include a couple of my favorite Jim Rohn quotes again here.

 “We must wage an intense, lifelong battle against the downward pull. If we relax, the bugs and weeds of negativity will move into the garden and take away everything of value.”

“Don’t take the casual approach to life. Casualness leads to casualties.”

 “America is unique because it offers you an economic ladder to climb. And here’s what’s exciting: It is the bottom of the ladder that is crowded, not the top”

Hey everyone,

As many have already noticed we pushed out some new revisions a few weeks ago as we’ve made a few big as well as small upgrades to SugarStats. While there are various user interface and design changes, the majority of it went on under the hood.

What we’ve launched is a solid foundation for a lot of cool things we’re looking to add and launch in the next few months. After taking so long with this last release, our goal is to make much smaller yet quicker iterations and rollout new features on a more frequent basis to keep things constantly evolving. As we roll those out we’ll be sure to post about them here and on our Twitter feed for notable changes you should know about.

You can get more feature details of various features in our help site: https://sites.google.com:443/a/sugarstats.com/help/

New Features Overview

Here is an overview of some recent changes:

• New, cleaner design throughout the site
• Overall performance and stability improvements as well as many bug fixes
• A new “Dashboard” page to give a quick overview of things
• Completely new and more interactive graphing system based on Adobe Flash 8
• We’ve add an all sugar entries graph as well as avg per day
• The graphs are zoomable (click and drag to zoom in) as well as clickable (On avg per day graphs, click on a data point to go to that day)
• We’ve added a few other new graphs, namely bar charts for tags and carb charting. More to come.
• We’ve replaced the “events” for each entry with a more generic tagging system. You can now customize and have multiple tags for each entry
• For premium users, food and activity input has been changed. You now simply type the name in and if you’ve added it before it’ll auto complete it for you.
• For premium users who track food intake you can now specify how many servings of a food you had
• “Day Notes” has now become the “Diabetes Journal” feature allowing you to have a personalize diabetes blog. You can mark blogs private if you like, all existing day notes have been migrated into the blogs feature and marked private by default.
• We’ve added a “Store” tab for those who want quick access to buying diabetes supplies online
• We’ve added Gravatar.com icon/avatar support

These are some of the big things and again this is only the beginning of a lot more to come. We’ve set a solid foundation to build off of and taken all the wonderful feedback you all have given us over the last year to great a overall better system for everyone.

Sharing, Privacy and the Friends System

A few notes about the changes in TrustedVue and new sharing features/friend system:

• “TrustedVue” has been expanded into a more standardize friend and sharing system. The biggest request to us was the ability to allow you to connect with others and share your stats easier. Now you can add others as friends and now non-diabetes can create accounts much easier. You now only need 1 account and can see the stats/accounts of those who accept you as a friend.
• We’ve also added a new friends tab at the top which lets you find others like you.
• When a friend views your account, they can see your stats, graphs, journals (that aren’t marked private)
• We’ve added sharing/privacy settings so you can set who and who can’t see your account. You can set it to Public, Members Only, Friends Only or Private.
• All existing users by default have their sharing settings set to “Friends Only”.
• All new users by default have their sharing settings set to “Members Only”.
• You can switch your sharing/privacy settings easily in your settings at any time.
• You now have a profile page your friends will see when going to http://manage.sugarstats.com/yourusername.
• You can now also include your bio info about yourself, similar to Facebook/MySpace, on your profile page.
• Friends can also add comments to your profile as well as journal entries.

As noted above we made a lot of changes regarding TrustedVue and sharing your stats with others. While the topic of privacy in a hot one in the Health 2.0 field, we feel in the context of diabetes the community and our diabetic support networks (friends, family and doctors etc) greatly benefit from collaborating with the patient and viewing their diabetic progress and status.

We highly encourage sharing your stats in order to get positive encouragement, motivation and support from others and we’ll be building more and more social networking features into SugarStats over the next few months to help facilitate this.

But we do know to some they may want to keep their account private or share with a select few and we want to respect this. For those people they can easily select from a few different privacy/sharing settings to find the one that best suites them. All existing users before the update have had their sharing settings set to “friends only” which is the same as it was before.

You can find out more about sharing/privacy settings in our help section: https://sites.google.com:443/a/sugarstats.com/help/privacy-and-sharing

Let us know what you think!

We want to know your thoughts and get your feedback. The good, the bad and the ugly as well as any features YOU want to see added in SugarStats. Shoot us an email at support@sugarstats.com

If you notice any issues/errors, see something that looks off or in general have questions please let us know as well.

Updates and Help

Keep an eye out on the blog, our Twitter stream and your email for more detailed updates from us.

You can check out more of these features in details on our help site: https://sites.google.com:443/a/sugarstats.com/help/

Wow, who woulda thought….?  I recently was lucky enough to celebrate my 46th Birthday and have been a Diabetic for almost 45 of those 46 years. I think back to how lucky I have been to be born to parents who were so totally involved and who told me I could do or achieve anything I wanted to…..I just had to work with my Diabetes and not against it.

When I was younger, I wondered if I would survive until 30!....But as my mindset and technology and knowledge of the disease improves, I truly believe that it is up to me to set my own course. I will or I won’t win,  based on the decisions and efforts I make every day to set myself up to be successful.

My mindset and approach to this disease will either help me or hurt me. I choose Joy because it’s not about elation  and excitement,...that’s Happiness. Joy is about Confidence and Peace. I have been blessed to have that!

Diabetes, a chronic disease   

Chronic.............7 little letters, but it’s a really, really,  realllllyy looooooonnngggg word!  Hopefully!!!!

Keep going,..................Peace,     Bob

I recently read on the ADA website that they believe there to be 57 million americans with Pre-diabetes.

Holy cow! That would mean with 24 million Diabetics, and 57 million Pre-diabetics, there are 81 MILLION Americans who are basically some kind of diabetic. With a U.S. population of about 300 million, that means that about 1 in 3.7 people are affected by some sort of Diabetes.    Wow!!!  I am afraid the healthcare system is about to be taxed , or maybe overrun…...   I hope that by managing my disease well, I won’t have to be a burden to the system. I think that if managed well, we can all have a positive impact on the health care system by working towards better control.  I guess that is why there is so much interest recently in Diabetes as the numbers of D’s are growing dramatically.

I feel pretty confident that technology will continue to improve the Diabetic’s life over the next few years and maybe even help to slow down the growth of the disease. ....or maybe even that “cure thing” would be nice…It is a matter of time. In the meantime, stay in control and keep the damage to a minimum….

Which is why I really like my cgms….

Wishing you “well”    Bob

Having been blessed with another beautiful Thanksgiving break, I am reminded how lucky I am to have an insulin pump and a Dexcom cgms. The tag team helped keep me pretty well in range during Thanksgiving dinner. Of course that last small plate of (place whatever name of your favorite food you want here) is always what puts me over the top. My bloodsugar was up for a little while but quickly recovered.

I am truly lucky to have both a pump and cgms and am thankful for both. I am also thankful that I have been motivated to try and keep my bloodsugars in line. I have never been the perfect diabetic (far from it) but for some reason, God has always smiled upon me and kept any damage minimal. After almost 45 years of the D, I can honestly say   ” I am a Blessed an Lucky man.”

The Misadventures of Lil’ Johnny…..Bullies on the Playground…and a loud cgms!     Here is another attempt to poke Diabetes with a stick. Another Misadventures of Lil’ Johnny video….you can see them all at www.youtube.com/1diabetic  a Diabetic humor channel…..lol.  Ok, they crack me up anyway…....

Keep going…..Peace,    Bob

From everyone here on the SugarStats team we just wanted to wish everyone (or at least all our American users) a great and happy new year.

Time to reflect and really be grateful for the people, friends and support we have in our lives. Of course also enjoy all the wonderful food, just be careful not to go into a food induced coma! I guess where food moderation fails, at least there will always be the bolus?

Have a great day everyone!

The Misadventures of Lil’ Johnny…..Here is my most recent video….Its pretty funny,   feel free to blast it around the net if you like it…..

I will be sending out 1 a week for the next 3 weeks, so stay tuned for more misadventures of Lil’ Johnny…

I hope you like it…...............Bob

In our last post from our interview with Jennifer McCabe Gorman of the Health 2.0 movement and Health2con.com we hear about her own incredible journey of recovery from physical trauma and pain and how she utilized the internet to help navigate and motivate her through it all.

You can find Part 1 here:

http://www.sugarstats.com/2008/10/11/interview-with-jennifer-mccabe-gorman-pt-1-of-3-background-on-health-20/

and Part 2 here:

http://www.sugarstats.com/2008/10/17/interview-with-jennifer-mccabe-gorman-pt-2-improving-patient-care-through-health-information-technology-hit/

Nedrra Lanakila (N): So MUCH to explore with you. You are to be commended on your earnest efforts! I’ve got to hear the upshot to your personal story: how long, and what happened to you?

Jennifer McCabe Gorman (JMG): I had to. I was 20 years old and my leg was at stake. I didn’t feel like I had any choice at the time. What was I going to do, give up? No way!

Well, the upshot is an amazing, miraculous recovery. When I’m home in the states I will send you a photo of me after the first few surgeries, with a 15 pound external fixator on my right lower leg (like the halo you see on people with broken necks).

N: Okay. Wait. Stop. Backup.

NOW you’ve got to share just a bit about the actual accident please? If you are too sensitive about it I totally understand and support that.

JMG: No, it’s totally cool. Sharing our testimonials, our personal histories of diagnosis, crisis, recovery – all these enable our individual and collective healing. It’s cathartic.

The short version: I was 20 years old. I’d just gotten a scholarship to study for my junior year abroad at St. Andrews University in Scotland, a big deal for a kid from Southern Maryland!

I was working 2 jobs to save up, training hard at the gym. I went to a friend’s party on Memorial Day weekend, his house was about 40 minutes from my parents.

When I drove home, I remember being so tired that the lights by the road were fuzzy.

About 1/4 mile from my mom’s house, I fell asleep behind the wheel of my red Saturn.

I drifted across 2 lanes of traffic and hit an 8 foot iron ship’s anchor dead on.. lol – when I do something I do it big!

It’s a very rural area, and this farm had a ship’s anchor at the edge of a field and a long dirt driveway.
I picked a good place though, because on one side was an oak tree, and the other was a telephone pole.

JMG: Miraculously, the car didn’t speed up, and I didn’t hit anyone else. The impact was about 50 mph. I drove the anchor on it’s side a bit, and the engine block in the car crushed up around me.

Apparently, I woke up when I hit the anchor (I don’t really remember), but couldn’t get out of the car. The block crushed my right leg only, because I had a standard (stick) transmission, and had tried, instinctively, to stop the car.

I only remember bits and pieces. I woke up, looked down and saw my right knree like a blooming onion with bits of bone and seatbelt and all kinds of stuff. Well, bleck. I couldn’t see my right foot because it was twisted completely around.

I was bleeding quite a bit and remember trying to get out of the car since I knew that was a bad thing. But I kept passing back out.

Unbelievably someone was watching out for me. An 18 year old kid named Denny Gibson (I don’t know him: I heard this way after the accident) was walking home from a party.

He heard me screaming and ran up. Then he followed the driveway close to where I crashed, to a house where the owners didn’t believe him. They thought he was some robber punk kid and called the cops.

The MD State Police arrived first, called ambulance immediately. They cut me out of the car and rushed me to our local ER.

Thank god we had good orthopedic docs in our local hospital, who just kind of flushed out the wounds, ‘fixated’ the ankle (turned the foot back around), wrapped me up, and sent me up to Shock Trauma at UMMC in Baltimore.

I was there for 5 days. I kept waking up and asking everyone in sight if I still had my right leg.

Needless to say, everything after that was a moment of celebration followed by concern. Yes, my leg is still here. What happens next? No one really knows. We’ll have to just see.

I ran a 5k 2 years after my accident. Two summers ago, I finished a sprint triathalon at Lums Pond in Delaware. I swam 1/2 mile, bike 12 miles, and ran 3.2 miles ( a5k). This is after 16 surgical procedures.

I work out at the gym regularly, and have a neat, characteristic limp (only after a really long, intense day) and some sweet scars. Unless I tell the story of my injury, most people never know.

N: Oh. My. God.

JMG: It’s not as bad as it sounds. Faith, and family, and the WEB helped me get through. I have been so blessed, I can’t even say.

N: Give me a moment to recover. I was breathing through a clenched fist over my mouth and nose.

So after the doc told you to ‘pray’, you discovered online supportive communities and online medical info.

JMG: Exactly. I learned from someone on mybrokenleg.com that infection was a primary concern after an injury of this type.

Then I went back to the hospital and requested my operative notes (the dictation doc does after surgery).

Sure enough “exquisite risk of infection.” So we were extra vigilant about that. It’s like Amy Tenderich’s blog post a while back at Diabetes Mine about being at a party where she’s touching sugary stuff, then takes her glucose, but forgot to wash her hands.

This is stuff most docs will forget to tell you, because they aren’t LIVING with this thing.

Also, it can be the tiniest, seemingly insignificant portion of advice or information a community member gives you that can be the most valuable.

When I had an ex-fixator, someone at the hospital (Kernan, in Baltimore, specializes in ortho rehab), told me that Adidas made track pants with snaps all the way up the sides (easy to put on and take off over the contraption on my right leg stabilizing the fractures).

Just being able to dress MYSELF made a huge difference in how I felt about recovery. Seems dumb when you try to convey the value that has, but someone who has been there ‘gets it’.

N: Yeah. I get it. But that’s another story!

That’s truly incredible and inspiring. Thank you for stepping forward to share it with the SugarStats Community. I know that our community will ‘get’ the resolve you had within yourself not to get beaten by what the doctors initially said to you, or the condition you were in.

You tapped into self-determinism and found ways for life to be sweet again and full again and vibrant.

N: So never take never as the prognosis.

JMG: Indeed. That’s an intensely personal approach to ‘medicine’ in which we try to ‘beat’ disease and ignore the severity. You can’t run from that. You have to choose to face it head on.

Or avoid it. But what makes you safer? Definitely facing it to whatever degree you personally can handle.

N: Congratulations! What a fantastic story and an ‘ending’. Definitely leaves us wanting to know more about you and Health 2.0.

JMG: Thanks Nedrra, it’s funny – I feel like I’m just beginning. Health 2.0 is what’s enabling me to meet amazing people like Marston (Marston Alfred, Chief Architect and Originator of SugarStats).

N: Are you doing other things aside from this work in the HIT arena?

JMG: Wow. That’s a long list! Lol

1. Writing for HealthCentral.com on healthcare policy, especially as tech and web-based stuff relates to the millennial healthcare generation.


2. I’ve started up NextHealth.nl with a bunch of amazing folks here in Holland: Maarten den Braber, Martijn Hulst, Niels Schuddeboom, Jacqueline Fackeldey, and Jeroen Kuipers.


3. Writing business ideas left and right, manifestos and blog posts on how to improve healthcare NOW at Health Management Rx.


4. Traveling around to different healthcare events, meeting inspiring people and trying to bring empathy back into our global healthcare conversations.


5. And somewhere in there I’ll get a degree so I can teach perhaps, med students how to incorporate patients into the care spectrum as partners, but that’s farther off!

N: Thank you! I’m looking forward to continuing conversations together.

I know our community will want to know more about what’s happening with Health 2.0, your insights on it and about you. I know I do.

JMG: Nedrra, thank you so much. It is so cathartic to tell and difficult. I just hope more people who have been through the proverbial wringer come back and decide to change the system. Awesome!

To find out more about the Heatlh 2.0 conference being held at the San Francisco Marriot on October 22nd and 23rd, go to http://www.health2con.com/

For more of Jen McCabe Gorman’s views go to her blog at http://healthmgmtrx.blogspot.com, and http://www.health20.nl/ is a website related to Health 2.0 based in Europe and The Netherlands.