The healing continues. From laughter, that is.

As we wait with great hope for a cure for diabetes, we do so with a smile thanks to humor to be found on the new website LOL Diabetes (www.loldiabetes.com). I've posted before about this site, which itself is part of the popular diabetes website Six Until Me (www.sixuntilme.com). Nevertheless, things have become waaaaaay to funny over there for me to not highlight some of my favorites.

These would be my Top 5:

5 - The Insulin Monkey. This picture features a stuffed animal, a monkey to be exact, with dozens of syringes sticking out of it, much like a pin cushion. The words "You're Doing it Wrong" that are printed on the picture sum it up perfectly.

4 - iPump. A play on the now famous iPod silhouette ads, this mock version of this campaign features people wearing insulin pumps in place of iPods.

3 - Thumbtacks. A photo of a child's Spider Man poster fastened to the wall with -- Thumb Tacks? No, no, no. Look again...those are lancets! As someone aptly commented on the entry, what a great use for all those extras!

2 - Wanted! In this Old West style Wanted poster, there's a bounty for bringing in Twinkie the Kid. Turns out "The Kid" is wanted for Shootin' Up High Blood Sugars.

1 - The Enemy. By far my favorite, Short, simple, and hilarious. The photo features no other than Willy Wonka himself, with the words "The Enemy" written below. Very true. And very funny.

There are a whole bunch more that could have made a Top 10 list (namely: Soundtrack to a Low, Is This the Remix?, My Pump Makes Me Look Like a Cross-Dresser, Ah! Needle Landslide, and What's Better Than a Cookie).

Be sure to check out LOL Diabetes. Think you have something funny to add? I say go for it!!

Blogs are everywhere these days. Hell, there seem to be about a hundred that run along the right side of this page; with topics ranging from Cinema to Wireless Technology. Oh yeah, and don't forget about us here at the Life Science blogs, covering news and info dealing with cancer, cardiovascular health, and diabetes. But, these are OUR stories. Well, maybe not directly -- but we are the people that are passing along the information here on these blogs. What about YOUR story? Well, now there's a chance for you to talk about your experience with diabetes, and the forum to do so is based off of a very well known and respected diabetes blog called Six Until Me (www.sixuntilme.com).

Separate from the main page blog, the new Your Story page allows readers to email their contributions and have them published on the site, thereby fostering an even greater sense of community and support among readers. And "stories" appears to be a pretty loose term, as it is made clear on the site that you can contribute anything diabetes related that you feel the world would benefit from knowing. Pictures, videos, poems, antecdotes, and of course, actual stories can be emailed to: story@sixuntilme.com

I encourage you to vist Six Until Me and spend some time navagating the site. Unlike much of what I write on TheDiabetesBlog, the content on Six Until Me is less diabetes medical/research-based and more centered on daily living with diabetes. The highs, the lows (both figuratively and literally), the good, the bad, and even the ugly -- it's all covered by the site's author with humor and elequence. Now, with the addition of the Your Story section of Six Until Me, your own stories, musings, rants, and tales of personal triumph can also be told.

Prior to meeting my girlfriend, who is an insulin-pump wearing type 1 diabetic, I didn't have all that much exposure to the disease. I remember my friend's mother having diabetes (though I didn't know at the time that she had type 2, and that there was a difference between type 2 and type 1), and years later a friend of mine dated a girl that was type 1 (who also wore a pump). I may or may have not mentioned her in the past, but she once threw a pumpkin at his car -- not because she was diabetic, but because she was a lunatic. Anyway, the point is that my exposure to, and understanding of, the diabetes was very limited. But now that I am used to being around someone with diabetes, I find myself more tuned in to the statistics, news stories, research, etc. that was always out there, but for some reason never seemed to get picked-up by my signal. I also catch myself quite often almost "looking for it."

Case in point: I was on the subway the other day when a young girl jumped on with a decent sized .mp3 player on her hip. I didn't notice the headphone cord stemming from it right away, so I almost immediately thought that it was an insulin pump. This actually happened a few different times, only with cell phones and other hip-attached items. Another time, I sat next to an older man on the subway and noticed his medic alert bracelet. Call me nosy, but I sort of glanced over at it to see it mentioned him being diabetic. It didn't, but for some reason I sort of just expected that it would. Trying to make sense of where my sudden ultra-awareness is coming from, I can only think that it comes from the most obvious place that it possible could: My Mind. The place where this new knowledge has been stored. Knowing that the number of people diagnosed with diabetes is growing tremendously with each passing year, my mind logically leads me to draw conclusions -- sometimes inaccurate ones, but others being right on the money. Like the time the guy who looked like he was skipping onto a new song on his iPod when, in fact, he was actually programming something into his pump -- bolusing, perhaps. I was right about that one. I'm not sure what me being right about that means, but I consider it a good thing, chiefly because I don't feel as ignorant about the topic as I clearly once was.

Far more funding must go into diabetes research, but before that ever happens, the public at large is going to have to know what it is. Plain and simple. For people with diabetes, and for people who are very close to people with diabetes, the education on the topic comes free (and based on how much it costs to maintain the disease with test strips, insulin, etc., that's about the only thing that seems to come free). As a result, it is understandable how it could then become assumed that just because you know just about everything there is to know about diabetes, everyone else must, too. But, I represent only one example of someone who knew almost nothing -- until I met my girlfriend, anyway. Now, armed with a great deal of knowledge on the topic, I am in the strange position of knowing how little the public actually knows, but at the same time knowing how much some people with diabetes think that the public knows. The truth is, the public does not know much. It's time they learn, don't you think? It may lead to more people staring at each others' iPods on the subway, but we'll just have to live with that.