(Thanks for the idea Cara Bauer)
Another TuD member, Cara, started this discussion in the Community Games forum about posting your last BG number as your Facebook or Twitter status. This is in response to the huge amounts of awareness that was spread by the “what’s your bra color?” FB status game that was played ony a few days ago. The bra color game was brought to the news and created millions more hits on the breast cancer websites than average in the past few days. Millions.
How it works:
- Post your status.
- Send out a mass email to your FB friends to inform them of what your status means
- Dare them to post a response FB status and send out the same message to all of their friends.
Use any means of status update you’d like! Can be BG number, insulin units taken for one meal today, how many shots you took yesterday, what medications are you on? etc. Just so long as your status is a little vague (but interesting!) and so long as your FB friends can respond with a status of their own that is related to your post.
The bra status update made so much noise that it was on the news in NH! It is reported that millions more than average people have visited the breast cancer awareness foundation website in the past few days , in response to the FB status game. What great exposure! What can we do for exposure for us diabetics?
Here is the FB email that I put together. Post it out to your friends to get the ball rolling.
Post your favorite breakfast food as your status to spread awareness for diabetes. Every meal equals medications needed for diabetics, most who also need multiple injectiosn per meal.
Diabetes affects more than 220 million people across the world. An estimated 1 million people died from diabetes complications in the year 2005 alone. Diabetic related deaths are expected to double in the next 20 years. Diabetes has many different types and different faces, but the end result is the same: heart failure, amputation, kidney disease, blindness, coma and death.
After only 15 years after diagnosis, 4.4 million people will suffer from blindness. Many diabetics are diagnosed as children, others as adults, and others as seniors who have been living with the disease for years without knowing.
Diabetic supplies without insurance can cost up to $10,000 per year. And that’s not including doctor’s office visits (4 times per year), hospitalization (on average once per year), or new medical devices meant to elongate the average diabetic lifespan.
Update your Facebook status with your favorite breakfast food to spread awareness not only about the things that we eat, but also to point out the simple every day tasks that we do every single day are much more complicated for those living with diabetes.
Doing this will spread awareness to those who don’t know how serious a disease diabetes is- regardless of what age it was developed or what measures a diabetic needs to take to survive.
Help us band together to cure this disease so that it stops taking the lives of so many.
Thanks to Cara for pointing out that we can use the exposure too! The more people we get going on this, the more aware people will be about what our lives are like!
I’m posting this here so that every forum has the opportunity to see what we’re doing. Cara has started the discussion in the Community Games forum a few hours ago and the FB status updates have begun!