Reba Redmond: Guilt as a type 1 parent, DKA, mental illness and celebrating the ordinary - a podcast by Jen Grieves

I can’t tell you how much I love this week's chat - for so many reasons!

Reba Redmond is a writer, public speaker and diabetes advocate living in Ontario, Canada. I hereby declare her a Diabetes VIP too, as she’s a distant cousin of Sir Frederick Banting who co-discovered insulin in 1921 and is the reason anyone with type 1 diabetes is alive today. But Reba is also a rare and brilliant human - one who can articulate the complex and unique challenges of a life lived with type 1 diabetes (and many other difficulties) without any sense of grandeur or call for pity. From a derailing diagnosis as a teenager, living with multiple mental illnesses and an episode of DKA that nearly ended her life, to overcoming needle phobia, the need for perfect blood glucose levels and dealing with the gut-wrenching guilt of being a parent with type 1 diabetes, Reba takes us on an incredibly heartfelt, eloquent yet pragmatic and humble journey of what it means to be human in this episode. “We spend so much of our lives with diabetes focussed on numbers that we get lost as people,” she says. Her honest, authentic writing on both her blog A Soul Is A Resilient Thing and her Instagram account @rebaredmond is a breath of fresh air in a curated virtual landscape of filters and so-called ‘straight liners’. I hope you enjoy Reba’s generous truth and wisdom as much as I did.

Further episodes of Type 1 on 1 | Diabetes Stories

Further podcasts by Jen Grieves

Website of Jen Grieves