I recently saw a tweet by Calgary Roughnecks forward Scott Ranger in which he said something about being a diabetic. This struck a nerve with me, since both my wife and father-in-law are diabetic. Also, back in 2010 I spent two months in the hospital (and three more months at home) recovering from pancreatitis, a condition which could have left me diabetic myself. In fact, I was told by a nurse during my hospital stay that I was diabetic, since a blood glucose test came back with some astronomically high value. A subsequent test showed that the first test was messed up and I was fine.

Anyway, I asked Scott if he would be interested in talking to me about his diabetes and how he deals with it as a pro athlete, and he eagerly agreed. We talked over email a few times and Scott was very forthcoming with his answers. He gave me lots of great information and I did a fair bit of research on my own as well.

Because diabetes is a topic that is meaningful to me, I wanted to get the message out to as many people as possible and quite honestly, my lacrosse blog is not the way to do that. So I made use of (you could argue “exploited”) the fact that I write for IL Indoor during the NLL season and contacted my editor, Bob Chavez. He was happy to oblige and agreed to publish my article on IL Indoor, where it will likely reach far more people than on my little blog. In fact, Bob made it sound like I was doing him a favour by giving him something to publish during what is lacrosse-wise the quiet part of the year.

Here is a link to the article, called Challenges of Type 1 diabetes can’t keep Calgary’s Scott Ranger from thriving. Many thanks to Bob for agreeing to publish it and of course to Scott for talking to me.