Scott Coulter, LSW

I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when I was 15. It left me stunned, confused, sad, and angry…

Living with diabetes, we understand what it means to persevere through difficulty…

A breakdown is the first step toward breakthrough, because a breakdown is the full and conscientious realization of what is no longer working…

As some regular readers of this blog might know, I have a policy when it comes to diabetes research. But lately, I’ve been breaking this policy, reading more and more about the state of research and where it’s likely heading…

My wife and I have been updating our house this summer. What started as just an idea to update the color of one room has turned into a pretty hefty makeover. In the midst of all of this, I’ve noticed my rate of monitoring has gone up and I’ve been much more diligent and organized about my blood sugar…

Dealing with diabetes is all about living a fully present, fully conscious life. It’s not the kind of thing that we can figure out once and then forget about — it’s something we need to continually monitor and “recheck…”

So I’ve been codirecting a jazz camp this week for the school where I teach piano. It’s a weeklong camp, with about 15 students. Already, we’ve had a few quit because they felt they weren’t up to the challenge. And this has got me to thinking about the idea of facing challenges in a broader context.,,

I read today that the GOP is pretty much set to sue Obama. What happened? We’ve never agreed on everything, but we were never SUPPOSED to agree on everything. So I say it again: It’s time for Diabetians to take over! What group of people is better equipped to deal with momentary frustration without overreacting?

Diabetes is a very serious condition, one that can cause great suffering in our lives, and, ultimately, something that can take our lives. But we still are the ones who get to define what it MEANS in our lives, and I think Jan Chait gave us a wonderful example to follow…

If there’s one lesson I’ve had to learn over and over again, it’s the need to set limits. And I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think Diabetians often have a hard time setting limits for ourselves. Diabetes is many things, but mostly it’s a CONSTANT thing…

I was asked recently what keeps me motivated to manage my diabetes. I thought it was a great question. On the surface, it sounds pretty simple — what motivates us to manage our diabetes is a desire to stay healthy, to stay alive, to avoid pain, all of that basic, instinctual stuff. But motivation is a much more complicated thing than that…

A report was recently released by the World Health Organization (WHO) on the effects of antibiotic resistance — and the findings are a little scary. The report found that resistance has spread to almost every corner of the globe…

None of us take this journey alone. We might be the only ones checking our blood sugar, taking our insulin, struggling with our complications, but we’re not alone in our journeys. No human being is truly alone. We are always part of one another’s lives…

Spring is here. It has been a looong, cold, and snowy winter. I’m usually a big fan of winter — I love snowstorms, they make me feel like a kid again. But this year was a little much even for me. So it’s nice to hear the birds chirping and feel the air warming…

I think the overriding theme of this week is “making do when things aren’t perfect.” Now, diabetes is never perfect. That doesn’t mean we can’t manage it well, of course. Little fluctuations won’t sink the ship. But even on the best days, diabetes throws a little UNpredictability our way…

It’s amazing how easy it is for us to deny ourselves the credit we deserve. I’m horrible about this! I shame myself so easily, it’s ridiculous. And I’m far too hard on myself MOST of the time. I’ve always known this, and yet continue to do it more often than I want to admit (pardon me while I shame myself over my bad habit of shaming myself…)

That’s not a typo you read. I want to talk about the problem with how we talk about the problems with Obamacare. I know this is a topic not directly tied to diabetes, but health insurance, and our rather precarious health-care system, certainly has a LARGE impact on all of us living with this preexisting condition…

Most of you have probably never heard of Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Heck, the computer just underlined “Naropa” to inform me I misspelled something! But it’s a real place. It’s where my mother taught for many years, and where I spent a lot of time as a youngster. It’s a wonderful place, founded in the mid-70’s by a Tibetan Buddhist scholar and former monk…

I’m a huge Denver Broncos fan…anyone who saw the massacre that was Super Bowl 48 can guess how I’m feeling this week…

This is the second blog entry I wrote for this week. I’m scrapping the first one. You see, I watched a documentary on the “workings of the universe” and got myself inspired to write a flowing, philosophical post about the vastness of time and space, the insignificance of people, why we should all come together and get along… Not bad stuff, but after rereading it, I think it missed the mark…

It’s the end of the year, and instead of making a list of resolutions for what I’ll do differently next year, I thought I’d take the time to write down everything I’ve learned from the past 20 years of living with Type 1 diabetes…

I decided to do a little online searching this morning to help get some ideas for what to write about. I came across the usual assortment of articles detailing research on various avenues toward a cure for Type 1 diabetes, but nothing jumped out as particularly noteworthy…

Explaining diabetes to other people is tricky sometimes. It’s a complicated thing to manage, and for those who don’t live with it day-to-day, it’s easy to oversimplify. So many times at dinner parties, gatherings, or other festivities someone might catch me having some dessert and inform me that, “you shouldn’t be eating that, you’re diabetic!”

I have a friend who’s a lawyer. I remember a conversation we had when she was still in law school. She said that what they were teaching her in law school wasn’t so much about information or content. Rather, they were teaching her how to view and understand the world through the lens of law…

A few weeks ago, I shared a resolution here and promised to update everyone on my progress. The resolution: to dedicate myself to my daily music practice, and renew my focus on progressing my career with full effort and concentration…

Two weeks ago, I left one of my part-time jobs. For years, I have worked as a clinical social worker, musician, and music teacher. Today, I am a musician and music teacher. The change has been a long time coming…

Resilience is the ability to “bounce back,” to encounter a setback or a trauma, a disappointment or a failure, and carry forward. It’s opposite might be helplessness, the inability to recover, to take a next step, to move past the initial trauma…

I was diagnosed with diabetes when I was 15. Before that, I was just another healthy adolescent kid. After that, I was a 15-year-old kid with a “preexisting condition…”

I’ve been anxious lately — anxious, a little down, and frustrated. I won’t go into the details of why, because the details are all run-of-the-mill things that don’t really deserve the attention in the first place. In the back of my mind, though, a thought is trying to break through all this chatter…

I’ve always had a tricky relationship with diabetes research. But then there’s the other side of the equation — the fact that I have to live with diabetes on a daily basis, and dreaming about a cure that doesn’t exist leaves me right back where I started…

I called my pharmacy today to refill my short-acting insulin prescription, and tomorrow morning I’ll hop in my car and pick it up. Then, perhaps, I’ll go get some lunch, then head up to the music school where I teach piano. It will be a mundane day of errands. Except one of those errands represents an absolute miracle…

Years ago, I heard about a study measuring the sensory responses of Zen monks compared to the responses of everyday people. The results of this study were incredibly interesting, and have far-reaching lessons for the rest of us. Here’s the study, in a nutshell…

Diabetes is a game of numbers. Blood glucose running too high, too low, a little a high, a little low, just right. Too many carbs, too few carbs, too many units, too few units, an insulin ratio that’s too high, an insulin ratio that’s too low…

There was a comment on my previous week’s blog entry, “there is merit in habit.” It was a great comment, and one that stuck with me…

I’ve spent the last five days learning more than I ever cared to know about plumbing. My wife and I decided, after years of living with a leaky faucet that required us to turn the hot water on and off by turning the shutoff valve UNDER the sink, to replace our faucet with a new one that would work properly…

My wife has been in Ohio for the past week, and one of my fill-in companions has been Netflix. I’ve been browsing around in search of interesting fill-in material. And last night I came across Ken Burns’ documentary on prohibition in the US…

remember the summer of my sixteenth year. I was still fairly new to diabetes (having been diagnosed with Type 1 at 15), but it had been with me long enough to sink in — there was no longer any part of my brain convinced that I would wake up one day and find out this whole diabetes thing was just a dream. Living with diabetes for the rest of my life was a reality…

Man, I’ve been doing a lot of avoiding and scrambling lately. This blog entry is late, I’ve been putting off a whole list of promotional and business tasks for a band that’s in its start-up phase, and I haven’t really been meditating. My numbers have been decent, but I haven’t really been checking them as often as I should…

I practice Zen meditation — much more sporadically than I care to admit, but I do practice it, and I have found it an incredibly valuable practice…

When I was 16, I went to a summer camp for teens with diabetes. My mother was the one who found out about it, and while I wasn’t resisting the idea with too much force, my enthusiasm for the camp was lukewarm at best. I was already feeling a little “weird” about having a chronic disease the rest of my life, and I thought that going to a camp devoted to it would only make me feel weirder…

I love baseball. I love everything about it; I love the slow pace of the game; I love the fact that it signals the beginning of more daylight and warmer weather; I love the tradition of it, the “poetry” of the game. And I think baseball can teach us a few things about living with diabetes…

As anyone who reads this blog with any regularity knows, I am a musician (among other things). I have played keyboards since I was about eight years old, and while other interests, and even careers, have come and gone, music has remained a constant…

When I was offered the chance to write this blog, I was excited by the opportunity to share my thoughts with other people with diabetes. I was excited for the personal growth this weekly writing exercise might cause for me. And I was hopeful that I might be of some help, some benefit, to the people who would be reading each weekly column…

So I was sitting here at my desk, waiting for my next client to arrive, and thought I’d get started on this week’s blog entry. Except… I wasn’t sure what to write about. I felt like many of my ideas had already been put to paper (or put to “Web site”)…

I remember two kinds of glucose tablets from my teenage years. One reminded me of horse pills — huge, rectangular white blocks that were individually packaged the same way allergy pills are: clear plastic cap on one side, and a thin, tinfoil-like sheet on the other that could be pushed in to free the horse-pill-sized glucose tablet. These always seemed monumentally impractical to me…