Thursday, November 17, 2011

Today I was out and about and ran into a Deaf (capital D signifies person is culturally as well as physiologically deaf) friend. We spent a couple of hours chatting. My signing skills are not fluent (I was flattered when she said I was going too fast at one point- mostly my signing is sloooow) and her English is not fluent (although, her written English is definitely better than my sign). So we were chatting in a less than fluent manner. And, not for the first time, we got to talking a bit about diabetes (Dexcom alarmed high while we were talking). She didn't know the sign for diabetes so she accepted the sign I used- a d backed a closed mouth. But the most common sign for diabetes is just the sign for sugar (which I find problematic because that word means too many things and the little context things, I don't pick up on). Various variations of a d handsign near the neck or mouth are also used sometimes in ASL.
In other words, there is no standard sign for diabetes.

So here's my question for you. If you were making up a gesture to mean diabetes, or something about diabetes, what would it look like?
There are standard signs for things like injection, btw- we actually were talking about injections too.

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