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This is one of the contributions to:DIABETES ESSAY AND POEM COMPETITION 2009
Halloween…a night filled with chocolate, suckers, caramel, rockets, every type of candy imaginable! Every child’s dream… well, not for all children and especially not for me. On Halloween night I still go trick or treating and collect lots of candy, but when I get home I can only eat one or two items from my loot bag. My Halloween treats last for months and months. I still have candy from the past Halloween! I have type I diabetes. Living life with diabetes can be difficult but I am still just an average kid. Honorable judges, teachers, and fellow friends I would like to tell you about my life with diabetes.
When I was one and one half years old I was thirsty all the time and drinking a lot of water. My dad also had to change my diapers a lot. He started to get concerned that this was not usual for a baby. He took me to the hospital to get examined. A few hours later the doctor came in and told my dad my sugars were sky high. I was diagnosed with type I diabetes.
When you have type I diabetes your body does not make insulin. Insulin is a hormone which is made in the pancreas. The pancreas is an organ located in the middle of your body right near your stomach. The reason that insulin is so important is because it keeps you alive by using the sugar in your blood. Without insulin, I would not be alive because it helps me to get the energy from the food I eat.
Luckily, there was a man named Sir Frederick Banting who invented a drug that is similar to insulin. It does the same job. Originally, when I was little my dad would prick my heel and draw out a small amount of blood. The blood was put into a strip which would tell him what level my sugars was at. If it was high he would give me a needle filled with insulin that would bring my sugar levels down. If it was low he would give me a bottle of apple juice. This would be done about four times a day, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bedtime. When I was eight years old I learned how to test my own blood sugars and inject the needles myself. This was not fun. It made my arms sore and I had to stop what I was doing to do this.
When I was nine years old, my family, along with my diabetic team, decided the insulin pump would be the best option. An insulin pump is a machine I wear 24/7, except in the shower, that pushes insulin through a tube into my stomach. Before I eat, I still need to check my sugars with a glucometer and then after I eat, I calculate the carbohydrates and then I type the total number into my pump. Then the pump injects a certain amount of insulin into my body which makes it so I can use the energy from the food I have just eaten. The big advantage of the insulin pump is that the needles are gone and I can get insulin any place, any time, any where.
The other way in which type I diabetes really impacts my life, is with the food I eat. I can eat all the foods that a typical kid can eat, but I have to eat smaller portions of some foods and larger portions of others. For example, I can eat small amounts of junk food such as salt and vinegar chips and cotton candy. But just not as often and not as much as other people. I also try to eat regularly throughout the day to keep my blood sugar normal.
People are familiar with the term diabetes because there are two types of diabetes. Type I is when the pancreas stops making insulin and is the most common in children and is the type that I have. Type II is when the pancreas makes insulin, but the rest of the body can not use it well and this is most common in adults. The result of both types is that there too much sugar in the blood.
No one really knows why I have diabetes. This is an area when scientists are continuing to research. Also, They are working very hard to find a cure for this disease. Even though insulin is a way to keep me alive, it is not a cure. I would love to eat a whole big bag of potato chips and wash it down with a gigantic bottle of Pepsi without having to worry about the effect this would have on my blood sugar. It would be nice to not have a machine attached to me all the time. Thankfully, I still get to do everything else that a ten year can do and I don’t let diabetes stop me from having fun in life.