Our Founder’s Story
Imagine having to stick your child with a needle over a thousand times in a year. Imagine that you had to worry every time your child left the house that for no reason, he could enter a low sugar hypoglycemia syndrome and die. This was life for my family while my son was growing up. It is still our fear today as he lives with the disease as an adult. From the time we got the diagnosis of type one diabetes our lives became a horror of rigorous and strict routine. A person with diabetes lives with it every single second of every minute of every hour, day, week, month, and year of their life. For a child, this is confusing and often terrifying. Type one diabetes took over our lives more with every day. For the type one diabetic, this never ends.
We learned to cope with the disease through the help and support of other families inflicted with diabetes We were provided with educational literature and meetings by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Out of necessity, diabetes routine became the new abnormal- normal. For people who don’t live with type one diabetes in their family, they don’t see that it is a chronic and menacing invisible illness. No matter what routine we settled into, we could not manage the high and low sugars my son still suffered. No matter what the doctors and professionals told us, we came to the conclusion that Type 1 diabetes is a threatening disease that cannot be totally controlled.
Twenty-five years later, my son still lives with type one diabetes. He is a candidate for heart disease, eye disease, circulation problems and many other health issues that can be caused by this disease. His life expectancy could be shorter and every day he has to constantly manage the disease. My wife and I live in fear for him all the time.