I thought I knew a lot about Juvenile Diabetes. It’s a common disease. It is caused by an auto-immune response that kills the cells necessary to make critical insulin. There’s a hereditary factor, a gene that is inherited, that when triggered causes the body to destroy its ability to control blood sugar.
In the past month I have learned so much more. I had the opportunity to sit down with families impacted by the disease. These are great families with great kids. The kind of people you would want to live next door. In all likelihood, they do live next door to you.
Juvenile Diabetes is alarmingly common but often goes unnoticed. The kids who have it show no visible signs most of the time. They play outside, ride bikes, jump rope, and draw colorful pictures in their driveways with sidewalk chalk. But, these same kids could drop into a coma quickly in the overnight hours, or could damage their internal organs by eating a birthday cupcake at school. Life is far from normal.
Their parents hover close; teach them how to perform the finger pricks and insulin tests at an early age. Its information they will need to know, when those same anxious parents send them off to kindergarten.
The children I interviewed are resilient and don’t complain much, although a five year old told me with a petulant face “She wished she never had diabetes.” Her younger brother said he wanted to be like their oldest brother because “He can eat breakfast whenever he wants.”
Suddenly, Juvenile Diabetes is not just a clinical condition to me. It’s the little faces I have met along the way, and the concern in the eyes of parents, who like me, stay up to hover over a sick child in the middle of the night. The difference is, their children have a chronic illness, and their worry will last a lifetime.
I was grateful, along with those parents today to see the overwhelming, and warm response from Utahns of all ages who laced up their walking shoes this morning and set out to make the future a little brighter for those families.
