“To me, diabetes is as regular as breathing; diagnosed with type 1 diabetes (T1D) at the fledgling age of 11 months, my entire life has been profoundly altered, although there’s no way I could have even begun to understand the implications that my diagnosis would incur.”

I am 17 years old, and a rising senior at The Potomac School in Virginia. As a young child with T1D, my parents were involved in every facet of my T1D management, and engaged my teachers, babysitters, and little-league soccer coaches about it. When I became a teenager, however, my doctors, family, and I all agreed that it was time for me to take charge in my own T1D management.

With high school on the horizon, my T1D wasn’t something that I wanted people to know about me. I wasn’t ashamed of it, but I didn’t want to be known as Ethan, the diabetic. As a result, few of my teachers knew I had T1D, and even fewer of my friends and classmates knew. This later turned out to be a huge mistake.

During my freshman year of high school, I spent a few days with my family in New York City (my all-time favorite place to go on vacation). I missed three or four days of classes for this, so I was extremely behind on homework, and by Friday I was absolutely exhausted. The following Saturday, I was sick with what seemed like a stomach bug; my blood sugars were a little higher than normal, but a lot of people at school had been getting sick, so I thought it was really no big deal.

I woke up the following Tuesday in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) with blood sugars over 500. Aside from the flu, which I had contracted after coming back from New York City, my pump had failed, sending me into extreme hyperglycemia. It was a trying time for me, but I recovered and bounced back, better than ever.

I experienced a whirlwind of shocked faces when I returned to school that Monday (I had missed another entire week of school, and most of my friends had determined that I had simply fallen off the face of the earth). I realized that T1D was something I just had to deal with. I had experienced the negative consequences of T1D; this experience was eye-opening for me. I am now more open about my condition, and have received nothing but support from my peers.

I’m now an intern at JDRF. I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to contribute to the organization whose goal is to progressively remove the impact of T1D from people’s lives until we achieve a world without T1D. I encourage people to stay focused on finding a solution to T1D, and be open about their condition; finding a solution is a team effort.