Danielle Hutchison

On December 19, 2005, I asked my mother if I could stay home from school because I was feeling sick. It was a Monday, and my mother, being the mom of a middle schooler, wasn’t sure if I really felt sick or if I was just trying to get out of going to school. So she used an age-old trick to determine the sincerity of my request: “You can stay home from school if you go to the doctor’s office.”

The doctor’s appointment started off normally. We were going through a list of spelling words for a spelling bee I was going to be in that week, and we discussed what songs would be sung in the next evening’s chorus concert. Then, chaos.

The nurse came in and said that they had found glucose in my urine and that they wanted to test my blood for diabetes. I immediately began to freak out. I had always been terrified of needles and blood. Like, I faint at even the thought of getting a shot kind of terrified. So I began to sob and I ran to my mother to protect me, as if she could magically make it all go away. But in the end, my finger was pricked, and it was determined that I did, in fact, have Type 1 diabetes.

The signs were there, disguised by the onset of puberty. Of course I was eating and drinking more (and therefore going to the bathroom more) because I was growing and needed the energy. And I was losing weight because I had grown four inches over the summer, and my body was just adjusting to that growth. It wasn’t until I weighed in at 72 pounds as a 12-year-old that we realized how much we had missed.

I was in the hospital for four days. I missed my spelling bee and my chorus concert (though my chorus teacher did call and let me listen to the concert from my hospital bed). I was forced to grow up fast and was overwhelmed by all the new information I was presented with. At one point, I was so upset that I thought about quitting. My dad drew an elephant on the whiteboard in my room, and asked me “How do you eat an elephant?” When I didn’t know the answer, he said “One Bite at A Time.” From that moment, every time I reached a milestone in my diabetes crash-course, a chunk of the elephant was erased from the board, culminating in the last ‘bite’ being erased when I was able to give myself my own insulin shots and was allowed to leave the hospital.

It has been almost 16 years since then, and though it has been a long and difficult road, I have achieved so much. I graduated high school, then college, and I am now an adult living with type 1 diabetes. There were times that I wondered if I was going to make it, but I had the diabetes community, both online and in person through groups such as Children with Diabetes, as a support system to lean on when times got hard. I am so thankful for them and I hope to be a part of this community and support it for the rest of my life, even once we have found a cure for diabetes.