“I’ve come to terms with the fact that TYPE 1 DIABETES is part of my life.”

My mouth felt as if it were full of cotton balls, and my head was pounding. “You can’t leave until you give yourself an injection,” the doctor told me. I stared at her with equal parts disbelief, defiance and horror. How could I, who dreaded even routine blood draws, stab myself with a needle, even if that injection would save my life?

That day, after a year of looking for the cause of my near-constant headaches, unquenchable thirst and overall exhaustion, I became, at age 20, one of the nearly 1.6 million people living with type 1 diabetes in the United States and one of 64,000 people diagnosed each year.

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that occurs when a person’s pancreas stops producing insulin, the hormone that controls blood sugar levels. Specifically, this type of diabetes develops when the insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells are destroyed by the body’s immune system; what causes the body to attack itself this way is still being