More Than My Story.
It’s My Why.
I was seven years old when type 1 diabetes became part of my life.
Growing up in South Florida, I learned early what it meant to live with a chronic illness that people often misunderstood. There were the questions, the assumptions, the misconceptions—and the constant responsibility of managing something that never really takes a day off.
But for a long time, I didn’t want diabetes to define me. In fact, I spent years doing almost the opposite. I was in denial about how deeply type 1 diabetes was woven into my life. I wanted to live around it rather than with it. I got married, built a life, pursued a career and kept moving forward, determined to be so much more than a diagnosis. Then I became a mother.
During my pregnancy, my world changed in ways I could never have anticipated. I began experiencing devastating complications with my vision from diabetic retinopathy. What should have been one of the happiest chapters of my life became intertwined with surgeries, uncertainty and the reality of significant vision loss.
At the same time, I was also losing my mother.
I was becoming a mother while grieving my own. I was learning how to care for a new baby while learning how to navigate a world I could no longer see in the same way. Motherhood, grief, disability and diabetes collided all at once—and the life I had known before all of it was gone.
THE LIFE AFTER
For a while, I had to figure out who I was on the other side of all of it.
Eventually, life brought my family to Denver, and in many ways, the move represented something much bigger for me: a chance to begin again.
And somewhere in that rebuilding, my relationship with diabetes changed too.
The disease I had spent so much of my life trying not to identify with became a community I wanted to be part of. The experiences I once wanted to put behind me became the experiences I realized could help someone else.
Today, I am completely immersed in the type 1 diabetes community—not only as someone who has lived with this disease for decades, but as an advocate, storyteller and healthcare professional working within the very landscape that has shaped so much of my life.
My mindset around diabetes is radically different now. I understand my body differently. I manage my health differently. I ask more questions. I advocate more fiercely. And rather than seeing my lived experience as something separate from my professional life, I recognize the value of bringing the two together.
WHY I SHARE
I share my story because I know mine isn’t the only one.
There is someone who has struggled to manage their diabetes because they’re exhausted by it. Someone who feels angry at their body. Someone navigating complications they never thought would happen to them. Someone becoming a parent while trying to manage their own health. Someone grieving the life they thought they would have. And someone trying to figure out who they are after everything changes.
I want that person to know they are not alone.
My story isn’t about managing type 1 diabetes perfectly. It is about evolving alongside it—through denial, loss, motherhood, disability, reinvention and, eventually, purpose.
Today, I use both my lived experience and my professional work in healthcare to advocate for better conversations, better education and a healthcare system that listens more closely to the people actually living inside of it.
Because after all these years, I’ve learned something I wish my seven-year-old self could have known:
There is power in owning your story. And sometimes the parts of your life you once wanted to hide become the very parts that allow someone else to feel seen.
