I am not sick but I am struggling to live. I am not sick but I am extremely nauseous. I am not sick but my head and heart are pounding. I am not sick but my body is shaking and breaking down. I am not sick I have Type One Diabetes. It is currently midnight and I can not sleep. My blood sugar is 295 with a straight-up arrow for no reason. I have hardly eaten all day and I can't even begin to imagine how much insulin I have taken today. All I know is every time I go to dose the number is over 10 units worth and I have dosed myself a lot today. On top of that, I had to change my Omnipod because it ran out of insulin and I just put it on the night before. So in less than 24 hours, I have gone through 200 units of insulin. I feel weird right now I am cold but I am sweating, I am exhausted but wide awake, and I am starving but nauseous. It is weird. For me, my Type One always makes me sick more than I would like to admit even to myself. I  put on this act in front of others so that they think that I am always ok and sometimes I even convince myself that the way I feel must be normal. Everyone must feel this when they are happy because feeling sick is normal at least to me, but I am not sick. I am not contagious I don’t have the flu, I don’t have a cold or COVID. I just have Type One Diabetes. I wish more people understood that. I wish more people in my community Understand that I always do my best even with my Type One nipping at my heels and trying to drag me down. Don’t get me wrong sometimes it catches me and I sink. I sink into this pit of burden back to feeling sick but I am not sick. I just have this disease that is nonstop 24/7 a work in progress except sometimes there is no progress. Sometimes I try and try and try and I stuck being high or low. I feel like everything I have learned over the years is pointless. I wish that everything I tried worked. I know that I will have Type One Diabetes for the rest of my life and I am ok with that. I just wish that every time I treated a high it would come down.  Every time I treated a low it would come up. Now nothing is perfect and I do not need my wish to be either. I just wish that all this knowledge I have from all my doctors and research of my own over the years would help more than hurt. I found that the times I have down the best thinking are on nights like these. The sleepless nights of Type One Diabetes. On nights like these, I like to write like this because it helps me focus on something other than Why isn't my insulin working, why isn't that juice box kicking in !!! Before I started writing this I dosed myself another 10 units of insulin because my pump said too. I would like you to stop for a second before reading on to think ok she started writing this at midnight it's now 12:20. Her starting B.S. was 295 straight up and now it is drum roll,  please…  305 and truthfully Type One Diabetes that is a Load of B.S. I hope to all the Type Ones and their caregivers out there your night was at least a little better than mine.   Good Night B.S.

3, 2, 1 and Repeat. Care today, Cure tomorrow. Burnout is one of those topics that isn't talked about often. Recently, I have not been in love with my type one as much as I used to be. Now you might be thinking, “How can you be in love with a death-defying disease?” Well, for me, I feel as though it's easier to live life with the intent of being who you are meant to be, and for me, that means having a disease full of unknowns. Does anyone have a hard time putting on their devices? Well, I do. It has been a struggle recently. I have been doing this for a long time now, so why am I having such a problem with a simple thing? Even though I have been doing it for so long, it becomes harder because every day it’s clearer that there is no end to this fight. I have heard since diagnosis that there will be a cure for type one in 5 years, so where is it? Care today, Cure tomorrow. Don’t get me wrong, I love my type one as I have said before, but at this moment, the struggle of love or death is hard. Every day I talk about my type one and say, “I don't want there to be a cure, and if there is, I am not going to take it because I don’t know where I would be without it.” Yes, it is weird. On one hand, I love it, but on the other, the more I think about the cure, my burnout kicks in, and all I can think is please, please, please, let this be over, or at least for at least just a minute. One of my friends and I talked about type one and how we feel it is our capture. I get it, it's weird to think of it that way, but it is. As much as I try to let my Type One Diabetes not control me, it does. When I am high, I feel sick. When I am low, I feel sick. When I am in range, I feel sick. When I struggle to put a device on and have a panic attack over it, I feel sick. With that being said, I have learned how to keep a smile on my face. When people ask me how my blood sugar is, I put on a smile and say it's fine, even though it’s not. If I answer it truthfully, it makes me feel worse because most people do not understand what I mean when I say I am high or low. One day I was talking to my only functioning pancreas (my Mom), and I told her that my free trial/warranty phase was over, can we stop the trial now? Meaning my Honeymoon phase is over, and every day becomes more and more of a mystery. When will it finally stop? Waking up at night is always terrifying because you either wake up from a low and you have this adrenaline rush of your brain shutting down and your fight or flight mode kicks in, and then can’t fall back to sleep. You wake up high, and you don’t want to get up because it is a high blood sugar, and there is a good chance you don’t feel good anyway, so why would you want to wake up? All the finger pricks with that small but painful lancet that I probably haven't changed in over a year, drawing the small droplet of blood to put on the test strip to tell me if I am dying or not. Every time I see my meter count down 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, I hold my breath in the hope that my number isn't as bad as I think it is. Many people have asked me what was your life like before type one and do I remember it. I never had an answer until today. There is no before type one because I have always had it, but I just never knew. The tiny memory I have from before my diagnosis was confusion and sickness that I cannot explain. I never realized how much people's gaze could affect me, but it does. The other day I caught someone staring at my pump, and all I could think about was trying to hide it. How come I can switch so quickly from being confident in who I am, to feeling like I need to hide? At the end of the day, it all comes back to Burnout, the thing that stops me from being who I truly am, the thing that stops me from being happy, the thing that stops me from taking care of myself the way I should. Care today, Cure tomorrow.

Growing Up Growing up is realizing that nothing gets easier, you just have more tools under your belt. For instance, with Type one diabetes I would love to say that over the many years of the roller coaster ride, I have figured out how to manage it, but I don't. I don't know because every low is different, every high is different. Every single little thing plays a major role in what happens next. One of the hardest things about type one is fighting the urge to give up. It's not the shots, it's not the 3 am low blood sugar wake-up calls, it's not the finger pricks or the site changes. It is not knowing if what you are about to do is going to kill you or not. I have fallen into a rut, I know what I am supposed to do, so I do it, but it doesn't work. So I end up feeling sick and then depressed because I feel like I am falling myself. I am the type of person who looks for an A and strives for perfection, But that's nowhere near what type one is about. Type one is full of imperfection. It's not a simple math formula to figure out, but instead, it's this twisted turn of events that is always changing. Over the years I have gotten many comments about my type one, well you know you can cure it all you need is cinnamon, yoga, celery, and a change of mindset. Like I am sorry but last time I checked changing my mindset eating cinnamon and doing yoga will not help me regain my beta cells. After all of these years my favorite one is when someone pulls out the  My mom's best friend's teacher cat has type one I know all about it. Now I have gotten this one many times just at different variations. Now I have gotten better at handling the comments but sometimes they rub me the wrong way. Every once in a while I will realize that I have a disease and that something is wrong with me. I have known this forever. I know I have a disease but sometimes the feeling hits a little too close to home. As much as those moments are hard they are also eye-opening because oh my gosh I have been keeping myself alive for years doing jobs that I was never meant to do. I am a pancreas, I am a mathematician (when it comes to diabetes), and most importantly I am me. I have been handling my diabetes on top of owning a business, on top of doing school, on top of trying to just be a teenager for a minute before it all goes away. I truly don't know how I do it all when I think about it, how I can handle high stress all the time. One of the things that type one has given me is my fake smile. It's the smile I use when I feel terrible and my diabetes isn't cooperating. It's my mask. I hate it because I feel like I am trying to be someone I am not. In other ways, I like it because it helps me feel less of a burden on people. Yes, they contradict themselves but it's true. I have learned that showing my emotions the way I feel just makes me feel worse because others around me ask if I am ok or what's wrong. I think that is my most dreaded question because no one except for another type one understands what I mean when I say I am high. I feel high. Trying to explain the way I feel to people is like trying to lead a horse to water. You can lead them there but it doesn't mean they will drink. I can tell people all I want to try to make them understand but they don't, because they don't live with it. Growing up has made me love who I am because look at me I am doing everything that everyone else does but I did it with Type One Diabetes.