Fund A Cure with Fran Carpentier | Breakthrough T1D New York City Gala 2024

About

Dear Family & Friends,

If you know me at all, you know that I talk. I talk a lot. Most particularly, I talk—a lot and every chance I get—about what it’s like to live with diabetes. Specifically, I talk about living with “Type 1 diabetes” (what was formerly known as “juvenile diabetes”). Trust me, I don’t do it to be in the limelight. And I certainly don’t do it to burden you. I talk a lot about diabetes because I believe that it’s important for everyone to know what life is like when you cannot go more than a few hours at most without a steady supply of insulin being delivered into your body either by an external pump or via multiple injections and also having to guesstimate how much carbohydrate you will be consuming every time you want to eat something. 

I feel that people need to know all this, because diabetes can suddenly strike anyone at any age. Suddenly being the operative word. Because the disease, which comes on quickly and then creeps into your psyche and well-being like an insidious thief. Truth is, none of you can be guaranteed that you will not get diabetes. My thinking is that perhaps, in addition to me, you know someone else or one day will know someone else—a child, a parent, a friend or colleague—who is stricken diabetes. And that by my pulling back the curtain about what life with type 1 diabetes is really like will equip you to help those people. Because knowledge is power.

I was diagnosed with diabetes on April 10, 1969—the month after I turned 14. Mind you, this was during what I call the “dark ages” of diabetes care, when blood sugar was tested only at the doctor’s office, and you had to wait several days for the lab to tell you the results. (Crazy, right?) In fact, when I was diagnosed, doctors used to tell their female patients not to get pregnant because of the inherent risks not only to the fetus’s development but also to the woman. (Ever see Steel Magnolias?)

And that’s why for years (and years) after my diagnosis, my mom was consumed with worry that I would never be able to have children (or, for that matter, find a husband). 

In 1978, while researching an article I was writing about what it was like to live with diabetes, I discovered an amazingly supportive organization, which in those days was called JDF (for Juvenile Diabetes Foundation). I’d found my tribe! And I never looked back. 

Through JDF (which later became the JDRF, and now is Breakthrough T1D,) I became the beneficiary of accurate and trustworthy information about how best to manage my diabetes, I connected with top medical professionals and, thus, was able to get state-of-the-art care—and Breakthrough T1D played a part in many of those medical advances by funding their research. Most amazing and most comforting of all, I experienced a camaraderie that I could never have dreamed of. (Like I said, I’d found my tribe.) Forty years later, my friends at Breakthrough T1D still fuel both my physical and my emotional well-being. 

 

And now, a more personal note: With all due respects to my husband, Ira Salom, and our fabulous wedding photographer, the picture you see here of a much younger me and my son, Ben, taken in November 1994 when Ben was only six months old, remains my treasured favorite. I was 39 when I had Ben. By then, I’d had diabetes for 25 years; nevertheless, I was able to sustain a remarkably healthy, full-term pregnancy, and my baby was absolutely perfect at birth. And that was due in part to what I had learned about optimum diabetes care from my association with Breakthrough T1D. In 1994, 25 years after my diagnosis, my very emotional mother—and my sweet, reserved father—were finally able to lay to rest their fears for me and their concerns about the kind of life that was possible for me.

And you just cannot put a price on that!

Speaking of “prices,” fostering progress in medical science is dependent on research. And research needs funding. And that’s where the extraordinary work of Breakthrough T1D comes in. Because Breakthrough T1D is the world’s largest nonprofit funder of research on type 1 diabetes. The money that Breakthrough T1D raises not only brings us closer every day to a cure for T1D, it also moves forward therapies that make managing diabetes less of an ordeal while also lowering the risk of the long-term complications that have long been associated with the disease—you know, the “scary stuff” like cardiovascular disease, blindness, kidney disease and amputations. 

As 2024 draws to a close and everyone is thinking about tax-deductible donations, I am reaching out, asking you to donate whatever you can to Breakthrough T1D by clicking the bright blue “Donate” button on the right, which will bring you directly to my donation page. (Alternatively, you can write out a check to Breakthrough T1D and mail it to: Greater New York Metro Chapter, P.O. Box 5044, Hagerstown, MD 21741-5044. In the memo section on your check, please write “Fran Carpentier.”)

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for helping me help Breakthrough T1D!