I was diagnosed days after Thanksgiving during my first year of graduate school for public health. Looking back, the number of empty water bottles in my parents’ home was astounding. It was a bit of a shock, especially being 25 and still thinking of type 1 diabetes as “juvenile”. Studying international health, I knew travel would be in my future, and thinking of it now, I never once stopped to think that T1D could impact my work and studies. It never occurred to me, it simply never crossed my mind that day in the ER or in the following weeks and months. I’m thankful the thought of traveling with diabetes didn’t come up.
I work for Johns Hopkins University as a researcher, in global health, and specifically focus on HIV in Southern Africa and access to care. My work takes me most frequently to Malawi, but also to Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Botswana.
I believe all those things that make T1D a challenging and infuriatingly frustrating balancing act are actually the reasons why I am so grateful. What I better understand each day is just how lucky I truly am. I get to travel to various resource-limited countries for work, and I absolutely love it. When I do travel, yes, it is more challenging to plan for and manage diabetes – from tracking carbs in unknown and unlabeled, trying to find a working refrigerator to keep my insulin, to being frisked at the store because my pump looks suspicious. I travel with back up insulin pens, in case of pump failure. And I always make sure to search for a local private hospital within a reasonable distance.
JDRF is at the forefront of T1D research in the US, which means newer devices and smarter technologies for me to play with. But more importantly, research and technological advances here are huge steps towards facilitating access to and improving care around the world. And that, at least to me, is the really cool part.
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