Sneak Peak at College and Life Away from Home

This week, I started taking an honors chemistry class at Northwestern University where I’ll be living and studying for three weeks. I was very excited to start this course, but also very nervous about how I’d manage my diabetes while away from home. Although I’d been away from home before, I’d never been away with completely new people for this length of time. While packing, I filled half of my suitcase with extra pump supplies, syringes, 4 bottles of insulin, 9 bottles of strips, and extra CGM supplies! The whole time while packing, I was wondering how I was going to do on my own. Although I am confident in my abilities to manage my own diabetes, I was scared about the possibility that something might go wrong and it would be up to me to fix it. The worst part of it, however, was the fear of telling the teacher and teaching assistant about my diabetes. Even though it is not a big deal, it always makes me nervous to tell people that I have diabetes. Sometimes, people don’t understand or they make a big deal out of it or, worse, they treat me completely differently than they treat other people. But, when I told my teacher, she asked a couple of questions about what exactly I needed and then told me that anything I had to do was perfectly okay! And, so far, camp is going great and there have been no diabetes problems! This has been a great lesson for me that sometimes it’s scary to tell others that you have diabetes or it’s scary to think about the worst that can happen in regards to diabetes, but everything always works out okay in the end.