Diabetes is facing your own mortality on a daily basis, looking it in the eye, and saying not today! How can you stomach hearing a 9 year old, who just brought home straight A's for another semester say "As long as I live to find the cure". Not until a cure is found, as long as he lives to find a cure for everyone else.
If diabetes has succeeded to accomplish anything in my son's life, it is this. We now have a determined, SMART young man, out there wanting to be the one who finds a cure. We will have a doctor who will stop at nothing but to have no more fighting diabetes for his patients. How can you hate a disease that has created this individual.
Before diabetes he was still destined to save others, he was still going to make a difference. That was because he wanted to serve his country. But since Diabetes has taken that option away from him, he is now destined to serve others just like him, and make their lives better.
Have you stopped and thought about your own mortality and what it would be like for those around you? Chances are you may have from time to time, chances are you have even come to terms with dying. But try being a child who has come to terms with dying. A child who hasn't even really lived yet. I can as an adult living 30 healthy years so far, come to terms with my own mortality. But I cannot fathom or even consider coming to terms with my son's mortality. Some people may think I'm strong, and from time to time I consider myself to have gone through hell, and bounced back looking forward to what's ahead, and for that I am strong. But I have no where the amount of strength that my 9 year old boy has. He lays his head on a pillow every night, knowing full well he may not wake up in the morning. That is hard for me to swallow, but imagine being a child and having to swallow that.
I write this not for those that have diabetes, because they have lived this, some of them as children, and are still living it. I write this for others who do NOT understand just what diabetes is, and what it does. Take a moment to think about everything. Try living your life from this moment forward like someone with diabetes does. Go to bed thinking you may not wake up in the morning, so it is your duty to live your life to the fullest, not to let any opportunity pass, and fill your day with nothing short of pure awesomeness, and make a difference in the lives of others.
