James Talarico

And so just me and her in the hospital room, I was sitting in the hospital bed.

I was still hooked up to the IVs.

And I remember her telling me about how to inject the insulin and that I would need to do it multiple times a day, that I would have to do it every time I ate, every time my sugars were high.

And I remember asking her in that moment, it seems so silly now, but I remember saying, how long am I going to have to do this?

And she said, for the rest of your life.

And like in that moment, I kind of lost it.

And that's rare for me.

And it was embarrassing because my family wasn't there.

It was just this poor diabetes educator trying to console me.

But it was just, I think, the stress of the two days prior, the weight of the news, all that had just kind of came crushing down on me.

Hearing that this was going to be something I was going to live with forever, it was a big thing to hear confirmed by this educator.

I would also then say, and this is what I've told, I've had a lot of Texans with diabetes, a lot of type one kids who come up to me at these rallies, actually signed an insulin pump, which I thought was weird.

But a lot of them show me their pumps or they show me their numbers or their glucose monitor.

Underneath my suit jacket, I have a monitor here that hooks up to my phone so I can see how my sugars are doing during the day.

And when I have a chance to talk to them, I always remind them that this disease is also a blessing because it, for me at least, it is like a daily reminder that I am a finite, organic being, and that life in every minute is a gift.

And I knew that intellectually, but before I got this disease, I would always forget that.

I would always think that I was invincible, that I was immortal, because we're all told that we're going to die, but all of us just kind of deny it in our brains.

But I'm reminded of it every day.

almost every minute of every day, because anyone who has type one, anyone who knows someone with type one, you know it's just a constant struggle.

If they're too high, you die.