Diagnosed and a Miracle - 30 Health Posts in 30 Days

Today I'm going on my own again.  I wrote this a few years ago for a churchy thing that never actually worked out..haha!


In order to receive my Merry Miss award, I had decided that one of my goals would be to read the New Era Magazine, cover to cover each month. I didn’t realize that this goal was going to be an answer to my prayers, merely months later.

My parents had known the symptoms all too well. So when I came to them with my problem, they had a good guess as to what was going on. They had been through this same situation eleven years earlier with my oldest sister. My mom quickly made an appointment the next day for me to see my pediatrician. 

I can still remember sitting in the waiting room after having my blood drawn There were kids much younger than I playing house with the plastic kitchen set while I sat silently next to my mother. It didn’t take long for the nurse to call me back into to hear my results from my doctor. My parents had been right. The doctors had just diagnosed me with diabetes at the age of 11, less than a week before Halloween.

I was sent off to the hospital for a week. I didn’t have to go to school, I had lots of visitors and received about nine teddy bears that week. The nurses taught me how to test my blood sugar levels and give myself insulin shots. At that time, I couldn’t understand why my parents were so upset, this didn’t seem all that hard.


Then one morning after coming home from the hospital it hit me. I filled my syringe with insulin to give myself my normal morning shot and placed the needle just above the skinned I had pinched on my stomach. I should have easily been able to slide the needle through my skin, but I just couldn’t do it. This lasted for a while where I would sit on my bed, crying, praying, that I would be able to give myself a shot before one of my parents would come in and take care of it for me. This was going to be harder than I had once thought. It wasn’t going to be easy to be different, to watch what I ate, to deal with low blood sugars, needles and pricking. 

In all my prayers, I never asked why I had to deal with this disease, but I cried for help and help came. Not too much later, we received the New Era and I held true to my goal of reading it all the way through. To my astonishment, the second story in the 1994 November New Era was a story about a boy with diabetes! As I kept reading through the magazine, there was a second story, this time about a young woman with diabetes! This second story, especially, gave me hope. What rang true to me in the words she said was that Heavenly Father is never going to give us a trial that we cannot bear. It was no coincidence that only weeks after being diagnosed with diabetes, the church magazine was running articles on people with similar stories. 

I would like to say that I went back to normal immediately and was able to give myself my shots, but it still took some time to get into the swing of things. Trials aren’t meant to be a quick and easy fix, but something that as we work through it, with the Lord, we can be strengthened by what we learn.


As I look back on m my experience, I realize that being diagnosed with diabetes was a testimony gaining experience. Not just because I was able to get through it, but because I knew the Lord was aware of me and answering my prayers. He may not answer our prayers the way we think He should, or even as fast as we would like, but He is mindful of what we really and truly need in our lives. 


This post was written as part of NHBPM – 30 health posts in 30 days: http://bit.ly/vU0g9J