You wake up in the morning feeling hungry. Simple: you go to the kitchen and grab a snack. Unfortunately, for students like senior Raylee Maize-Scaife, it isn’t.
Four years ago, senior Raylee Maize-Scaife was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, due to an autoimmune disease attacking her pancreas. This changed her life.
“I’m a type 1 diabetic, so I have to do a lot just to eat,” Raylee said. “It [my routine] involves math, finger pokes and shots that can take a while.”
When Raylee was twelve years old, she started to experience nausea, excessive thirst and weakness. She then went to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
“The doctors told me that if I had fallen asleep that night, I would’ve died. Ever since, I’ve taken insulin at least three times a day,” Raylee said.
According to the CDC, the autoimmune disease attacks the pancreas and stops insulin from being produced, which causes type 1 diabetes. Insulin is a hormone that allows sugar to enter cells and produce glucose. In the United States, 0.55% of people have type 1 diabetes, which is about 1.3 million adults.
While diabetes is well-known, Raylee thinks that even the people who are aware of her disease struggle to fully understand the effects diabetes has on her life, since they don’t make the effort to learn more about it.
“There are positives and negatives with it,” Raylee said. “A lot of people know about it, so if I’m in trouble, they know the basic concept of it. At the same time, though, people think I got it because of how I eat, when in reality, I got it from genetics.”
Type 2 diabetes is commonly mixed up with type 1 diabetes. According to Mayo Clinic, when the body can’t use insulin properly, it causes type 2 diabetes. Although it’s not known for sure, being overweight and having bad eating habits can be factors in having type 2 diabetes, while type 1 diabetes is passed on through gene variants, also known as mutations in genes.
Although Raylee is the one mainly affected by her diabetes, it also disrupts her family’s life. For instance her sister, 20-year-old Kyla Scaife, had to help take care of Raylee when she was younger.
“I was 16 when she was diagnosed, and it kind of changed everything in my house,” Kyla Scaife explained. “My dad has it, and I saw how it changed him, so I wanted to make sure that she was safe, and so it forced me to take on the role of a parent.”
Even though it was hard, Raylee and her sister made it work. Now, four years later, Raylee is comfortable with being diabetic and also talking about it.
“It was a journey because many people would see my diabetic supplies and judge me,” Raylee continued. “At first, I was embarrassed, but I’ve gotten better at dealing with it and explaining it to others in school. A lot of kids at school see the Dexcom on my arm and think I’m a robot, and having to explain it over and over is annoying. ”
