I was nervous and very confused about what I should do. This was such a hard choice for me to make, but in the end everything seemed to work out.
  

A few years back, I was a cheerleader. It was the one thing that I liked doing here, it was also a distraction from the fact that my mother just decided to give up and send me to live, in Rhode Island, with my dad. I was hurt for a while, but when I started cheering I felt happy and felt wanted by a group of girls. During my second year of cheering, everything started to get harder for me. I would faint at practices and have to leave early, and at one of the games I fainted in the bathroom, and I was so lucky that someone was there to get help for me. This continued on for a while..
  

My grandmother and father were worried about me and talked about what was going on when I wasn’t around. My grandmother decided to take me to the doctor’s before it got worse. The doctor wouldn’t say what was wrong, all he said was to take me to the hospital. That was all he needed to say to make me cry. I was terrified of going to the hospital so I kept trying to give excuses for my grandma not to bring me such as, “I have practice,” and “I have lots of homework to finish,”, but none of them worked. My dad rushed home from work so we could all go together. I was nervous, my palms were sweaty and I had a terrified look on my face because of how serious everything seemed.
  

When we arrived at the hospital they rushed me into a room and had me wait there for hours and hours. They nurses talked with my grandmother and father for a few minutes while I wasn’t paying attention and they told them we would have to stay for a couple of days. They came back in the room and told me they were going home to pack a bag for me. After they came back to the hospital, the nurses, my father, and my grandmother explained to me that I’d been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. They were trying to explain to me what exactly diabetes is and they tried to tell me that everything would be okay if I could take care of myself, but I thought it was the end of the world. I couldn’t help but cry. When they told me the news all I could think about was “I can’t eat sweets anymore!” and that was upsetting considering that Halloween was in a week.
  

I tried going back to cheerleading after I was able to leave the hospital but things were only getting harder for me. Now had to check my blood sugar 4 times a day, take insulin 4 times a day, and eat at a specific time. I would be exercising a lot while I was at practice, so this would cause me to have a lot of low blood sugar readings, so I would have to take time out of practice to make sure my blood sugar levels went up. I realized that it was going to be challenging to go to competition when something bad could happen to me, so it was time for me to make a choice. I decided to quit cheerleading so I could manage my condition better. This was hard for me
because cheerleading was the one thing that distracted me from the fact that I didn’t have my mom around, but now I have to deal with this disease ON TOP of dealing with not having my mother.