My name is Christina Roth, I am the founder and president of College Diabetes Network (CDN) a non-profit organization which connects college students who live with Juvenile Diabetes, creating a support network which will enable students to fulfill their potential and limit the negative psychological and physical effects of Diabetes. I founded CDN as a junior in college when I discovered that there were no support services available to college students with diabetes.
As a 14 year old freshman in high school diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, I suddenly had to worry about giving injections, pricking my finger at least 6 times per day, always feeling sick, accepting that it was a part of my life, and all the while knowing that it was never going to go away. With so many overwhelming thoughts and fears high school and academics were not a top priority in my life. When I started college at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2007 I had taken control of my diabetes and was able to feel “normal” for the first time since my diagnosis. It wasn’t until I was on the Dressage Team, getting straight A’s with an overloaded course schedule, and exercising every day that I realized how much of my life diabetes had taken from me while in high school. It was at this time that I began to try to get in touch with other students with diabetes and soon found that not only were there no support groups for college students with diabetes, there were no support services on campus either. To simply keep my blood sugars under control I had to control every aspect of my life, every minute of every day, the intensity of which was exhausting. For many students this takes a significant toll, and can lead to serious physical and psychological side effects. Support services can help to counteract the toll such strict management creates, and prevent such side effects.
After freshman year I had to petition to move off campus due to the fact that I couldn’t even eat at the dining commons. Their meal plans were only “all you can eat”, where you could eat an unlimited amount of food but only 3 times per day, which was extremely difficult as I was supposed to be eating many small meals a day. Also, the food offered at the dining commons made my sugars extremely hard to control as there were very few choices which were actually good for my dietary needs as a diabetic. At the University health services I was very lucky to find a nurse practitioner who used to have diabetes before she received a pancreatic transplant, aside from her nobody at the health services had much insight into diabetes or understood its medical complexity. “Diabetes” wasn’t even a disease/ health concern on their website.
With the struggle of living with diabetes on campus and my interest in meeting other students coping with the same experiences, I started a group to connect with other students. I soon encountered considerable resistance from health services in informing other students about the support group, despite the assistance from the nurse practitioner involved in forming the group. Due to the difficulty of raising awareness about the group, I created a website to facilitate communication between students at universities and to provide suggestions on forming groups despite resistance they may encounter from administrators. The site became a way to help other schools form groups and to provide suggestions on making their campuses more “diabetes friendly”. Through this, College Diabetes Network was born and has continued to grow and expand its services.
I would like to especially thank all the people who helped to make CDN possible, without them CDN would not exist.