I’m not going to say I remember the day like it was yesterday, i’m not even sure if I remember the whole conversation. What I do remember is that it was one of the few moments that changed the way I thought about my own health and how I wanted to live my life…

It was was a day like any other day, some time last fall. I was returning a missed phone call from my mother. The message said: “It’ be nice if you could call your mother once in a while, so I know that you’re still alive!” So I decided I’d better call her back, and let her know that I was okay. But when she answered the phone, I was the one who was worried when I realized where she was talking from.
It was a little noisy in the background and I could hear somebody there with her, asking her questions about how she was feeling and if there was any discomfort.

Puzzled, I asked her where she was. She refused to tell me at first, but I pressed her until she admitted that she was at the hospital. And before I could let out my usual worried rant, she said: “I’m fine, I’m fine, don’t worry.”
But she wasn’t fine, she was on dialysis, and had been for weeks now, but chose not to tell me, because she felt like there was nothing that I could do from 100 miles away, and she didn’t want to worry me. It turns out her kidneys weren’t functioning the way that they should, a side effect of diabetes, and she needed help filtering her blood.

I didn’t understand how she could be so calm about it, or even pretend to be so calm about something so serious! And I didn’t understand why she expected me to be so calm about it! This wasn’t just the flu, or a broken arm, it was kidney failure!!! And all because she wasn’t taking care of herself the way that she should, she wasn’t watching what she ate, and she wasn’t checking her blood sugar on a regular basis, and it was starting to affect her body negatively…

I found out then that she wasn’t the only one in my family who had diabetes, but both my father and my sister also had diabetes. And all I could think about was how I was next in line. Not just because it’s hereditary, but because I was also overweight like many of the women in my family and because of the higher rate of diabetes within my Hispanic heritage.

I knew right then and there that I had to make some changes in my own life if didn’t want to get diabetes. First I needed to change the way I think…Just because I had never had a problem with high blood sugar didn’t mean that I wasn’t at risk or that I didn’t need to change. I had to think about what I really wanted out life, and how eating better and being more active could help me to more effectively accomplish my goals.