My friends call me Yaa. 25 years of age and I have been living with diabetes for 11 years. I was diagnosed as having diabetes when I was 14years.

It all started when I realized that I was passing lots of urine daily especially at night, would wake up extremely hungry, and was losing so much weight .I Was then in a boarding school (senior secondary school) so one day, I decided to go home and tell my parents about what I was going through. My mother is a nurse so I thought this would be the easiest step to take to solve my problems. When I got home my mother decided that I should have an early scheduled medical checkup due to the symptoms I had told her about. After the routine tests, the doctor said to my mother in my presence “your daughter Yaa has diabetes”. I knew nothing about diabetes then, so all I remember is seeing the shocked and devastated look on my mother’s face. Then she uttered these words “We don’t have diabetes in our family”. I on the other hand knew nothing about what I was going to deal with for the rest of my life.

My parents are very helpful; mother being a nurse understood and did her best to educate me on the condition. As a teenager, I had difficulty understanding and accepting due to that I was advised to be withdrawn from the boarding house temporally. I would take soft drinks (soda, fizzy sugary drinks), eat chocolate with friends against doctors’ advice because I found it difficult accepting. This unfortunately always would result in me being admitted to the hospital on account of high blood glucose and I will miss classes in school. When I thought I was starting to get hold of things, finally accepting and allowed back into the boarding house, I had friends avoiding me because they heard I