If you have never had to deal with diabetes—either on a personal basis or through helping someone else—you would not know how stressful and irritating it can be. I mean, I myself don’t even know. But there is someone who does and that is Alexander Sholmire.
Sholmire is our team’s newest member. A current student at Texas A&M University, he joined The Post about a month ago as an intern. He will be working with us for the remainder of the summer, before going back to A&M to finish up his final year. “I’m 19, but I’ll be a senior because I was part of the collegiate program. So I took classes at College Of The Mainland and earned my Associate’s Degree while I was still in high-school,” he told me. Sholmire is studying Society, Ethics and Law at A&M because he plans to go to law school and, eventually, become a lawyer.
Taking college classes and going to high-school simultaneously cannot have been easy. But not only did Sholmire have to handle that, but he also had to manage his diabetes. Sholmire was diagnosed with Type One diabetes at the age of 16-months-old and has been living with it for the past 17 and a half years. Type One Diabetes is different from Type Two Diabetes, also known as Adult Onset Diabetes, because “with Type Two (diabetes), the body produces insulin but it doesn’t metabolize well with the foods you eat. Many times this can be controlled with diet and exercise,” Dixie, Sholmire’s mother, said. “But with Xander, his body no longer produces insulin at all. Therefore artificial insulin is his life support.”
Both Sholmire and his mother discussed everything he has had to deal with since being diagnosed with diabetes. For one thing, he has to carry an insulin pump with him 24/7. Fortunately, the pump he has had since the first or second grade is a small wireless device, but before he got this device, he had to wear a wired device. “It was an inconvenience because I couldn’t swim or shower since it couldn’t get wet and I couldn’t take it off since, if I did, I wouldn’t be getting the insulin I needed.” Furthermore, he also has a monitor that connects to his phone and manages his blood sugar. “If it gets too low or too high, it’ll warn me.” However, he only received this monitor a year ago and—up until that time—he had to deal with injections to manage his blood sugar. His mom said: “Xander has experienced and endured over 26,000 skin pricks for blood sugar checks and over 13,000 shots or pump site changes.”
But sometimes, as Sholmire told me, he needs a bit of extra monitoring when it comes to his blood sugar. And that’s where Maverick comes in. Maverick is Sholmire’s service dog, who has been trained to monitor his blood sugar and alert him when it gets too low or too high.
“Sometimes I’ll sleep through the alarms and Maverick will paw at me to get my attention.”
“Having diabetes has definitely made me more responsible,” Sholmire told me, a sentiment his mother echoed. While he can eat anything he wants, within reason, he always has to make sure to take his insulin before he eats. He always makes sure to check the food labels so he can input the information into his monitor and tries to stay away from foods that are loaded with carbs or sugar. His mother added that “he had to learn self-control when it came to eating snacks and sweets. He had to learn more medical terminology than any child should have to. And he had to learn about the debilitating details and complications of diabetes at a far too young age.”
Sholmire has credited his family and friends for being an excellent support system. He says that no one has treated him differently due to his diabetes, because they have known him since he was young and, therefore, have always known he has had it. “I remember one time I was at a party with some friends and my blood sugar monitor started to go off. My blood sugar had gotten really low and my friends were like ‘you need to sit down and rest.” Sholmire also told me that, when people find out he has diabetes, they have a lot of questions for him but they never treat him gingerly or “with kid gloves.”
When I asked Sholmire how he thought his life would be different had he not had to deal with diabetes, he said that it was a difficult question to answer because “I’ve always had it. It’s just become a way of life. I have it and I deal with it, but I have never let it define me or get in the way of my life and accomplishing what I want.” And, as his mother said, “he has accomplished SO MUCH.”
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