Your Life with Diabetes, in Numbers

Here is something nobody talks about: diabetes is a full-time job that nobody sees you doing.

Your partner sees you. Your friends see you. Your coworkers see you. What they don't see is the thousands of tiny decisions behind every single day. The carb counting before every meal. The 3am alarm going off because your sensor thinks you're crashing. The mental math you do before a walk, a flight, a glass of wine. It never clocks out, and almost none of it is visible to anyone else.

I started wondering what all of that invisible work actually adds up to. Not in a medical sense. In a human sense. How many times have I actually done this?

So I built a little calculator. You enter your history, your years on injections or a pump, your finger-prick days, your CGM years, roughly how many lows you have in a week. And it shows you your life with diabetes, in numbers.

Try it here: Your Diabetes Stats — it takes about a minute, and everything runs in your browser. Nothing you enter goes anywhere.

Why I built this

I was 10 years old when I got diagnosed. I'm 30 now. That's 20 years of this.

For the first 2 or 3 years I was on pens and needles, injecting for every meal and every snack, and I was a huge snacker back in the day. Then I became one of the first people to try an Omnipod, and I fell in love immediately. No more pulling out a pen at the table. I could give myself insulin quickly and quietly and get on with my life.

People call diabetes the invisible disease, and that might be the truest thing I've ever heard about it. The sleepless nights stick with me most. I've had more of them than I can count, and I still get them occasionally. Then the sun comes up and you carry yourself like any other person, like nothing happened.

There are too many stories. One that always comes back to me: waking up low in the middle of the night, so hungry from the low that juice wasn't going to cut it. I'd end up eating complete meals at 3am. Two full PB&Js, juice, water, then a protein bar for good measure. Then back to sleep like a normal person.

I'm tired of this disease being invisible. I built this because I want people to understand the amount of work we put in every single day, every week, every month, every year, just to keep ourselves alive.

My numbers

I ran my own history through the calculator. Twenty years with diabetes. Eighteen on the Omnipod. Fifteen years of finger pricks, ten a day. About five lows a week. Three disrupted nights a week. Five years on the Dexcom G6.

Here's what that looks like:

Read that list again. That is what invisible looks like.

Calculate your numbers

Show someone who loves you

The calculator has a share button for a reason, and this is it.

Most of us have someone in our lives who has no real sense of what this takes. Not because they don't care, but because the work is invisible by design. We do it quietly, between everything else, for years. A single number, your lifetime injections, your lifetime 2am juice boxes, can communicate in five seconds what years of explaining never quite manage.

So run your numbers. Then send them to one person. Your partner, your mom, your best friend. Let them see the math.

Calculate your numbers

Frequently asked questions