I was 7 when
everything changed.

I don't remember much about the hospital. I remember my parents' faces. I remember the word "forever."

Type 1 Diabetes doesn't ask if you're ready. One day you're a kid, and the next you're doing math before every meal, and you'll be doing it for the rest of your life.

That was more than 30 years ago.

Since then, T1D has been with me through everything. School. Work. Marriage. Becoming a dad. Travel. Every milestone and every ordinary Tuesday, it was there in the background, asking for attention.

Soccer has been there almost as long. I started playing in Colombia, kept playing through my teens in D.C., and carried it into college and adult life. Exercise taught me early that T1D rarely follows one clean rule.

Here's what nobody tells you at diagnosis: the hardest part isn't the needles. It's the constancy. The math at every meal. The 3 a.m. lows. Smiling and saying "I'm fine" while your CGM is sounding an alarm. The version of this disease that never makes it into the pamphlet.

Now my daughter hears those alarms too. Sometimes one wakes her in the middle of the night, and the next morning she asks if I'm okay. She's learning what they mean a little at a time. So am I.

The shift came when I stopped treating diabetes like an enemy I had to beat every day. That fight was exhausting.

I started accepting T1D as part of my life. Not as defeat. Not as my whole identity. I built systems around it and made room for everything else. That's when it got lighter. Never perfect, but livable. Mine.

Along the way, I turned hard-won lessons into practical systems. Plays for lows, mornings, pizza nights, training, travel, parenting, and the days when doing everything right still produces a different result.

That became The T1D Playbook.

I'm not a doctor. I've carried this for most of my life, and I wrote down what I wish someone had handed me at 7.