In the year since being diagnosed, I have completed two semesters of college. didn't skip a beat post diagnosis. (okay, so maybe i dropped one class and one extracurricular, but i was basically already failing them because of hyperglycemia symptoms, so it wasn't the diabetes as much as the pre-diabetes that made me drop them.) I have just started a project to make pamphlets that can help type 1 folks without a significant science background understand, physiologically, what is happening in their bodies. I have done what might be the most important move of my life, and become an EMT and started working on my college campus as an EMT.
My dx was 3 years ago at age 26. Five months after being diagnosed, I rode a 2-day 200 mile bike ride from Seattle to Portland. I also raced in my first sprint triathlon (and finished in the middle of the pack) and did a second one a month later. Later that year, I did another 200 mile bike ride from Seattle to Vancouver, BC. I logged over 1500 miles on my bicycle that year! But the thing that I'm most proud of happened almost 2 years after my diagnosis, when I gave birth to a healthy, beautiful, full-term baby girl. I didn't have any complications and I maintined an A1C between 5.4 and 5.7 for my entire pregnancy.
It's my personal opinion that this disease can't stop me from doing anything that I really want to do. I may just have to work a little harder and think a little more critically about things. I choose to think of that as a good thing. My diabetes makes me more determined and makes me push harder.