It was the last day of camp. I couldn’t believe that only four days earlier I had arrived, timid and clinging to my mom and brother, afraid of what the week would bring. What if the kids don’t like me? What if I don’t like the kids? What if there’s an emergency and I, so uneducated in diabetic treatment, have to take charge?

It was the last day of camp. Tonight was the closing assembly, with each unit performing a short skit based on their assigned decade. I worried about whether ours would turn out. The fast-paced medley of 80s music was something I would ordinarily plan with my friends, not a bunch of eleven-year-olds. Who knows whether or not each kid will remember his part? Who knows whether the parents or camp directors will approve of the fact that it isn’t diabetes related at all? Whoever said it was okay for me to bring my loudest music and loudest clothing and superimpose it upon these young, impressionable minds?

It was the last day of camp. As I sat on the grass in front of the main gazebo, I reflected back on what the past week had been. I had made crafts, recorded blood sugar levels, and carried countless snacks and eleven-year-old girls. I had grown two extra limbs named Kerry and Sierra who were now lying in my lap, lazily watching the assembly. But I still didn’t know much about the disease that my youngest brother had been diagnosed with shortly over a year before.

It was the last day of camp. I tried to pay attention to the woman in the gazebo lecturing on the past century’s diabetic treatments, or lack thereof. I saw the heavy blood glucose monitors, the ambiguous urine testing strips, the rough razor blades and the glass syringes that had all been used by this woman to control her diabetes only a few decades before.

Treatment of the disease has improved so greatly. And yet, here are these seventy-some-odd children, most of them diagnosed before they could even understand, still waiting, patient yet frustrated, for a cure. It isn’t fair.

As if she could read my thoughts, Kerry raised her tear-filled eyes to meet mine.

"I hate diabetes," she cried, in a voice so meek it was almost a whisper.

My own sobs rising in my throat, I stroked her dark blond hair. The cool sun reflected off of it, making it glow the color of an autumn wheat field. I realized that I had next-to-no scientific knowledge of her condition. And I realized how lucky I was to have escaped it and how brave my brother was to live with it every day. And it broke my heart because I would rather that I had it than either of them. And I knew there was nothing I could do to help them.

But I was here.