As an adolescent, legislators wanted to hear about how diabetes made me feel different in school, or how much I disliked having to give myself four shots of insulin every day. They wanted stories that tugged on heartstrings and I was happy to comply — whatever it took for them to remember my cause when it came time to vote on legislation that would potentially mean millions of dollars in research.

For most of my childhood and adolescence, I defined my experience as a diabetic in terms of lifestyle. I talked about planning my meals and medication ahead of time, preparing for a hypoglycemic emergency (low blood sugar) and of course, how I had to do all of those blood tests and injections. To most people without firsthand experience with diabetes, this all sounded very dire, but after years and years of treating my diabetes, I had more or less adapted. I didn’t think much of the day-to-day changes the disease had brought to my lifestyle.

In a sense, diabetes had become “second nature” to me, even though it still presented an array of challenges and demanded my constant attention. I wanted to make a difference and convince legislators to use federal resources to cure the disease, so I continued to tell my story of life with diabetes in terms of feelings and youth lost to the maturity forced by a chronic disease.

I finished my undergraduate program in December 2005 and months later began my first “real” post-college job at a nonprofit organization in Detroit, which also meant going off my parents’ health insurance. I soon navigated the confusing sea of health insurance — providers, suppliers, networks, a hundred different identification numbers — and paid the bills myself.

I no longer defined my experience as a diabetic in terms of the lifestyle it forced me to adopt, rather in terms of the impact it had on my wallet. I knew diabetes was expensive — an insulin pump costs at least $5,000 — but I had no idea how much I would be paying to many different sources. One company ships my insulin and another supplies the materials needed monthly for my insulin pump, but both are full-service, mail-order pharmacies.

I purchased a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), a device doctors are prescribing to thousands of diabetic patients that enables them to more closely monitor their blood sugar trends. It is covered by very few health insurance companies and costs about $1,000, including supplies, plus an additional $50 for the software.

It occurred to me I was spending more on diabetes supplies, treatment and other related costs than I was on things I originally thought would be my largest expenses, such as food and transportation.

With almost 20 million diabetics in America, I am certainly not alone. Earlier this month, the American Diabetes Association released a report estimating the annual diabetes-related medical and economic costs of diabetes in America in 2007 to be $174 billion, a figure which has increased by almost one-third since 2002. In Michigan alone the total cost of diabetes last year was $5.426 billion.

Just as I am spending more on diabetes, so is the U.S. The annual cost of diabetes exceeds the annual cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined, and it is almost $25 billion more annually than the damage done by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The human toll of diabetes is greater as well, with 284,000 deaths last year, according to the same report.

While I have advocated for funding for diabetes research for some time, it is equally important that educational efforts be funded in order to lower the prevalence of type 2 diabetes, which accounts for about 90 percent of diabetes cases, and unlike type 1 diabetes, can sometimes be prevented.

The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (www.jdrf.org) and the American Diabetes Association (www.diabetes.org) both operate Web sites where you can learn more, advocate for this funding and help put an end to diabetes.

Ryan Dinkgrave is a State News columnist. Reach him at dinkgra2@msu.edu.