Hi! My name is Romelle Slaughter. I'm 34, live in Des Moines, Iowa, and I am a young professional with diabetes. I was diagnosed in 1998 several days before I left home to attend college. For the next decade, I have struggled like many young diabetics in managing my diabetes, feeling like no one in my age group understood the challenges of being a young professional and a having a life-long chronic disease.

Hi! My name is Romelle Slaughter. I'm 34, live in Des Moines, Iowa, and I am a young professional with diabetes. I was diagnosed in 1998 several days before I left home to attend college. For the next decade, I have struggled like many young diabetics in managing my diabetes, feeling like no one in my age group understood the challenges of being a young professional and a having a life-long chronic disease.

I am a member of a young professional lunch group in Des Moines. One of our lunch members was an assistant director of our local ADA chapter. She knew I had an interest in getting involved, but I was hesitant because I didn't think I could devote enough time to volunteering. In the fall of 2006, I was let go from my job and I didn't know what to do. I made a phone call to her about getting involved. Ironically, she was going to call me at the same time, once she learned I was unemployed.

Since that phone call 4 years ago, I have been positively affected by the work of the American Diabetes Association, not as a citizen, but as a volunteer and a board member. How has ADA positively affected my life? I learned how the ADA not only raise money for research in finding a cure to STOP DIABETES. The ADA provide education and classes for certified diabetes educators (CDEs) for continuing education on diabetes, sponsor support groups for people affected by diabetes, and bringing awareness about a growing epidemic that continues to get worse.

I have learned that I'm not alone. There are over 19,000 diabetics between the ages of 19-44 that live here in Iowa, and there is a sense of shame in being talking about it in public. I choose not to hide it. The more young professionals understand about diabetes and not the "myths" and misinformation, the hope is that they start to take diabetes seriously as they do with all forms of cancer and AIDS. Death due to complication of diabetes claims more lives than breast cancer and AIDS combined.

Ben Ahnen, who is a son of a fellow board member and a past youth ADA ambassador, said it the best when he was asked by a classmate "which diabetes is the worst? Type 1 or Type 2?" His response was "the worst type of diabetes is the one that you don't take care of."

That gives me the reason to be positive and the reinforcement to live each day with diabetes.