Margot Porter was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes during her third year of college at Brigham Young University.
Leading up to her diagnosis and for months after, she found herself struggling to focus on her schoolwork.
“I could not get my brain to engage and that was really scary for me,” said Porter. “Being someone that’s normally used to being high achieving and really motivated all the time, just having no motivation was honestly terrifying.”
She felt isolated socially and was forced to advocate for herself academically.
“People just really didn’t get that I would need to have extra accommodations or do anything differently than I had done before because there wasn’t anything obvious about me that changed,” she said. “But inside, I felt like a totally different person.”
Upon reaching out to her school for resources, her experience was both “negative” and “invalidating.”
Porter was told that all she needed was a snack in the testing center and was placed into the same category as every other student with diabetes rather than being treated on an individual basis.
