The day I stopped hiding the pump
11,786 needles. I used to hide every one of them. Then one day I just stopped.
I want to tell you what those two things actually felt like, because the number doesn’t capture it and neither does the headline.
I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at 11. Two years later, when I was 13, the same disease killed my father. So I learned what this thing could do before I learned how to manage it. That’s a heavy thing to hand a 13 year old. The disease that’s now living in your body is the one that took your dad.
For most of my life after that, I treated diabetes like a secret. I’d test under the table. I’d dose in the bathroom. I got fast at it. Slip the needle out, do the shot, put it away before anyone clocked what was happening. I didn’t want to be the sick guy in the room. I wanted to be the engineer who had everything handled.
Here’s the problem with handling everything quietly. The disease doesn’t care about your image.
There was a day in New York. I was at work, and my blood sugar dropped out from under me, and I had a seizure. A colleague called 911. I don’t remember most of it. I remember the after. The looks. The realization that the thing I’d worked so hard to hide had just announced itself to everyone in the loudest way possible, and I’d had zero control over the timing.
Another time I was on a plane. Right at takeoff, the worst possible moment, my blood sugar crashed. You’re strapped in. The seatbelt sign is on. You can’t get up, you can’t get to the galley, and your body is going into a hole. I got through it. But I sat there afterward thinking about how many times I’d cut it close because I was more worried about being seen than being safe.
That’s when the math finally clicked for me. And I’m a math guy, so this is how I actually think about it.
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Hiding the disease had a cost. Every time I dosed in secret, every time I skipped a check because someone was watching, I was trading my safety for my pride. And the bill for that trade doesn’t come due on a schedule. It comes due at takeoff. It comes due in a meeting in New York. It comes due at the worst possible moment, every time, because that’s how risk works when you ignore it.
So I stopped hiding the pump.
It sits on me now where people can see it. If it beeps in a meeting, it beeps. If someone asks, I tell them. It’s a medical device that keeps me alive, and pretending it isn’t there never made it less true. It just made me less safe.
That decision was smaller than the seizure and bigger than anything. Because the day I stopped hiding it was the day I admitted that managing this disease is a full time job that runs underneath my actual full time jobs. 11,786 days of injections and finger sticks and pump sites and 3am corrections. Every single day. No weekends off. No sick days from being sick.
People sometimes ask why I’m so disciplined about systems in my business. Why I build everything to fail safe instead of hoping it holds. Here’s the honest answer. I’ve been running a fail safe system on my own body for 34 years. I don’t get to skip the checks. I don’t get to assume it’ll be fine. I plan for the crash before it comes because I’ve felt the crash, and the crash does not negotiate.
That’s not a sob story. My dad didn’t get the tools I have. He didn’t get the pump, the monitor, the 34 years. I did. So I’m not going to waste them being embarrassed.
The needles kept me alive. Hiding them almost didn’t.
Now I let people see the machine. It turns out the people worth knowing don’t see weakness. They see a guy who shows up every day in a body that requires it.
—Jon