At the Breakthrough T1D Walk at Liberty Station last month, surrounded by family and friends on Team Brooke, local teenager Brooke Lowman served as the grand marshal, leading a parade of people of all ages living with Type 1 diabetes.
The honorary role was one of the first acts of advocacy for the 17-year-old Torrey Pines High School junior who has recently started volunteering with the Breakthrough T1D Foundation (formerly the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation ), which works to raise awareness, fund research and support families impacted by Type 1 diabetes, the autoimmune disease that affects more than 1.5 million Americans.
“This cause is deeply personal to me, and I’ve made it a mission to share my story and help others understand what life with T1D is really like,” said Brooke.
Brooke was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was just 11 years old on Jan. 3, 2020.
“My symptoms were super crazy, my parents were so worried,” Brooke said. It started with her having a huge appetite and yet losing weight at the same time. She was very thin, tired all the time, constantly peeing and very thirsty. On Christmas Eve, she suffered a horrible bout of heartburn. “You could tell that something was really off.”
During a family New Year’s trip to Big Bear, she couldn’t climb the stairs in their cabin and could hardly breathe at the higher elevation, having to skip out on snow tubing with her cousins. Back home in San Diego, her parents immediately took her to the hospital and a blood test confirmed the diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes.
Brooke Lowman’s team at the Breakthrough T1D Walk at Liberty Station. (Danny Rivas)
It came as an enormous shock—no one in the family had diabetes and no one really knew anything about it. She was in the hospital for about five days and her parents could not leave the hospital until they knew everything and how to take care of their daughter. It was a crash course for everyone on calculating units of insulin, how to inject shots and meal planning. At one point, Brooke remembers asking a nurse: “Am I going to have this for the rest of my life? Would it be a miracle if I get cured?”
“It was pretty overwhelming,” Brooke said. “I had to memorize my whole life plan in a span of two days.”
Brooke went through “the honeymoon phase” of her disease during the pandemic, which was a blessing in disguise as there was time for her and her whole family to adjust to her new normal.
The biggest challenge is always having to pay attention to what’s going on in her body.
“When you eat carbohydrates, it increases your glucose,” she explained during an appearance on the local news. “The sugar and the carbs go to your blood and since the pancreas can no longer work or works very little to produce insulin, you have to manually put the insulin in your body through an injection or an insulin pump like I have. By eating, your levels increase and by not eating, they can get low. With too much insulin your levels can also get low.”
“I know now how to tell if my levels are off, but in the beginning it was really scary.”
Two months ago Brooke switched to the latest glucose monitoring device, Dexcom G7, and she wears an Omnipod insulin pump system. While the devices keep getting smaller with better innovations, she still tries to hide it by wearing long sleeves—as a teenager, she admits she sometimes worries that others will judge her as many do not understand what T1D is. Since she was in fifth grade, she has been the only student allowed to keep a cell phone in school to check her levels, which always attracts attention and questions.
For the last three years, Brooke has participated in the Breakthrough T1D Walk, an inspirational event that raises both awareness and funds to back research. This was the second year Brooke had a team of walkers contributing to her cause and making the event special for her. For the last two years, they have raised $10,000.
“This year was a great turnout, everything was perfect,” she said of her 32-member team.
Due to the amount of funds her team has raised and the power of her personal story, Brooke was selected to serve as the grand marshal of a parade before the main 1.3-mile walk kicked off. The parade featured people of all ages living with T1D, “champions” holding posters with the time since their diagnoses, from 30 to 39 years to down to less than a year.
“It made me so emotional to see the kids who had it, they were all so little,” she said of the youngsters in the parade. “It was really, really lovely to experience seeing all the people supporting the kids and their teams.”
The newly diagnosed, like those little kids, are the people Brooke is most looking forward to reaching in her role as an ambassador with Breakthrough T1D. She remembers her own experience, being in the hospital and Breakthrough coming into her room with a comforting teddy bear, a dietitian book, and helpful resources for her and her family, “They were so welcoming and will always be a big part of my life,” Brooke said.
In her volunteer role with Breakthrough, one of her assignments is to have a park meet-up once a month to bring together people who are affected, offering help for daily management and guests speakers and information about new technologies and treatments. She wants to be a source of support for others going through that overwhelming honeymoon phase, when there is so much to learn and so many changes to adapt to.
A guitarist who has played in an all-girl rock band since she was a freshman, Brooke is also planning a benefit concert for Breakthrough in the spring with a fellow high schooler who has diabetes from Canyon Crest Academy.
As T1D has been such an impactful part of her life, she would like to always stay active in raising awareness and doing whatever she can to help people.
“I’m really proud of everything I’ve done,” Brooke said.
To learn more about Breakthrough T1D, visit breakthrought1d.org.