Amira Gee finished the TCS New York City Marathon with a condition that does not take days off, and the part she wants named is the part nobody watching could see.
Gee is a population health PhD candidate at the NYU School of Medicine, and she has type 1 diabetes. She was diagnosed in 2017, she said, while she was finishing her chemistry degree. She ran her first New York City Marathon on the Beyond Type 1 team, over the 26.2 miles from the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge to Tavern on the Green in Central Park, during what is Diabetes Awareness Month. A year earlier she had stood on the course cheering friends who live with the same condition.
“Every day with type 1 diabetes feels like a marathon,” she said.
What she describes is arithmetic rather than grit. Blood sugar read and read again. Insulin pump settings planned around every training run.
“Diabetes never takes a day off, and most of that work is invisible to the people around me,” she said.
She crossed the line and hugged her mother, Geneva Gee.
