By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post

Sierra Sandison was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when she was a senior in high school.

She already felt awkward, unattractive and struggled to find success in your typical high school activities like choir and theater.

She finally tried out for basketball her senior year and earned a benchwarmer spot on the JV team.

Sandison would go on to compete at Miss America as Miss Idaho and be spokesperson for her illness, but there were many ups and downs along the way. Sandison spoke at the Hays Public Library Tuesday night about her journey.

Sandison had already been dealing with a lot of bullying when she was diagnosed.

“Internally I had a lot of things about me that made me feel different and weird that I did not like about myself and wished I could change or even hated about myself,” she said.

The media, Sandison said, influenced that list of criteria she had to meet to be accepted and beautiful.

Being diagnosed with a chronic illness was a horrible blow to her self-confidence and self-esteem.

Some classmates thought her illness was contagious. Others thought her diabetes was her fault because she had eaten too many potato chips.

Type 1 diabetes actually is an auto-immune disease and is not caused by diet or exercise.

Sandison was reluctant to get an insulin pump, which monitors blood sugar and automatically delivers insulin to the body. She said it was a physical reminder to everyone that she was different.

“It was another thing that I could add to my list of things that made me weird, or different or that I didn’t like about myself,” she said.

Discouraged she sat in her high school classroom, and a Google search landed her on the name of Nicole Johnson, who in 1999 was the first Miss America to have type 1 diabetes.

“I realized how silly and ridiculous it was to be looking at this narrowly defined list of what it meant to be beautiful and comparing myself to it,” she said. “There was nothing about my insulin pump that made it not beautiful except what me and society had decided.”

She said everyone has that insulin pump — that thing that is different that you wish you could change.

Sandison, sweaty with her hair up in a pony tail and no makeup, grabbed her friend and said, “ I am going to go to Miss America and wear my insulin pump.”

Sandison would eventually make it Miss America, but she had some bumps along the way. The first pageant she entered in her home town, she lost.

She tried a smaller pageant and won and went on to Miss Idaho. However, she didn’t make the first cut. she was in the bottom seven of 18 contestants.

Her second year she won her hometown pageant, Miss Twin Falls, which sent her back to Miss Idaho.

But there was another obstacle. Sandison developed diabetes burnout, which is a form of depression common to people with chronic illnesses. Sufferers often find if difficult to take the medicine that will sustain their lives.

Sandison had to back away from some of her diabetes activism in order to take care of her own physical and mental health.

Meeting a girl with disabilities at a local camp, who asked her questions about her pump, helped her focus on her dream again.

It came time for Miss Idaho, and Sandison still dreamed of wearing her insulin pump on stage, but as she prepared to go out on stage, a girl pointed at her insulin pump and said, “What is that?”

Sandison was mortified and ran back to the dressing room and ripped off her pump. She was almost in tears when the little girl came up to her and explained she also had type 1 diabetes and seen her insulin pump. The girl had heard that there was a contestant who had a pump in the pageant and wanted to meet her.

The girl came up after the pageant excited, telling here that she was going to go the next week to get her own insulin pump. The girl’s mother was in tears and told Sandison that the girl had not wanted to get a pump and the issue had been a point of contention in their household for some time.

Sandison won Miss Idaho in 2014 and went on to be the first women to wear a medical device on stage at Miss America, where she made it to the top 15 and the televised portion of the program.

Today Sandison travels the country speaking about her pageant experiences and advocating for those with type I diabetes.

She wrote a book called “Sugar Linings: Finding the Bright Side of Type 1 Diabetes” about her experiences. A signed copy is now in the Hays Public Library. The library also gave away a signed copy of the book, which went to Hayley Keller, a 15-year-old Palco girl who also has type 1 diabetes.

Sandison was in Kansas this week with Beyond Type 1’s Bike Beyond on a cross-country bike ride. The group, which is completely made up of diabetic bikers, are riding more than 4,000 miles between New York and San Fransisco.

Her team was in Stockton Tuesday and will cycle to Minlow today. Sandison is sitting out a week because she hurt her knee.