Grace’s Story — When Insulin Is Out of Reach

Grace was a young woman from Kirinyaga who had been living with Type 1 diabetes for about seven or eight years. She was diagnosed while she was still in high school.

From the beginning, managing diabetes was never just about understanding the diagnosis. It was also about whether the family could afford the care she needed every single day.

Type 1 diabetes requires insulin. For Grace’s family, insulin was expensive and difficult to keep buying consistently. Their experience was that the public insurance available to them did not reliably cover the insulin she needed as an outpatient, which meant the family often had to pay out of pocket. And insulin is not a one-time expense. It has to be replaced again and again, month after month.

The costs did not stop there. There were hospital visits, specialist consultations, tests, transport, and the everyday cost of trying to eat well while managing diabetes. When money was already tight, all of those things became another burden for the family.

Because Grace could not always access the treatment she needed consistently, she became seriously ill many times. She would develop diabetic ketoacidosis, be admitted to hospital, recover enough to go home, return to her normal life, and then become sick again.

And still, Grace kept going.

Her mother remembers her as a kind young woman. People in the community loved her. When she was sick, youth groups and neighbours came to visit her. She was known, cared for, and surrounded by people who wanted her to get better.

But love from a community cannot replace insulin.

About two weeks ago, after becoming very ill again, Grace was admitted to hospital. This time, she did not recover. She died from complications related to Type 1 diabetes.

Her death was devastating to her family and to the people who knew her.

Grace’s story matters because she was not simply “a diabetic patient.” She was a young woman with a life, a family and a community that loved her. She was trying to manage a condition that requires daily treatment in a system where the correct medication can still be financially out of reach.

Her story is also not unique.

There are young people living with Type 1 diabetes whose families are doing everything they can, but insulin, specialist care, transport, food and repeated hospital visits can become impossible to sustain. When access breaks down, the consequences can be severe.

Grace deserved the chance to grow older.

We are sharing her story because access to insulin should never be the reason a young person loses that chance.