Rye Brook third grader fundraises to help find cure for diabetes

By Casey Watts

After spending only five days in his kindergarten class, a five-year-old Rye Brook boy was rushed away to spend a week in the hospital to learn how to manage his new diagnosis. Now eight years old, Matty Zimmerman and his family are working to fundraise for JDRF to find a cure for type 1 diabetes.

It was Matty’s mother’s idea to start fundraising and a JDRF member suggested she and her family create a team for their annual One Walk event. That was three years ago, and now the Zimmerman family is gearing up for their third walk. This year, Matty and his family will proudly don their red Type One Toughs shirt – a shirt that displays their team name and a blue superman logo with an “M” in the middle.

“I felt like I couldn’t just sit,” Luci said. “The only way to do something to make it easier was donating to JDRF.”

The first year, Luci raised about $25,000 from friends and family. Over the past three years, she estimated they raised about $50,000 without any corporate help – it was all collected from sharing the JDRF page on Facebook and people stepping up to help. The donation link can be found on JDRF’s website after searching Luci’s name in their Donate tab. So far, The Zimmermans have raised about $9,000 towards their goal of $10,000.

Matty has also gotten more involved than just walking with his parents – he wrote a book about diabetes that he asked his nurse to read to his class so they all could understand what diabetes was. He also helped show a three-year-old with diabetes how he checks his blood sugar levels to help her feel better about her condition.

“I want to help them so they’re not as scared of diabetes as I am,” Matty said. He isn’t afraid of the disease, but he wants other kids to be less scared because his efforts will help develop better treatments and a cure that younger children can benefit from.

His father Eric agreed and said living with diabetes and managing the disease properly is all about the mentality you approach it with.

“One of our main goals is to keep everyone’s mentality on an even field,” he said. “Everything about diabetes makes sense – there is always a logical answer.”

Eric went on to explain that if they approach the problem with a level head, it is always easier to find the logical answer on how to fix it. This mantra is reinforced by everyone he talks with when he is in the doctor’s waiting room and discussing diabetes with people who have had it for a long time or who were just diagnosed. For a lot of them, it’s all about their mentality and approaching the disease in a way that allows the patient to manage it and not let it affect their life.

The family also learned that the sweet spot for blood sugar is normally only hit about 30 percent of the time during a three-month period, meaning the average number of times a person’s blood sugar is within a normal range is only 30 percent. Therefore the Zimmermans try not to focus too much on maintaining one number the entire day and accept that Matty will have high and low spikes to his blood sugar.

“It’s not all about being one number all the time, it’s about the average,” Eric explained. “Live your life and have diabetes at the same time.”

Eight years old and a pro

Matty only has had type 1 diabetes for three years, but he wasted no time in talking about his daily routine and going through what everything was and how he had to use it. He wears a sensor, a pump and a watch, all of which play a part in monitoring and leveling his sugar levels. His pump inserts insulin directly into his body and the sensor tells him through his watch and an application on his and his parents’ phones if his sugar is too high or too low.

Sometimes the Ridge Street School third grader has to wake up two or three times at night to drink chocolate milk to raise his blood sugar, something he finds annoying. But he understands that he has to do it in order to stay healthy.

“If I’m really high or really low, it can be scary,” Matty said. “When I’m really high, I have a lot of energy in my body, my brain gets fuzzy and it’s a little hard to think. When I’m low, my legs are shaky and wobbly. I have to get water and a lot of exercise.”

His go-to candy for when he is low during the day is Smarties. At the mention of them, Matty’s four-year-old sister Mia popped up and began chanting the candy’s name – it’s an obvious favorite for the Zimmerman children.

When she isn’t eating his candy, Mia is helping her brother. She sometimes gets ice for Matty when his pump site is hurting him.

Despite all of this, Matty is still a happy kid. He is glad he knows he isn’t the only person in the world who has to deal with diabetes and he wants to meet as many people with the disease as he can and talk to them about their experience with it.

Of course, he isn’t happy he has to check his blood sugar five to eight times a day, if not more, or get poked with needles.

“I feel like diabetes is an enemy to me,” he said. “I don’t like diabetes and not being able to eat right away at birthday parties or fun occasions.”

This is why he is excited to be helping other people like him. He not only gets to meet other people, he gets to help them too. But the walk and the fundraiser just weren’t enough for the 8-year-old. Since he is always forgetting to take his diabetic bag with him when he goes out of the house, he vowed that every time he forgets it, he will donate $1 of his own money to JDRF. So far, he has donated $1.

JDRF does more than just research with the money they’ve raised – they put some of it towards lobbying insurance companies to cover diabetic supplies like pumps and sensors, Eric explained. Therefore the money the Zimmerman family is raising, along with countless others, could directly impact a lot of newly diagnosed families.

Matty hopes he won’t have to go to the One Walk forever. Scientists and researchers at JDRF “must have over a million dollars,” which to Matty is more than enough money to buy tools and find a cure. So he is hopeful there will be one soon, or at least within his lifetime.

If they’re not walking, Eric is confident that the family will always be doing something to help those with diabetes and hopefully get the community one step closer to a cure.

Join the Zimmerman family during JDRF’s One Walk event on Oct. 23 at Yonkers Raceway at Empire City Casino, 810 Yonkers Ave. Check-in is at 9 a.m. and the walk begins at 10. Registration is required and is free on JDRF’s website, www.jdrf.org.

This article was written by Casey Watts for Westmore News.