ROUTINE OPERATION
Gallagher Engineers plan to succeed with diabetes
Before every practice, Kylie Gallagher checks her blood sugar levels. Then she continues to monitor it regularly.
MIT’s sophomore center always brings her backpack to the basketball court, where she stores food and glucose tabs. Her teammates jokingly call them “safety snacks.”
Then, wearing a pump that produces insulin, she gets to work.
On game days, she usually eats about three hours before tipoff, making sure to count her carbs. She takes off her pump for the game, but during timeouts or when she’s on the bench, she continues to monitor her levels.
These are routines for Gallagher, who has Type 1 diabetes, a disease that forces a life in which routine is hard to find — especially for a basketball player.
“Sometimes there are points where I’m like, ‘Oh, this is a little annoying,” Gallagher said. “But it’s just something that I have to do.” And it hasn’t slowed her down. From the moment she was diagnosed in 2012, Gallagher never let diabetes prevent her from chasing her dreams. She was named valedictorian at Nipmuc High in Upton, and she excelled right away on the basketball court at MIT, selected as the NEWMAC rookie of the year in a starting role last season.
“I think the only time I’ve seen her feel sorry for herself was in the hospital, because it was such a shock,” Gallagher’s mom, Carol, said. “She just adapted really quickly.”
It was the summer before eighth grade when Kylie and her family went on a three-week, cross-country road trip. They were on their way back, stopping to visit her aunt in Ohio, when suddenly Kylie became very sick. She was feeling nauseous and dizzy, so her mom brought her to a walk-in clinic. Her blood sugar was abnormally high, so they immediately went to Dayton Children’s Hospital.
That’s where Kylie got the diagnosis: She had Type 1 diabetes. It was shocking news.
“We had no other family members that are diabetic, so it wasn’t something that was on our radar at all,” Carol said.
They stayed at the hospital for about three days before heading home to Upton.
“I didn’t really understand what it was and how it was going to change my life,” Kylie said.
But after a few visits to the Joslin Diabetes Center, she started coming to grips with her new reality. And she embraced the challenge.
“I say this to people I know, that of my four kids, if anyone had to be saddled with some kind of disease like that, Kylie is the one that makes it the easiest on us,” Carol said. “Because she’s always been real good at math, and there’s a lot of calculations being involved with being diabetic. You’re constantly figuring out what you need to give yourself for insulin, and she just immediately said, ‘I’m gonna do this.’”
It took some time, naturally, for Gallagher to learn how to manage her diabetes, especially with basketball. Exercise, she explained, can make things difficult. Sometimes the adrenaline will cause her blood sugar to go up, and the exercise will bring it down. There’s no set system day to day with managing her levels, which can fluctuate even if she tries doing the same things.
Luckily, there have been no major setbacks, her comfort level with it has grown significantly, and she understands her body well enough to know when her levels are getting too low and she needs to eat.
By the time she arrived to study biological engineering at MIT in 2017, everything was second-nature to her. But there was a case of the unknown for MIT coach Sonia Raman, who never had a player with diabetes. At the beginning of her freshman season, Gallagher, the coaches and the sports medicine staff all met to discuss everything, from the disease to how she manages it. They also discussed plans for any situation that might come up.
Raman wasn’t sure if she would need to take Gallagher out of games regularly or put her on a minutes restriction, but none of that ever materialized. This season, Gallagher is third on the team in scoring (9.2 points per game) and leads in rebounds (6.4) and blocks (1.2) while averaging 19.8 minutes. The 6-foot-2 center has started all but three games in leading the Engineers to an 18-7 record. They finished fourth in the MASCAC at 12-4, two games behind Babson, and will host Emerson in the first round on the conference tournament tonight.
“I really think it’s a credit to Kylie and the way she manages the diabetes,” Raman said. “It really doesn’t come up in the course of practice or a game. … She takes care of it to the point that it’s all happening in the background for the rest of us while she’s actively doing everything she needs to do.”
Through it all, Gallagher never has lost focus and never has felt sorry for herself. She wanted to make sure diabetes never stopped her.
“It was just something that I knew, I’m just going to keep going,” she said. “It hit me that, ‘Oh, this is going to have to change things,’ but it was never like, ‘Oh, I can never play basketball,’ (or), ‘Oh, well now I can’t do well in school.’ It was just, ‘I’m going to do what I want to do and make sure I’m healthy and fine along the way.’ …
“I think I’ve really prioritized how I’m going to change my treatment to make sure I’m healthy, but also make sure that it doesn’t limit what I do.”
Her mom has been touched by watching her daughter overcome a difficult obstacle.
“It’s inspiring to me to see how she deals with all this stuff,” Carol said. “It’s hard, too, because there’s a lot of comparisons with her siblings. It’s like, Kyle’s doing this again, Kylie’s doing that. But when you talk to her, she’s not the one out there saying, ‘Look at me.’ She’s very modest.
“She excelled in high school, she was a valedictorian, she made it to MIT. She really is inspiring, and I’m thankful that she’s my kid.”