I applied for a job at this movie theater in my hometown and I have an interview with the manager next week...do I tell him about my diabetes? -Sarah
Hey Sarah,
So, here's the thing: it is against the law for anyone to not hire you because of your diabetes (except if you want to be a Commercial Airline Pilot or 18-wheeler truck driver). I've found over the past few years of having many different part-time jobs, that by informing my potential employer of my disease it impressed them! I think they appreciated that I was being upfront about my illness and were impressed that I live with the disease in the first place.
I usually say, "I also want to tell you that I have Type 1 Diabetes, and it has never interfered with my ability to do my job well, but if my blood sugar was low I would need to take five minutes to get some sugar."
And most adults totally already understand this, and they may have even employed a person with diabetes already.
It's also really important to tell your employer because you don't want to end up sabotaging your diabetes care in order to "hide" the disease from your boss.
Having said all this, if you are prone to having severe lows due to poorly managing your blood sugars, and you are continually "taking five minutes" to treat lows when you should be tending to customers, it wouldn't be surprising if your boss got a little annoyed -- and rightly so. Just because you have diabetes doesn't mean you can get away with being late to work all the time or take long breaks. This is just another reason why learning how to manage your blood sugars well is really, really important!
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