03/30/2026
Ran across this interesting article written about the Supreme Court judge that Sonia Sotomayor High School was named after.
“The morning her parents were screaming at each other, Sonia Sotomayor made a decision.
She was seven years old. It was 1962 in the Bronx. Her diagnosis was three weeks old: Type 1 diabetes. At the time, children with this disease rarely lived to see their fifties.
Her father's hands shook too violently to hold a needle steady. Alcoholism had stolen his coordination. Her mother worked double shifts as a practical nurse, leaving before dawn, returning after dark.
They were yelling about whose responsibility it was to give their daughter the insulin injection that would keep her alive.
Sonia walked into the kitchen, dragged a chair across the linoleum floor to the stove, and climbed up.
Her mother stopped mid-sentence.
The seven-year-old filled a pot with water. Turned on the gas burner. Dropped the glass syringe into the boiling water to sterilize it.
"I'll do it myself," Sonia said.
And she did. Every single morning for the next sixty-four years.
Most people remember their childhood as a time when adults handled everything. Sonia Sotomayor's childhood was about figuring out how to handle things adults couldn't.
The mechanics were complicated for a seven-year-old. Glass syringes had to be boiled before each use—disposable needles didn't exist yet. Blood sugar testing required slicing your finger open with a razor blade. The needles were so large that when a lab technician first came at her with one, Sonia bolted from the hospital and army-crawled under a parked car outside. They had to drag her back in by her ankles.
But every morning, she climbed up, boiled the water, waited.
Waiting was the worst part. Water takes forever to boil when you're seven and your stomach is empty and you're already late for school.
So Sonia developed a system: light the stove, start the water, then get dressed while waiting. Brush teeth. Pack school bag. Make every second count.
The syringe boils. Draw the insulin. Find a spot on her leg or arm that isn't already bruised from yesterday's injection. Push the needle in. Press the plunger.
Done.
Then grab breakfast and run to catch the bus.
This was her life. Not tragic. Not inspirational. Just her normal.
What Sonia understood that most adults didn't: if she wanted to stay alive, she had to take responsibility for staying alive. Waiting for her parents to get their lives together wasn't an option.
Her father died when she was nine. The alcoholism had progressed too far. Her mother never spoke about him after the funeral.
Celina Sotomayor worked herself to exhaustion raising two kids alone in the Bronxdale Houses, a public housing project. She'd leave for her nursing shifts before the kids woke up. Come home too tired to talk. The apartment was always cold in winter, always too hot in summer, always too small.
But there were books. Sonia buried herself in them.
She loved Nancy Drew—the girl detective who solved every mystery, who was always smarter than the adults around her, who never needed anyone's permission to do what needed doing.
Sonia wanted to be Nancy Drew when she grew up.
Then came the conversation with her doctor.
"A detective's job is too physically unpredictable for someone with your condition," he said. "The stress, the irregular hours, the physical demands—it's not realistic."
Sonia was devastated. Her whole future, erased.
Then one evening she was watching television—a rare luxury—and saw an episode of Perry Mason. The courtroom drama. The sharp-suited lawyers. The judge presiding over everything with authority and wisdom.
A judge. That was it.
Nobody said diabetics couldn't be judges.
She was ten years old when she announced to her mother: "I'm going to be a lawyer. And then I'm going to be a judge."
Her mother, exhausted from another double shift, just nodded. In the Bronx in the 1960s, Puerto Rican girls from the projects didn't become lawyers. But Celina had learned not to tell her daughter what was impossible.
Sonia was valedictorian at Blessed Sacrament School. Perfect attendance. Even worked part-time at a retail store despite being underage, lying about her age to help with family expenses.
She took the entrance exam for Cardinal Spellman High School and passed. Joined the forensics team—the debate club—and discovered she had a talent for constructing arguments that people couldn't dismantle.
Then came the day her guidance counselor said she should apply to Ivy League schools.
"What's Ivy League?" Sonia asked.
The counselor explained. Princeton, Yale, Harvard—the best universities in America.
Sonia had never heard of any of them. The best university she knew was the one she'd seen on TV.
She applied anyway. Princeton accepted her.
September 1972. Sonia Sotomayor arrived at Princeton University with one suitcase and her insulin kit.
The culture shock was immediate. Her classmates had attended elite preparatory academies. They'd traveled to Europe. They spoke casually about their summer homes. They used words Sonia had never heard.
One student compared her confusion to Alice in Wonderland.
"Who's Alice?" Sonia asked.
She'd never read Alice in Wonderland. The public library in the Bronx had limited selections, and fairy tales hadn't been a priority when she was teaching herself to stay alive.
Some students made it clear she didn't belong. Letters to the school newspaper openly questioned whether women and minorities could handle Princeton's academic rigor. Whether affirmative action was lowering standards.
Sonia's first semester grades seemed to confirm their doubts. She was drowning.
She could have quit. Gone home. Proven the doubters right.
Instead, she spent the summer teaching herself proper grammar. Building her vocabulary. Learning how Princeton students wrote papers, structured arguments, thought about problems.
By graduation, she was summa cm laude. Top of her class.
Then Yale Law School. Same pattern: struggled at first, then mastered it.
Through all of it, every single morning: climb up, boil the syringe, inject the insulin.
By her twenties, Sonia was taking one injection a day—far less than the multiple daily injections doctors now recommend, but that was standard protocol then. She didn't get her first glucose meter until she was thirty years old, nearly a decade after they became common.
She was too busy building her career to focus on managing her disease better.
As an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, she prosecuted murderers and drug dealers. The same kinds of cases that had destroyed her old neighborhood. She was ruthless. Prepared. Unshakeable.
A colleague called her "one tough bitch" after watching her cross-examine a witness.
The comment stung. But it was also true.
Sonia Sotomayor had been tough since she was seven years old and decided she wasn't going to wait for adults to save her life.
In 1992, President George H.W. Bush—a Republican—appointed Sonia Sotomayor, a registered Independent, to the federal bench. She was thirty-eight years old.
One of her first major rulings ended the 1994-95 Major League Baseball strike. Baseball fans across America cheered. The season was saved.
Sonia's mother, Celina, watched the news coverage with quiet pride. Her daughter, the girl who'd climbed on a chair every morning, was now one of the most powerful judges in New York.
Seventeen years later, President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court of the United States.
She was confirmed 68-31. The first Hispanic justice in the court's 220-year history. The third woman ever appointed.
And the first justice with Type 1 diabetes.
On the day of her confirmation, Sonia Sotomayor was fifty-five years old.
Five years past the life expectancy doctors had given her in 1962.
Today, Justice Sotomayor is seventy-one. She injects insulin four to six times a day now—modern treatment protocols. She wears a continuous glucose monitor. She carries glucose tablets everywhere.
She still sits on the Supreme Court, deciding cases that affect 330 million Americans.
She's written multiple children's books about living with diabetes, telling young kids: "It's a disease you have to deal with, but you can."
The doctors in 1962 told her parents she probably wouldn't see fifty.
They were measuring her future by the limitations of 1962 medicine.
They didn't account for a seven-year-old girl who would climb onto a chair every morning and refuse to accept that her life was supposed to be short.
Sonia Sotomayor didn't beat diabetes. She lives with it. Every day. Every injection. Every blood sugar check.
But she beat the predictions.
She beat the statistics.
She beat everyone who said a Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx couldn't make it to Princeton, couldn't make it through Yale, couldn't make it to the Supreme Court.
Because on a morning in 1962, while her parents screamed about whose responsibility she was, a seven-year-old girl decided:
I'll take responsibility for myself.
And she never stopped.”
