Jan. 28, 2026, 5:02 am ET
Karter Olewiler should be dead.
The New Oxford junior knows it. So do his parents. So does the doctor who hastily made his way to Penn State Hershey Medical Center five years ago to see things for himself.
That doctor had to see the 11-year-old boy whose glucose level registered beyond the range of an urgent care’s monitor.
It was at that New Jersey urgent care in spring of 2021 when Ben and Kara Olewiler realized their oldest child was in serious trouble.
“We were on vacation for my mom’s birthday, and I wasn’t feeling well,” Karter said in a recent interview. “I had to go to the bathroom a lot and couldn’t eat. My dad pulled me aside and asked if I was on anything.”
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Things didn’t improve, and on their last morning in Ocean City, N.J., Ben told Karter they would stop to get him checked out.
Karter agreed. He said OK when Ben told them they would have to take blood, even though a routine blood test required four staff members to hold him down.
Kara did some research on the way to the urgent care. The symptoms pointed toward diabetes, but neither parent had a history of it in their family. A blood test proved the research right.
But it also showed something else. Karter had a glucose level that went higher than their monitor of 750 could read.
“They wanted to call an ambulance to take him to the hospital,” Ben said. “I told them I could drive him because it was only a couple of blocks away. They made me sign a waiver to bypass the ambulance in case he didn’t make it to the hospital.”
But he did. And once there, they learned his glucose level was 934, more than twice the level that can be fatal.
Karter started to receive insulin to bring his glucose level down. It had to be administered slowly, which was done as he made his way by ambulance to Hershey.
“The scariest moment was when we got to Hershey, and his name was already on his door,” Ben said. “His information was all there. By midnight the top diabetes doctor in the country had flown in because he never saw someone with numbers that high.”
Karter said he doesn’t remember much from the three days he was in Hershey. That includes being awakened every 10 minutes to make sure he was still alive.
What he does remember is being told what doctors believe kept him alive.
Swimming.
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Recipe for a disease
Ben says they are a “scientific family.” So when Karter was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, they learned as much as they could about it. First on that list was how he got it.
“Type 1 is not situational, it’s in the autoimmune system,” Ben said. “The gene could be in someone, but they could go their whole life without getting the disease.”
So what brought it out in Karter? Science points toward COVID-19.
Karter had a mild case of COVID in January 2021. From then until he was diagnosed with Type 1 in April, he lost 60 pounds, but he also grew 6 inches. He was in the heart of the competitive swim season, working out every day, and his parents thought he was hitting puberty.
Doctors believe those swimming workouts burned off the extra sugar his body was making, and that’s why he survived those high glucose levels.
Post pandemic medical studies show an increase in Type 1 diabetes cases. Doctors believe the increase is from people who got COVID or SARS, and that activated their Type 1 genes.
Next on their list of research was how best to handle the diagnosis.
The Olewilers learned Type 1 “is not a death sentence, but it is a life sentence.”
Karter spent the first week after the diagnosis in classes learning how to count carbs, how to test his blood and the formula to determine how much insulin he needed based on food and exercise.
Those early days included daily 2 a.m. stick tests to determine if his glucose levels were sufficient until morning. His tree nut allergy gave him a head start on reading labels, but now he had to look at them for carbs, too.
Life became easier after the first year when Karter got a continuous glucose monitor, and then again when he got an insulin pump. He wasn’t allowed to have a monitor in the first year so that he could learn how to manually do his testing and make necessary adjustments.
“I’m one of the lucky ones,” Karter said. “I have a pump and CGM. When I wake up, I check where I’m at. I don’t eat breakfast because insulin can cause your blood sugar to drop. I can drop low if I over-correct.”
There are a lot of factors that go into determining how much insulin the pump will drip at any given time. Karter has to take into account how hard his swimming and track and field practices and meets will be and adjust his insulin accordingly.
“He is doing way more as an athlete to prepare himself, more than most kids are doing,” Ben said. “We need to know that he can handle it. In the hospital, we were all in shock. Everybody kept saying, ‘we got this.’ That was our motto. It still is.”
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Busting the Type 1 myths
“It’s not my pancreas’ fault,” Karter said. “My beta cells can’t reproduce insulin.”
It’s one of the things the Olewilers try to educate people about when they learn about Karter’s Type 1 diabetes.
Another is that Karter can’t have sugar. As long as the food doesn’t contain tree nuts, he can eat whatever he wants. He just has to count the carbs and adjust his insulin.
“We have an insulin-to-carb ratio,” Karter said. “For every 10 grams of carbs, I need one unit of insulin.”
That ratio changes as he grows, so he is constantly monitored by the doctors at Hershey. They get daily information from his monitor and go over things with him every three months.
“The disease is 24/7,” Karter said. “You never get a break from it.”
Ben said the biggest myth is that Type 1 diabetes is situational. It’s not. You can’t get Type 1 by eating too much sugar or being overweight.
But you can get Type 2, and that’s a completely different disease with its own set of treatments.
“It was difficult to explain to my friends when I was diagnosed,” Karter said. “I got ‘get well soon’ cards, but they didn’t really know what was wrong with me. And it was difficult to explain because I was trying to figure it out.”
Karter hasn’t let the disease slow him down.
Karter continues to be one of the stalwarts of the New Oxford swim team. He has his sights set on the school 50 free record and would like to make the District 3 meet again this season.
He has a good shot at making the podium in the YAIAA meet on Feb. 6-7 at Central York based on this season’s times.
And while swimming is something he loves to do, and likely kept him alive long enough to get treatment, it can be terrifying for his parents.
“The problem with swimming is there is no direct communication, and that’s a dangerous situation to be in,” said Ben, who is the head coach of the Colonials and YMCA club team.
Ben and Kara experienced that first-hand last season when Karter collapsed between races at New Oxford’s first home meet in program history. Fortunately, it happened on the pool deck and not in the water.
The thing I’m most proud about is that this doesn’t consume him,” Ben said. “He doesn’t flaunt it, but he’ll talk about it when asked.”
And now he wants to help other kids handle what he’s been going through by becoming a pediatric nurse.
Shelly Stallsmith covers York-Adams high school sports for GameTimePA and the USAToday Network. Connect with her by email mstallsmith@ydr.com or on X, formerly Twitter, @ShelStallsmith.