WASHINGTON — The parents of Sonia Sotomayor, the future Supreme Court justice, knew something was wrong when their daughter, 7 years old at the time, was always thirsty, began wetting the bed and fainted in church.

In heartfelt remarks before a group of 150 children Tuesday, Sotomayor recalled being taken to the hospital for tests. When a technician pulled out a needle to draw blood, she was so scared that she tore from the room, ran out of the hospital and hid underneath a parked car. After hospital staff dragged her back, "kicking and screaming," and completed tests, things turned scarier: Sotomayor was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

It was the first time she saw her mother cry. The doctor told her diabetes wasn't so bad, and Sotomayor thought, "If it isn't so bad, why is my mommy crying?"

Sotomayor's diabetes has long been known, yet she has never spoken so publicly and in such personal terms about her life with the condition. Over the course of a half-hour at a downtown Washington hotel Tuesday, Sotomayor spoke as a group of children in bright blue T-shirts — ages 4 to 17, from around the nation — sat rapt before her on the floor of a large conference room.

She opened her remarks at the event sponsored by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation with the shame of wetting the bed after drinking too much water and the fear of her disease. She quickly moved into how she learned to manage it and the discipline diabetes has given her.

After living with it, she said, she discovered "it wasn't so bad, but it was still bad."

She told the children, diabetics like her, that they could become anything they wanted. If you want to be a Supreme Court justice, she said in response to a 10th-grade boy from Michigan, "do the things you like to do and do them well."

She told one of the smallest girls in the audience, from South Carolina, that life as a diabetic will get better as she grows up, figures out what's happening to her body and learns to manage her blood sugar.

Sotomayor, who will turn 57 Saturday, said she constantly calculates how a meal will affect her and said that no matter where she is having dinner, she will give herself a shot of insulin. Unlike most of the children in the room who get their insulin through a pump, Sotomayor said she uses needles about four times a day.

The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation estimates that about 3 million people in the USA have type 1 diabetes and, like Sotomayor, must regularly test their blood sugar and give themselves insulin injections.

Sotomayor, whose parents came from Puerto Rico, grew up in the Bronx. When she was 9, her father died. Her mother, who eventually became a nurse, worked long hours to support her daughter and son.

In an era before disposable needles, Sotomayor recalled getting up early to boil water and sterilize needles. She said she was so little, she had to pull a chair over to the stove.

Sotomayor stressed the discipline cultivated over the years, such as learning what foods are best for her. "Unlike other people, I actually pay attention to my body," she said, noting that she can usually tell when she is getting sick.

The juvenile diabetes foundation says that even with insulin injections, complications from diabetes can arise, such as kidney failure, blindness and heart disease.

Sotomayor went to Princeton University and earned a law degree from Yale. When President Obama appointed her to the Supreme Court in 2009, she became the first Hispanic to sit on the nation's highest court.

In what she described Tuesday as "the job of my dreams," Sotomayor said she watches how the stress of the court business might affect her blood-sugar level and always checks it before she takes the bench for the hours-long oral arguments.

She accentuated the positive side of having diabetes, telling the youths, "It affects you in knowing how precious it is to have good health."