You’re either diabetic or not, there’s no in-between

Posted: Friday, September 30, 2011 8:02 pm
By: By Donna Ryder

As a friend who was a recently diagnosed as “pre-diabetic” told me, you either are or you are not a diabetic. There is no such thing as an “almost diabetic.”
I know where he’s coming from.
I had an uncle who was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 9. In her adult life, my mother found out she also had the afflicition. So, I knew there was a possiblity that at least one of her five children would also be diagnosed with diabetes. I guess I drew the short straw.
When I was pregnant with my first child, I had gestational diabetes. But, as soon as the baby was born, all my blood sugars came back normal. Then, when I was pregnant with my second child, I was able to avoid the gestational diabetes diagnosis.
It was a couple of years after my second child was born that I began to experience short-term memory loss. I was having to write notes to remind myself of appointments and tape them to my computer screen. But, then I’d forget to read them. Or I would see them in the morning and forget by the afternoon I had an appointment.
I can’t exactly remember having the classic sign of excessive thirst, but the memory loss was getting to me. So much so that I mentioned it to my physician.
He ordered a full glucose test — you know the one in which you have to drink the sugary drink that’s seems so thick and sickingly sweet you can barely get it down. The first reading after the drink was above 300 and it didn’t want to come down very fast. Therefore the diganosis of diabetes.
I immediately began cutting sugar from my diet substituting one of those little pink packets — the ones that supposedly cause cancer — for my spoonful of sugar and starting an exercise plan which included walking the street in front of my home from Reelfoot Avenue to the cemetery and back. I lost 40 pounds.
Then I quit.
Yes, I quit and gained it all back. All the time, though, I’ve was able to maintain my A1C3 (an average  blood sugar over a three-month period) at between 5.5 and 5.9. Pretty good, if I do say so myself.
But the extra weight was killing me and I knew it.
So, I started going to the gym so extreme heat and cold would not be an excuse. A year and a half later, I’m doing 30-45 minutes of cardio excerises and 15-20 minutes of weight training. I’m 15 pounds lighter, four pants sizes smaller and still maintaining my A1C3 numbers.
There is no cure for diabetes, which is the seventh leading cause of death in America.
Author Anne Morrissey wants to raise awareness to fund the groundbreaking research that will cure diabetes that affects more than 3 million people in the United States. And she’s doing it through poetry.
She recently released a new book, “Santa’s Adventures: Flight Preparations 2007, 2009, 2010,” which follows Santa as he prepares for his Christmas Eve flights in three recent years. To make it educational, she has tied his flight to recent events, such as Russian submariners planting their flag on the ocean bottom at the North Pole in 2007, the spread of H1N1 flu in 2009 and the Icelandic volcano eruption in 2010.
All proceeds from the book will go toward funding Dr. Denise Faustman’s research for a cure for Type 1 diabetes. Dr. Faustman is the director of the immunobiology laboratory at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. In 2001, the Faustman Lab reversed type 1 diabetes in mice with end-stage disease, a project that is now in human clinical trials.
The softcover book (ISBN: 9781456743635) is available for $11 online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. The author, a retired teacher from Milwaukee, has survived 60 years with insulin-dependent diabetes.
Associate Editor Donna Ryder can be contacted by email at dryder@ucmessenger.com.

Published in The Messenger 9.30.11

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