My
First Fifty Years as a Diabetic /
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I had been the
research director of a company that made equipment
for hospital laboratories, but recently I had taken
a new job as an officer of a housewares corporation.
I was still receiving trade journals from my old field,
and one day I opened the latest issue of a publication
called Lab World. I came upon an advertisement for
a new device to help hospital emergency rooms distinguish
between unconscious diabetics and unconscious drunks
at night when laboratories were closed. Knowing that
an unconscious person was a diabetic and not drunk
could easily help hospital personnel save his life.
What I stumbled upon was an ad for a blood sugar meter
that would give a reading in 1 minute, using a single
drop of blood.
Since I'd been experiencing
low blood sugars, and since the tests I had been performing
on my urine were wholly inadequate (sugar that showed
up in the urine was already on its way out of the
bloodstream), I figured that if I knew what my blood
sugar levels were, perhaps I could catch and correct
my hypoglycemic episodes before they made me disoriented
and irrational.
I marveled over the instrument.
It had a 4-inch galvanometer with a jeweled bearing,
weighed 3 pounds, and cost $650, which in those days
could have been a month's salary. I tried to order
one, but the manufacturer wouldn't sell it to patients—only
to doctors and hospitals.
Fortunately, my wife, as
I've said, was a physician, so I ordered one in her
name. I started to measure my blood sugar about 5
times each day, and soon saw that the levels were
on a roller coaster. Engineers are accustomed to solving
problems mathematically, but you have to have information
to work with. You have to know the mechanics of a
problem in order to solve it, and now, for the first
time, I was gaining insight into the mechanics and
mathematics of my disease. What I learned in my frequent
testing was that my own blood sugar levels swung from
lows of under 40 mg/dl to highs of over 400 mg/dl
about twice daily. A normal blood sugar level is about
85 mg/dl. Small wonder I was subject to such vast
mood swings.
In an effort to balance
my blood sugar levels, I began to adjust my insulin
regimen, and went from one to two injections a day.
I made some experimental modifications to my diet,
cutting down on the carbohydrates to permit me to
take less insulin. The very high and low blood sugar
levels became less frequent, but few were normal.
Three years after I started
measuring my blood sugar levels, my diabetic complications
were still progressing, and I was still a 115-pound
weakling. My sense of gaining insight into the workings
of my diabetes had diminished, and so I ordered a
computer search of the scientific literature to see
if exercise could prevent diabetic complications.
In those days, computer searches were not the simple,
almost instant searches they are today. In 1972 you
made your request to the local medical library, which
mailed it to Washington, D.C., where it was processed.
It took about two weeks for my $75 printout to arrive.
There were quite a few
entries of interest, and I ordered copies of the original
articles. For the most part these were from esoteric
journals and dealt with animal experiments. The information
I had hoped to find didn't exist. I didn't find a
single article pertaining to the prevention of diabetic
complications by exercise in humans.
What I
did find was that such complications had repeatedly
been prevented, and even reversed, in animals. Not
through exercise, but by normalizing blood sugars!
To me, this was a total surprise. All of diabetes
treatment was heavily focused in other directions,
such as low-fat diets, preventing severe hypoglycemia,
and preventing a potentially fatal extreme high blood
sugar condition called ketoacidosis. Thus it had not
occurred to me that keeping blood sugar levels as
close to normal as possible for as much of the time
as possible would make a difference.
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