My
First Fifty Years as a Diabetic /
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Excited by my
discovery, I showed these reports to my physician,
who was not impressed. "Animals aren't humans,"
he said, "and besides, it's impossible to normalize
human blood sugars." Since I had been trained
as an engineer, not as a physician, I knew nothing
of such impossibilities, and since I was desperate,
I had no choice but to pretend I was an animal.
I spent the next year checking
my blood sugars 5–8 times each day. Every few days,
I'd make a small, experimental change in my diet or
insulin regimen to see what the effect would be on
my blood sugar. If a change brought an improvement,
I'd retain it. If it made the blood sugar worse, I'd
discard it. I discovered that 1 gram of carbohydrate
raised my blood sugar by 5 mg/dl, and 1/2 unit of
the old beef/pork insulin lowered it by 15 mg/dl.
Within a year, I had refined
my insulin and diet regimen to the point that I had
essentially normal blood sugars around the clock.
After years of chronic fatigue and debilitating complications,
almost overnight I was no longer continually tired
or "washed out." After years of sky-high
readings, my serum cholesterol and triglyceride levels
had now not only dropped, but were at the low end
of the normal ranges.
I started
to gain weight, and at last I was able to build muscle
as readily as nondiabetics. My insulin requirements
dropped by about two-thirds of what they had been
a year earlier. With the subsequent development of
human insulin, my dosage dropped to one-fifth of the
original. The painful, slow-healing lumps from the
injections of large doses of insulin left under my
skin disappeared. The fatty growths on my eyelids
vanished. My digestive problems (chronic burning in
my chest and belching after meals) and the proteinuria
that had so worried me eventually vanished. Today,
my results from even the most sensitive kidney function
tests are all normal. My deformed feet and the calcified
walls of arteries in my legs still remain.
I had the new sensation
of being the boss of my own metabolic state, and began
to feel the same sense of accomplishment and reward
I had in engineering when I solved a difficult problem.
I had taught myself how to make my blood sugar levels
whatever I wanted them to be and was no longer on
the roller coaster. Things were under my control.
Back in 1973, I felt quite
exhilarated with my success, and I felt that I was
on to something big. Since getting the results of
my computer search, I had been a subscriber to all
of the English-language diabetes journals, and none
of them had mentioned the need for normalizing blood
sugars in humans.
In fact, every few months
I'd read another article saying that blood sugar normalization
wasn't even remotely possible. How was it that I,
an engineer, had figured out how to do what was impossible
for medical professionals? I was deeply grateful for
the fortuitous combination of events that had turned
my life, my health, and my family around and put me
on the right path. At the very least, I felt, I was
obliged to share my newfound knowledge with others.
There were no doubt millions of "ordinary"
diabetics like me suffering needlessly. I was sure
that all physicians treating diabetes would be thrilled
to learn how to prevent and possibly reverse the grave
complications of this disease.
I hoped that if I could
tell the world about the techniques I had stumbled
upon, physicians would adopt them for their patients.
So I wrote an article detailing my discoveries. I
sent a copy to Charles Suther, who was then in charge
of marketing diabetes products for Ames Division of
Miles Laboratories, the company that made my blood
glucose meter. He gave me the only encouragement I
received in this new venture, and arranged for one
of his company's medical writers to edit the article
for me.
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