My Life with Diabetes
WELL BEYOND A HALF CENTURY AND COUNTING...
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 during the 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 many blood sugars that were too low, and
since the tests I had been performing on my urine were wholly inadequate
(sugar that shows up in the urine is already on its way out of the bloodstream),
I figured that if I knew what my blood sugars 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. 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 from
my frequent testing was that my own blood sugars 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.
Although most medical journals and textbooks throughout the world measure
blood glucose in mmol/l (millimoles per liter), most physicians, laboratories,
and blood glucose meters in the United States measure blood glucose
in mg/dl
In an effort to level my blood sugars, I began to adjust my insulin
regimen, and went from one injection a day to two. 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 long-term complications 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.
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 lowfat 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.
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 blood sugars
worse, I’d discard it. I discovered that 1 gram of carbohydrate raised
my blood sugar by 5 mg/dl, and ½ unit of the old beef/pork insulin
lowered it by 15 mg/dl.
PASS PAGES
(milligrams per deciliter). Blood glucose values in this book are as
a rule given in mg/dl. If you should need to translate from one to the
other, 1 mmol/l = 18 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.” People
commented that my gray complexion was gone. After years of skyhigh 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 to about one-third
of what they had been a year earlier. With the subsequent
development of human insulin, my dosage dropped to less than onesixth
of the original. The painful, slow-healing lumps the injections of large
doses of insulin left under my skin disappeared. The fatty
growths on my eyelids from high cholesterol 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.
The cystoid macular edema that I thought as recently as twelve years
ago was irreversible has finally reversed. My deformed feet, the calcified
walls of arteries in my legs, and the loss of hair on my lower legs
are not reversible and 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 sugars whatever I wanted them to be and was no
longer on the roller coaster. Things were finally 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.
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