Diabetic Brothers Beat Odds With Grit and Luck

[caligirl]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/nyregion/05diabetes.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Chris Livingston for The New York Times
When Robert Cleveland was a boy, in place of a birthday cake his mother wrapped an oatmeal box in colored paper and put candles on top. "I never had any sweets as a child," he said. "Never."
Gerald Cleveland, 90, left, and his brother, Robert, 85, diabetics since childhood.


Robert Cleveland, who turns 86 in March, checking his sugar level at his winter home in Melbourne, Fla.
Since he was 5, he has lived within the strict boundaries imposed by diabetes, knowing that if he loosened his grip on the disease it would ravage his body — the terrifying complications, the shortened life span. For years, the only diabetic he knew was the principal of his grammar school, who lost one leg to the disease, and then the other, "and I remember wondering how long it would be before I lost mine."

Then his big brother, Gerald, got diabetes at age 16 and also adopted a set of meticulous lifelong habits. He scribbles sugar readings and insulin doses in a logbook, tests the level of sugar in his system seven or eight times a day, avoids desserts and simple starches, exercises and has always stayed reed-thin. "Even so, I never expected to live to be 50," he said.

Both brothers have done a bit better than that: Gerald turned 90 this month, and Robert will be 86 in March, and they are in fairly good health for their ages. Experts say that they know of no other childhood diabetic who has lived to be as old as Gerald, and no one who has survived with the disease as long as Robert has — almost 81 years.


........There is more. This is such a good story. If you know of someone who deals with this disease please read it and send it to them too. My son who is 17 has had diabetes nearly 4 years now.

[mzmolly]

1. Thanks caligirl. My husband has been diabetic for about 30 years.

bugmenot login for those interested: notme9 Pass Word = noone

[FM Arouet666]

2. Great link, thanks and EVERY diabetic needs to read the link

I am a general/vascular surgeon and I see loads of diabetics. Mainly for peripheral vascular disease, or PAD, and renal failure, for which I provide access for hemodialysis. I have ONE patient who had diabetes for decades, forty+ years if I recall, that had his first complication when he was 87. Just like those in the story, he controlled his sugars and avoided other risk factors.

The worst patient is the diabetic who is poorly controlled and smokes. Smoking diabetics are looking at double amputations, strokes, heart attacks, a life of misery, albeit a very short life, no pun intended.

Diabetes does not have to be a death sentence, but a very rigid lifelong lifestyle modification is in order. I will be honest, I don't know if I could do it, and seeing the suffering first hand, I hope I never have to.

[boise1]

3. 45 years here, no complications (yet)