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Preface,

Chapter One-Realization,

Chapter Two-Making the Choice,

Chapter Three-What Diabetes is/isn't

Preface

No one would choose to have diabetes as their constant companion. Like so many other things we encounter in our lives, however, "there is no way out, there is no way back, there is no other way but through." It is, indeed, a Red Sea place in one's life.

To those of you just facing that place, don't do it alone. There is no medicine, no aid to health like a loving, supportive family.

Don't think it has to be the kind that lives in your house either. There are so many of us affected by this 'companion', that we are everywhere.

Pick up the phone, attend seminars, and look around you. The chances are that you know someone else that lives with the same thing that you face every day.

We are, all of us, together in learning and sharing whatever we can with each other. In unity, there is strength to face the common enemy and live joyous lives despite it.

Joyce and James Lavene

Approximately 11 million Americans have diabetes but about half of them do not know they are diabetic.

World Book Encyclopedia

Chapter 1 - Realization

"What's wrong with Dad?"

It had become a household phrase a little like 'What's for supper?' or 'What's on TV?'.

"What is it this time?"

Our son sighed and leaned back against the counter while he ate the last few potato chips in a bag and tried to put it into words.

"We went out to look at those computers today while you were gone and he acted really weird."

His mother glanced up at him. "Define really weird."

He shrugged. "Well, he had to stop a few times on the way to the store to go to the bathroom and get something to drink. He seemed preoccupied or something. Nervous. I don't know."

I came in on the end of that conversation. Just in time to wonder what he was talking about and start to get a little angry.

"Maybe I was just thinking about the money it's costing us to send you to college, besides the computer," I growled at him.

He stared at me for a minute, ate the last of the chips then walked out of the room.

"What's with him?" I asked innocently.

"What's with you?" my wife asked in return. "You've been like a bear all week."

"I don't know," I shrugged. "I thought things were going pretty well. I've got this smoking thing under control. Maybe I get a little irritable from time to time."

"It's not just that," she told me seriously. "It's like he said. Everywhere we go, you have to stop to go to the bathroom."

She laughed and turned back to me. "I'm not saying you shouldn't have to go but it seems like a lot. Is something wrong?"

"No," I answered calmly. "I guess it could be my body getting used to not having the nicotine. Maybe it's trying to flush itself out."

She looked at me carefully. "You look tired."

"I am tired. But my system is in the middle of a lot of changes. I did just turn forty and I quit smoking six months ago. But I have been working out and I feel great."

"I guess that's all that matters." She shrugged. "You're probably right. It's probably just your system flushing itself out."

"I'd tell you if I didn't feel right," I told her.

The conversation nagged at me for a few days but then I forgot it.

The 'flushing out' process continued until sometimes at night I would have to get up and down five or six times. I know for a lot of people this would be an everyday thing but for me it was annoying and unusual.

In the next two weeks, I quit working out altogether. I was tired all the time and the free weights I had adopted since I had quit smoking became just too much effort.

My wife noticed it and asked again if I thought everything was all right.

"I'm just tired," I told her and turned away, purposely ending the conversation.

I wasn't very good at thinking about being sick or discussing it. I never liked the attention sick people received or accepting that feeling of being pitied.

Not that I was sick. There was nothing wrong with me that a few good nights of sleep wouldn't help.

My wife came home from work the next day and found me guzzling water from a water bottle until the entire quart was gone.

"Trouble finding a glass?" she wondered.

"I was too thirsty to take the time," I replied with a smile. "I think I'll make some juice."

"Still thirsty?" she asked.

"Don't start." I shook my head, taking out a container of frozen orange juice. "There's nothing wrong. It's just hot outside and I'm thirsty."

"You know, these are symptoms-"

"If they are," I reminded her briskly, "they're symptoms I've always had, you know that. I've always been a big drinker."

"And not been able to sleep or make it through a store without going to the bathroom," she supplied.

I didn't have an answer to that and wandered away to the utility room to escape.

It was about that time people started noticing that I was losing weight. Guys at work started telling me that working out was paying off. I hadn't told them that I'd stopped a few weeks before. It seemed to me that what I had done was paying off.

Trips to the water fountain and bathroom were becoming amusing even though I never joined in the laughter.

One day I would be worried that something was really wrong with me and the next, I would be sure it was only part of a change in my life.

Besides, I recall thinking as I tightened my belt up one notch, the weight loss looked good on me. I didn't mind losing a few inches in the waist. The effect of the weight training I had been doing for the six months before that had just started to kick in.

I woke up that night and made my usual trip to the bathroom but I noticed that something else was wrong. My jaw had become slightly swollen and a dull ache had started in a back molar.

Just what I needed, I considered, looking at my face in the bathroom mirror, a bad tooth.

I looked at myself more closely, considering the face of a forty-year-old man. The circles under my eyes that I had hoped would clear up when I stopped smoking instead had become more pronounced.

I couldn't help thinking as I stared at my face, that my father had died at thirty eight and I had outlived him by two years already. He had died in a dark alley, the victim of street violence, just a few weeks before I had turned eighteen.

I couldn't remember him. My mother had divorced him when I was just a baby. I had been going to see him for the first time since their divorce when his family had told me that he had been killed.

Was he like me? I wondered, searching that face in the mirror.

"Are you all right?" my wife called from the bedroom.

"Fine," I repeated both to her and myself. I was fine, I told myself, despite everything.

The tooth that had gone bad turned out to be two teeth. I had never had any luck with my teeth, my one blessing that they had always come out easily.

When I was sitting in the dentist's chair, I knew it wasn't going to be long before I was looking at false teeth, especially if they kept coming out two at a time.

The dentist had no trouble pulling them. My wife paid the bill and drove me home that afternoon in late September.

We stopped at the store and bought some soup since I wasn't supposed to eat solid foods. It was all pretty routine.

But for the first time in my life, my mouth became infected. I was in agony for the next few days while the dentist prescribed pain pills and antibiotics, amazed that it had happened when it had never happened before.

Usually a fast healer, a week later, I was still in pain and unable to eat solid foods. My weight dropped dramatically and I really began to worry. But I couldn't bring myself to ask the all important question; could something serious be wrong with me? Was it just a string of bad luck?

When my mouth was finally healed, my wife and I went out for a drive. The leaves were just turning red and gold. The temperatures were beginning to cool down from summer and the sunshine was golden on the road before us.

My wife drove us up to the mountains. We'd decided to follow some back roads instead of taking the Interstate. That required using some maps and since she was the pilot, that made me the navigator.

I was looking at the map while she drove, following the tiny curving lines, wondering what was wrong with it. The lines were so faint, almost disappearing into the colors of the map.

"Are we lost?" she asked, smiling across at me.

"I can't find the road," I replied. "This map is just not right."

We stopped for gas and if necessary to buy a new map and while I was in the bathroom, she looked at the map.

"Here's the road," she told me, pointing to it with her finger.

"Where?" I looked again and still didn't see it, squinting my eyes and putting the map closer to my face then further away.

"You can't see it?" she asked in astonishment.

I shivered in the warm breeze and admitted that I couldn't. I couldn't make out those little road lines anymore than I could read the print on the side of the paper.

"I've always heard when you turn forty." I shrugged it away. "I guess I need glasses."

She rubbed my shoulder. "Mom says you can get reading glasses from any drugstore. She and Dad both had some before Dad got his permanent glasses."

"I guess that's what I'll do when we get back," I answered, also noticing that I had begun to feel a little nauseous. "I'd better drive."

"We'd better get on the Interstate." She shook her head. "If you can't see the map, I think I'd rather drive."

My wife and I, always talkative, always trying to see who can get in the next word, were quiet on the way home that day.

I was really starting to get scared but I didn't want to admit it. My guiding passion since I had been a small child had always been books and reading. Suddenly realizing that I couldn't read was worse than any torture that could have been devised for me.

We stopped on the way home and I found a pair of reading glasses that helped me to be able to read the fine print on the map. I felt a little better for then until a few weeks later, my vision became worse and I had to go out and get another pair of reading glasses. The second pair were a little stronger and corrected the problem again.

My wife put a name to everything the next day. It was the second week of November. I had continued to lose weight while people complimented me on how good I looked.

At work, everything was fine. At home, I had started defending how many soft drinks I consumed as well as how much water and juice.

It seemed to me sometimes that my family had turned against me, trying to make me believe that something was wrong with me while everyone else seemed to think I was doing great. I had stopped smoking, was losing weight, what more could anyone want?

"You have all the symptoms I've ever seen of diabetes," my wife told me as we unpacked groceries and put them away.

"Diabetes!" I scoffed. "That's crazy."

"Excessive thirst, frequent urination, weight loss-"

"I've always had a lot to drink," I defended angrily. "There's nothing wrong with me."

"You just dropped thirty pounds," she charged, "and you haven't changed what you eat."

"It's from working out before," I told her. "Even though I quit, it makes you burn more calories."

"And you don't think you have frequent urination either?"

"I'm older. People change when they get older. Like my eyes and my teeth and my hair," I replied.

"It wouldn't hurt-"

"It doesn't mean I'm sick," I answered her impatiently. The one thing I didn't want to do was talk about any possibility that something could be wrong with me. The only time I faced that was when I was alone at night, lying in bed after another trip to the bathroom and not able to go back to sleep.

"Anyone can become diabetic," she persisted. "I think you should go and be tested."

"I'm not diabetic," I told her as though it was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard.

"Then it won't hurt to be tested," she continued.

"There's no point," I flatly refused. "You're just making a big deal out of nothing."

Thanksgiving came and went that year with no change in my circumstances. I would never go back to the way I was before, I had already prepared myself for that. But that didn't mean anything was really wrong and certainly not that word, diabetic, that kept coming from my wife and children.

I started hiding anything that seemed relevant to the situation.

When my eyes became worse again, I got new glasses without saying anything. I noticed at about the same time that sores had begun to become infected on my hands, refusing to heal no matter what I did. I kept it to myself.

I finally stopped reading anything that wasn't absolutely necessary because it had become such a chore. Even the computer had become too much effort and I just stopped using it, pretending not to be interested in it. Not realizing that I wasn't fooling anyone and that my family was worried, no matter how much I reassured them.

My wife and I had never faced such silences between us. There was a look in her eyes when she looked at me that made me feel uneasy and I would look away from her before she would have the chance to tell me again that I should see a doctor.

Christmas was coming with it's usual preparations but for once I couldn't join in the festivities. I was tired all the time, scared most of it. All the wonderful Christmas food that we always made every year was unappetizing, I felt nauseated most of the time, trying to get by on as little food as I could, making excuses.

One night I got up for what had become my usual rounds of bathroom visits, sick and tired, and when I came back to bed, my wife was awake.

She put her arms around me and laid her head on my shoulder. I could feel her face was wet with tears.

"What's wrong?" I whispered, holding her.

"I had a dream," she told me in a trembling voice.

"Bad dream?"

"It was about you," she confided, her grip tightening. "I dreamed that I saw you, your soul. It was flying through what looked like windows, going faster and faster," she paused for breath.

"Honey-"

"It was like you had lost touch with us all, like you were going on without us and if you kept going that way, you'd just keep going on forever."

We were both quiet for a moment while the cold December rain beat against the window.

"I think if you don't stop and reach back, if you don't do something to reestablish your ties here with us," she drew in a shaky breath, "you're going to die."

I wanted to reassure her again that nothing was wrong but I couldn't find the words. "I'm not going to die."

"I know things have been changing," she continued. "The kids are growing up and life isn't as simple accepting those changes. I know that you hate the idea that you're growing older but you can have a lifetime still in front of you."

I didn't answer, couldn't answer. She was really scared. I was really scared. We didn't talk anymore about it that night. We just held each other for a very long time and I wished that in the morning things would be better.

Of course, they weren't. That evening, we went out to eat and I realized that I couldn't read the two foot high menu the waiter had put in front of me. It had become obvious to me that I was slowly going blind.

My eyes, my precious eyesight was sliding away from me. I looked across the table at my wife and realized that I couldn't see her face. She was barely a few feet away from me, laughing at some joke our son had told, and I couldn't make out her features.

Already the week before, I had become afraid to drive and made the excuse that I wanted to join a car pool to ride to work. I let my wife and son drive everywhere else and while I could see in their faces that they were frightened and sometimes angry, I couldn't make myself admit it and ask for help.

I tried my best to figure out a way not to have to ask for help with that menu but there was no use. It was the first time I had ever been at that particular Mexican restaurant and I had no idea what they served.

"The lighting is really bad in here," I finally told my wife. "Does that say something about a burrito?"

She found me a burrito but she was mad. All through the meal, she avoided talking to me again, an easy thing to do since we were with a large group of our family.

Afterwards on the drive home, the entire family was quiet with her anger, sensing a growing conflict between us. My wife wasn't mad often but when she was, everyone knew it.

When we got home, the kids scrambled for their rooms and she slammed into ours.

I hesitated for a moment but knew there as no way out of it. Taking a deep breath, I went into our room as well and took off my jacket.

"Okay," I started. "I know you're mad."

"Mad?" she questioned. "Mad because you won't take this thing seriously? Or mad because you don't love me or the kids enough to be willing to fight for your life? What you do or don't do affects us all! I want you to be there when I'm old and gray! I don't want to keep looking for our dreams if you aren't going to be there to share them with me."

"It's not-"

"And don't you dare tell me you aren't sick and that there's nothing wrong with you! You can't see, you can't sleep a whole night without getting up. Look at your arms and legs!"

"What?"

She reached over and grabbed my arm. "Your muscles you were so proud of! Your arms feel like marshmallows!"

"That happens when-"

"You can't eat, you don't sleep," she raged. "You're letting yourself go! You have to do something! You have to find something to anchor yourself here before it's too late!"

"All right!" I yelled in return. "All right! Something is wrong. I'll be tested, okay? I love you and I want to live. I'm just not sure what to do."

"We'll find the answer," she told me confidently. "We'll have to know for sure what the problem is but when we do, we'll find the answer."

We are really just an average family with our share of good and bad times. My kids talk on the phone too long and want more allowance than I think they should have every week.

We work and we live together, five strong personalities trying to make ends meet and get through life the best we can.

For some people, realization of this sort never happens. It's less dramatic, less life threatening. Diabetes can be a creeping, silent disease that slowly erodes your body, attacking internally with no external clues.

Some people go to the doctor for that yearly physical and are shocked and amazed that the doctor finds they are diabetic. They never felt anything, never guessed that something was wrong with them.

It was hard for me to accept that I could have something so serious wrong with me but I think it might have been harder to accept something that hadn't been so vivid, so graphic.

Maybe that's why it happened that way for me. Maybe anything less would have been impossible for me to take as more than a cold.

Since it seems that we make definite decisions about how and where our lives will be affected by things that happen to us, this appears to be a likely possibility to me.

While it wasn't easy for me to accept the fact that something was wrong with me, the information was so plain that I didn't have much choice.

I talked to a doctor at a local clinic who advised me to stop eating high sugar foods for a few days, give my body a chance to handle what may have been just a sugar overload from the holidays.

I went one step better and stopped eating white sugar in anything. Those few days, I was so scared, it was easy.

We walked on glass around the house, not really looking at each other, not really saying any of the things that we wanted to say.

Fear of the unknown is really the greatest fear. By not talking about it, I guess we felt it would go away. I guess we hoped it would, anyway.

We both come from healthy stock. Mostly the members of our families on both sides have never been sick, dying suddenly with no burdens of thinking about it for very long when it was their time.

My children have always been very healthy, usually only seeing the doctor for a sports physical once a year or so.

I could see in their eyes that they didn't know how to take what might be happening. How did it affect them? How would life be different? What would it be like to be around a sick person all the time?

I thought about it in much the same way. What would it be like to be a sick person all the time? If I really was diabetic, how could I bring myself to live that way?

I hoped, I prayed fervently that it wouldn't be true. The doctor had sounded as though it wasn't unusual to have a rise in blood sugar that went away when you stopped the supply.

Borderline diabetic, he had called it. Nothing much, just eat a little differently. No problem.

Without saying anything, trying not to alarm my family anymore than I had to, I bought some simple test strips to home test my urine.

My hands shook the first time I did it. I washed them afterwards until they were red from scrubbing.

While I did, I kept an eye on the test strip on the sink. Like the at home pregnancy tests I'd heard so much about on tv, the strips were supposed to change color if there was a problem.

My test strip turned green, dark green. I looked at the package for further details and sat down heavily on the side of the bathtub.

Green was a danger sign. The darker the green, the more sugar in your urine.

I tested twice more that same day, hoping something had been wrong with the strip. All the tests remained the same.

I hid the rest of the strips in their box in the bottom of my desk drawer.

I think I knew at that moment that I wasn't going to have a reprieve. The doctor had said to make an appointment with him if the symptoms didn't go away after a few days of not eating sugar.

In just those few days, I had lost more weight, my vision hadn't improved, I was still sick. I walked around with what I could only think to call a washed out feeling. Everything was just too much effort. Living had almost become too much effort.

There was nothing else to do but go and face whatever had happened to me.

I couldn't help but feel it was just a little unfair. I mean, I had quit smoking, I was really exercising for the first time in my life. Shouldn't I have been healthy, healthier than ever?

Instead, it appeared that I had started doing the right things only to have my good health thrown into my face.

It didn't occur to me until much later that part of my problem could have been all those years of abusing my body. I had asked it to maintain a healthy standard while doing the best I could to hinder it.

While my wife and I had always been so careful that the kids ate the right things, went to bed early enough for a good night's sleep and took vitamins for prevention, I was smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, pushing myself to stay up until three in the morning writing computer programs and ignoring how important it was to be healthy.

Even when I was sitting in the doctor's office, I couldn't help but dwell on the implications of having somehow become diabetic at that time in my life.

I remembered reading a small part in a book a few months before that kept popping into my mind. It was called 'The Magic of Thinking Big' and it basically dealt with solving life's problems by thinking yourself through them.

I had read it for it's business message, barely skimming the part about defeating attitudes when there was something personally wrong with you.

The author, David J. Shwartz, said that he had personally experienced having a health problem that he could have used as an excuse not to do well. He was diabetic and said that he was warned, "Diabetes is a physical condition; but the biggest damage results from having a negative attitude toward it. Worry about it and you may have real trouble."

Sitting there in the green and yellow, very clean, antiseptic smelling waiting room, I thought about that part of the book. How I had really just ignored it because, as far as I had known, everything was just fine with my body.

I realized that if the tests were positive and I was diabetic that I had probably been diabetic even when I had read those words.

It was a very different feeling just then. I wished I had read that part a little more carefully. Although from where I was sitting at that moment, I didn't see how anyone could have a positive attitude about being diabetic.

My wife had tucked a piece of paper into my pocket before I'd left that morning after she'd read it to me. I touched it as I went into the doctor's office when they called my name.

"Have you come to the Red Sea place in your life,

Where, in spite of all you can do,

There is no way out, there is no way back,

There is no other way but through?

Then wait on the Lord, with a trust serene,

Till the night of your fear is gone;

He will send the winds, He will heap the floods,

When he says to your soul, "Go on!"

Annie Johnson Flint

One word

Frees us of all

The weight and

pain of life:

That word is love.

Sophocles

Chapter 2 - Making the Choice

The diagnosis was diabetes. Of course we had heard of diabetes, who hadn't?

We were stunned at first, even though it was nothing less than we had expected. How could something like that have happened to one of us?

A small pamphlet put out by the American Diabetes Association came with the diagnosis. My son read it to us and we all felt a growing sense of unreality.

"Older adults who are either overweight or have a family history of the disease, or both, should see a physician for the following symptoms which may indicate diabetes."

I had manifested eight out of twelve symptoms. I couldn't get enough to drink. I could barely go more than a few minutes without urinating. My clothes hung on me like I had become a scarecrow. I couldn't read, couldn't drive. I was tired all the time.

It was becoming harder to work and carry on normally with what I had to do every day.

In short, I was diabetic. I was excreting high levels of glucose in my urine. There might even be the more serious ketone excretion which would mean my body was burning fat, changing the balance of my system.

There were more tests that could be done but the flat line was; change or die.

I didn't understand and the anger raced crazily through my brain.

If I had been overweight, it hadn't been by more than a few pounds and those I had lost weeks before. I had already lost thirty six pounds and was still losing at the rate of two or three pounds a week.

During those few days I had stopped eating sugar, waiting for some sign of change, I had lost two more pounds. The weight loss made my six foot frame look gaunt.

Certainly I didn't know everyone in my family tree but of those I knew in my immediate family, there had never been a diabetic.

As soon as we got home, I called my mother in Chicago to verify what I thought I knew already.

I exchanged a few pleasantries with my stepfather then waited on the line for him to get her from the kitchen.

I wasn't sure what to say to her. "Hello Mom, I just found out I have diabetes, does this have anything to do with you?"

We weren't a closely knit family unit. We sent Christmas cards and talked with each other on the phone a few times a year. I hadn't learned until a few months after the fact that she had to undergo surgery a few years before and it made me feel like a baby calling to talk to her about being diabetic.

"Hello?" she answered the phone.

"It's me, Mom," I started and knew I couldn't tell her.

She could recall a sixth cousin on my father's side that had been either diabetic or had he had tuberculosis? It had been a long time ago. Why did I want to know anyway? Was there a problem?

I thanked her, told her that I was just wondering if I should go and be tested because of my age and so on. I couldn't bring myself to tell her the truth.

She didn't ask anything further. I didn't explain.

I inquired politely about my four sisters who lived near her. She asked nicely how my family was getting along. Neither of us had to say anything that the other might not want to hear.

That attitude had left many things unspoken, unresolved between us through the years. I said goodbye and hung up the phone, sitting in my bedroom looking out the window at the dead trees in the empty field next door.

I could hear my wife and children in the other part of the house but I wasn't in any hurry to join them. I felt as dead and dry as those trees were in January.

I felt as though I had awakened from a bad dream and found that I hadn't been dreaming after all. The knowledge, far from setting me free, trapped me in a nightmare.

Where would I go from there? What would I do? I looked at my arms and thought about the chart of changing areas to inject insulin into your body. Legs, back, stomach. No place was too tender or painful.

I went into the bathroom, feeling as though I needed to vomit but there was nothing in my stomach. My skin itched insatiably; another sign of diabetes. I sat down on the edge of the tub and stared at the floor.

My wife knocked on the door. "Is everything okay?"

"Great," I answered her briefly. "I was just sitting here and thinking about shooting up insulin."

"Come into the living room," she urged. "Don't sit in here by yourself."

I looked at my wife and my children as they made dinner that night. I wondered what they thought of me. Was I weak? Had I become less in their eyes?

You have an incurable disease, I told myself. Images of stories I had heard of diabetics losing feet and legs, going blind, reached into my soul and wrenched at me until I didn't know if I could live with it.

Did I want to live with it? Did I want to live as some kind of crippled, helpless person who couldn't have a normal life?

The pamphlet from the doctor's office said that diabetes could be controlled with regular exercise, weight loss, a change in my eating habits and medication.

It would require further testing to know if insulin was necessary, depending on how I responded to the program.

I was exhausted, I was thirsty and I could feel that rage inside of me wanting to yell at the world that it wasn't fair.

My wife took my hand, startling me from my thoughts of doom and destruction. "We can beat it."

"Nobody beats it," I replied flatly. "You just survive until something falls off or stops working. Then you die."

"Don't say that," she urged. "We can work this out. It doesn't have to be a death sentence."

I had already decided though. I didn't want to work it out. I didn't want to live looking over my shoulder every day to check my blood sugar level. I wanted my life back the way it always had been, the way I liked it.

I couldn't face my family over dinner that night. I wasn't hungry anyway; food had begun to nauseate me although I hadn't told anyone of the problem. I was beginning to be afraid of those looks I saw on everyone's faces.

What's wrong with him now? I felt they were wondering. What new symptoms has he manifested today? What's his problem?

I wasn't the man I had always thought I was, believed I was. That scared, shivering hulk who couldn't eat, whose body couldn't heal itself. That wasn't me. I had become a stranger to myself. How would I ever trust myself again?

When I had been smoking and having trouble breathing every time I had a cold, I had thought about developing lung cancer or emphysema. It had scared me enough to fight a twenty-year habit.

If I had found out that day that I had something wrong with my lungs, I wouldn't have been surprised.

But diabetes, my pancreas not producing insulin. Why would that have happened to me? I wasn't even that much of a sweet eater. I liked a good box of popcorn at the movies more than a package of candy.

I stared up at the ceiling, lying on my bed in the darkness and wondered what I really believed about death and dying. Wasn't that the big question? Wasn't that what it all came down to in the end?

It was one thing to mouth platitudes about reincarnation and heaven and hell, another to really feel the need to understand. I had always said that quality of life was more important than quantity of life. I had always told my wife that I didn't want to be kept alive by artificial means if the worse happened.

I had always felt so sure that I had all the answers. Where had that confidence gone?

What if I couldn't bring my blood sugar level down, despite everything? What if there wasn't all the time I'd thought I had to do all those things I'd wanted to do? How would my wife manage everything alone and finish raising our children?

What would it be like to close my eyes for that final time? Was it just a passing from life into the white light where people in white robes waited to greet me?

It was pathetically amusing to me to recall how I had felt when I was eighteen. Full of myself and the sure knowledge that I could do whatever I wanted to do. I had grown up reading science fiction. People either lived forever or there were perfect, android bodies waiting for them.

Where had all that belief in immortality and being young forever gone? And what had I done with my life that had made it worth living? What had I done that anyone would remember me for? Or would I die like my father; a wasted life and a wasted body?

I had grown up believing in heaven and hell. I was Catholic, we even believed in purgatory. But by the time I had finished high school, I questioned if there was a God at all.

My friends and I expounded on all the theories, read all the popular books. Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land', Carlos Castenada's theories. I had studied the occult and read the 'Necronomicon'.

Down through the years, I went back and forth on the matter. I was a Jehovah's Witness for a year and found that it wasn't for me. My son had been christened a Catholic but my daughters had never been baptized.

Since then, I had lived from day to day, believing that there was a God but that He didn't really have much to do with my life.

I wasn't a bad person. I tried to help other people when they needed it, tried not to hurt anyone else. I didn't steal or cheat on my wife.

I had read a few books on positive thinking, mostly for the business applications and making money. I had been impressed by Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie.

My wife had read a great many channeling books from the New Age movement but I hadn't been able to get past the ideas behind those. Some spirit with great power and foresight entering a human being to impart knowledge? Maybe when I had been eighteen.

But death was suddenly staring at me and it was so final. There was no time to decide what I thought was right. All of the philosophies came and went through my mind, leaving me feeling empty and alone. I had searched but given up before I had found the answer.

A vision of myself when I was eighty, reading and studying, having the time to work out the answers to life, was what I had imagined. My grandfather had died at 104, still healthy and vigorous. Ruefully, I realized he had also had a full head of white hair that I had hoped to inherit. It had passed me by as well.

As I lay there that night, I couldn't think of a single thing that could save me. I couldn't think of a single reason why I should be saved. I tried to focus on what I should do but my mind was blank.

Nothing seemed to matter except that I had a chronic, incurable disease that was creeping like a black cloud over my life. It obscured every other vision, all my future.

I wanted to scream. I did cry, tears slipping down my face in the blackness. My throat felt parched and my hands tingled from the disease. I felt weak and old.

In the darkness that night, through the pain of wanting to deny what I knew was happening to me, I remembered something I had read once many years before.

"When you are in difficulties, look upon the overcoming of them as a great adventure."

It sounded almost too simple, too cheerful. Like the bank teller telling me to have a good day. Or the smiley face sticker on my daughter's notebook.

Still, it kept coming back to me, like a song that plays through your mind. You can only make out a small portion of it so you keep on humming it, hoping you'll remember it all.

"When you are in difficulties, look upon the overcoming of them as a great adventure."

Where had I read that? The words floated through my mind and somehow strengthened me. It was as though someone else had spoken them directly to my brain. They demanded attention and I found I couldn't rest until I found their source.

I turned on a light and started rummaging through my books.

"Feeling better?" my wife asked, coming in and finding me in a pile of books torn down from the shelves.

"No." I looked at her. "I need your help.

I told her about the quotation. I hated to ask her to find it for me in our books but I had to know. It was difficult for me to read more than a few lines of print, even with my glasses, before it became a jumbled blur.

She looked at me briefly then nodded and set about finding the quote. I couldn't explain how much those words meant to me at that moment and I was grateful that she didn't ask.

I clung to those words like a drowning man with a life raft. They became a chant that emptied my mind of fear and left only room for that sentence. Those words were more precious than all thoughts of heaven or hell. Even the disease became secondary to the search and the feeling of those words.

It had to be because I was so terrified that one sentence could have such power. I'm not sure that my brain, like a super computer, wasn't looking for something, anything to get me out of that black pit. I grabbed those words and the search for them became the search for the meaning of my life.

I sat helplessly while my wife searched through book after book. She sat crosslegged on the brown carpet in our bedroom, the light halloing her hair.

A feeling of love welled up inside of me just looking at her. We had spent twenty years together. Not always happy times, not always perfect. But we had weathered all the storms and we had enjoyed many wonderful times. She was surely as much a part of me as my heart or my soul.

What would I have done without her? My life wouldn't have been the rich, interesting journey that it had been without her. I knew that at that instant. I knew I had taken her for granted sometimes, forgot to say the things I should have said to her.

Maybe I hadn't done anything really big with my life. I had never climbed Mount Everest or become a wealthy tycoon. I had never done any of those really crazy things I'd thought I wanted to do when I was twenty.

But I had been loved and I had loved a wonderful woman. We had created a life together and together we had created three great children. They were full of questions and their mother's blue eyes.

My youngest daughter, with her freckles and obstinate straight hair, who sang like an angel and looked so much like my mother.

My brilliant, creative son who questioned Einstein's theories and was never content unless he understood everything about a problem.

My middle daughter with her head full of blonde hair that made some people miss the intelligence in her eyes, talking about fractals in Spanish.

"I love you." I reached out my hand to that woman who had loved me for the past twenty years, not heeding the tears that flowed down my cheeks.

"I love you," she returned with a misty smile of her own, blue eyes welling with answering tears. "And I found it."

"Really?" I sat on the floor beside her like a small child waiting to be read to at bedtime.

No one had to tell me that the house was extraordinarily quiet outside our bedroom door. The phone didn't ring, the television was off. Even the stereos were quiet.

It was as though the kids were holding their breaths until they could find out what was happening.

Waiting for the storm to pass, I thought, remembering how we had sat together in the living room when Hurricane Hugo was going by us. No one had spoken. Everyone listened to the screeching wind outside, flinching when debris was thrown against the house.

"It's in this little book. I remember we bought it at a flea market a few years ago. I can't remember where. I can't believe you remembered that one sentence from it." My wife shook her head, thumbing through the old book.

"Read it to me, please," I asked, simply knowing inside of me that whatever followed had the answer I was looking for in my difficulty.

"All right." She nodded and held up the little book with it's yellowed pages. "When you are in difficulties, look at the overcoming of them as a great adventure. Resist the temptation to be tragic, to give way to self pity or discouragement; and approach the problems as though you were an explorer seeking a path through darkest Africa or an Edison working to overcome difficulties in connection with a new invention. You know there is a way out of any difficulty whatever, no matter what it may be, through the changing of your own consciousness by prayer."

I almost couldn't breathe, I was so overcome with emotion. The words had even more power than I had expected. Their meaning was like a burning sword passing through me. This was what I was looking for, this was the answer.

"Who wrote that?" I wondered.

"Dr. Emmet Fox," she answered, taking my hand. "He was a teacher, a spiritualist in the 1930's. There's more."

"You know that by thus raising your consciousness any conceivable form of good that you can desire will be yours; and you know that nobody else can by any means hinder you from doing this when you really want to do it - nothing can hinder you from the rebuilding of your own consciousness - and this rebuilding is the great adventure."

I swallowed hard. This was just the beginning, a faint gleam in the midst of all the darkness that had entered me.

"Can we start again?" I asked my wife. "Can we start at the beginning?"

She nodded and turned to the front of the book, the binding almost falling apart in her hands. The title was nearly worn away by the hands that had touched it.

"Introduction," she read in that voice that I knew so well but that had suddenly become precious to me. "This book is designed to teach the principles of life building through constructive thought. All power lies in creative thought."

I listened while she read through that whole book that night. Those words hadn't come to me by chance, I felt, as the concepts of that book entered my mind. I knew that their meaning had been waiting there for me since we had bought that book years before that night.

When I was a kid, we had fooled around with holding cards away from each other, guessing at their pictures or trying to read each other's mind. I had owned a ouija board that we had used frequently. When I had been in school, it had been part of almost every get-together.

I remembered the man who had been on television bending spoons with the power of his mind even though I couldn't recall his name. I remembered, too, that he had been proven a fraud.

But the power in Emmet Fox's little book was real power. I could feel it flowing through me, dissolving my fear, touching me in a way that I knew I had been searching for in my desperation.

I didn't know what it meant. I wasn't sure what had changed in me, but I felt sure something had moved just slightly. Something had changed and would never be quite the same again.

For the first time in years, my wife and I sat up all night talking. We finished the book and we talked about it and everything else until my voice was nothing but a hoarse croak.

The alarm went off at five thirty as it always did and the sun rose with the bright blue of a cold Carolina morning.

We bundled up and went out, walking for a mile around the circle that constituted our neighborhood.

Everything was different, everything had changed. I felt as Emmet Fox had said, as though I had been reborn. The sun was brighter than I could recall it being the day before, the sky was bluer, my wife's smile was more beautiful.

For the first time in months, I knew there was a future and that I wanted to have a part in it. I knew that I had made a commitment to life. For as long as I was there, for as long as I could find a way to fight.

I was still scared, still not as certain as my wife that there was anything we could do besides just wait and hope for the best, but there was a change evolving within me.

Some people I have met and talked to since that day have told me they didn't feel that rage and hopelessness that I felt when I found I had diabetes.

They had either expected it because it ran in their families and was predictable or they took it in stride and immediately made the best of it.

One woman my wife and I met at a local diabetes group said that she had even been relieved because she had known all her life that it was going to happen to her. Once she had been diagnosed, she didn't have to worry about it anymore.

Three members of her immediate family had died from diabetes. I could never quite understand her thinking but she did seem serene and unaffected by it. I envied her that at the time.

Some people have never been able to overcome those powerful feelings.

A gentleman I met while waiting to have our car repaired had a blood sugar level of 350mg/dl, probably a hundred points higher than any safety range. He told me he couldn't stop drinking Cokes with sugar, could never get used to the taste of artificial sweeteners.

He didn't think it was fair that he should have to do anything different than he had always done. He had been diabetic for two years. For him, even two years later, it was a curse that was racking his body and stealing his life.

I've read that you should view your diagnosis as a chance to grow as a person and as a family. One psychologist suggested that illness, especially life threatening illness, is an opportunity to be larger than yourself.

While those sentiments are admirable, I just don't know if anyone could actually feel that way from the beginning.

Could there be a person alive that, on being diagnosed with an incurable disease, springs to their feet and declares that it's the opportunity they've been searching for?

A nurse at the doctor's office told me that I should be thankful, that having diabetes was better than having cancer or a bad heart attack.

From a medical point of view, that might be true. From the diabetic's viewpoint, there is nothing worse. Diabetes is chronic, and at this time, incurable. There isn't much good anyone can say about it. You can become adjusted to it but I don't think anyone ever thinks of themselves as 'lucky' because they're diabetic.

Eventually, it's possible for most people to accept their condition and perhaps agree with the idea that things could have been worse. At first though, it's all emotion. Fear, anger, depression.

With support, you can come out on the other side better than you were before you went through the ordeal. First, though, I think most people go through hell.

My son told me it was natural for me to be angry. I agreed with him. I was furious. With myself, with the disease, with the world.

For me, I feel it was a necessary part of survival. I don't think I would ever have been able to bring about the changes that I needed to make within my life if I hadn't gone through those terrible emotions. I feel fortunate to have been able to find the other side.

I had never been what anyone could term a good patient. I had never been sick very often and those times I had been, my wife has been known to refer to me as a monster.

Lying sedately in bed waiting for the getting well process has never been one of my strong points. Instead, I stomp around, mad at the world, wanting to blame anyone but myself.

Acceptance of those things you can't control has never been a part of my vocabulary. I read a paragraph that made me laugh as it said to learn to accept the fact that I couldn't accept the fact.

I'm not quite that good, even from a later perspective.

I can't say I didn't rail against the helplessness of my position from the beginning but after that day, I never felt hopelessly out of control again.

My wife and I sat down with the children when we returned that morning, after my startling night of realization. I don't really know that starting to accept the fact that I was diabetic brought relief to them or just made it more real.

It's one thing when you're a child to think that there is a boogieman under the stairs. It's another for your father to agree with you. How do calmly say that the worst has happened, then say that it's okay, don't worry?

I looked at their intent young faces and wondered what I could say that would make it easier for them to live with the problem. I don't think I ever really appreciated until that day how interconnected our lives are with others.

When I first considered being diabetic, it never occurred to me how scared everyone else was as well. The whole process of watching me go slowly downhill had been traumatic enough but to really acknowledge that I had a life threatening disease was frightening.

Not surprisingly, it was my middle daughter, the practical one, that recovered first and looked me straight in the eye.

"Well, we've gone through that. Now what do we do next?"

I am truly blessed, I thought, looking at them sitting around me in the sunshine pouring in through the living room windows.

As their problems were never just their own, my family made it clear to me that my problems were not just my own to bear either.

"Don't look so surprised, Dad," my son joked when I hugged them all. "You do sign a lot of the checks around here."

"Are you going to die, Daddy?" my youngest asked, staring at me in the way only a young child can look; at you and through you.

"I'm going to get better," I promised her confidently although I admit, I looked at my wife over the top of her head. "I'm not going to die just yet."

I have never been a religious man. I do believe in a Supreme Being but I have never been able to commit myself to any one religion.

After being brought up a Catholic when I was just a small child then becoming a Baptist when I was nearly twelve, I have always encouraged my children to look at every religion as well.

I was baptized into both faiths but when I was older and had a chance to read and experience many of the other religions and meet people from so many other faiths, it became clear to me that there can't be just one belief. Life is not so narrow and easily put into categories.

That day with my family was a personally enlightening one for me. No creed could have encompassed it. Yet I felt the light of the Spirit shining through to me as surely as the warmth of the sun on my face.

We have always taught our children to question, never to accept something just because someone else told them it was right but to find what was right for them.

I knew I was going to have to apply that thought to my own life as well.

I felt as though the decision to die or fight was within my power. Dying might have seemed easier to accept at first but fighting was the choice I made in the end.

Dealing with the concept of death was not so easily put behind me. It seemed that awakening that question only brought with it a host of other speculation that refused to go away.

As put so succinctly in 'You Can't Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought", you have several different choices:

"Death is it, the end, finito" When our time here on Earth is over, that's it.

"It's heaven or hell(or maybe purgatory) When we die, we go to one of these places according to what we've done in our lives.

"We keep coming back until we learn what we need to know" The soul never dies but continues to live until we learn all the lessons of life.

And maybe, ultimately, how we feel about death and dying is as important as how we feel about living.

Mostly, it was a subject that I hadn't thought about since I had been twenty and we had spent hours discussing various theories and debating what the afterlife was really like; was Heaven really an eighteen hole golf course?

That each person must deal with their own philosophy goes without saying. We must each discover what we believe in our own time as well.

I made out my first will during that time just after finding out that I was diabetic. I never told my family because I didn't want them to think I had done it because I was afraid that I would die.

In fact, I didn't do it because of being afraid that I couldn't win the battle. I did it because I realized for the first time that none of us lives forever and that my family deserved my consideration in death as well as in life.

Adjusting to being diabetic became a brief pause in my life. A chance to rethink what it was I did believe in, realize what was important to me and what really didn't matter.

It's probably something we should do as we go along through life but with working, paying the bills, worrying about crime and A.I.D.S., and trying to get your kids through each day, it slips along the wayside of our thoughts. If not, more of us would surely be living our dreams and worrying less about what other people thought of us.

I've met some people who were in serious car accidents or had heart attacks who felt the same way. Their experience had changed forever the way they thought about their lives. Life refuses to be as tidy or easily dismissed when you feel as though you have faced the actual prospect of dying without the far flung cushion of "someday".

My wife told me much later that she had been surprised that it hadn't crossed my mind that she could be part of the problem. I understood what she meant since we had known people who'd divorced their husbands or wives after a life threatening experience.

The one thing I can say for my confusion is that it didn't encompass those thoughts. If anything, my family became more important to me.

Sitting and talking with my son, eating lunch at school with my daughter or going to see my older daughter rehearse a play she was going to be in, became much more significant to me.

School band concerts even became special. Those wrong notes didn't hurt my ears so badly. They became a part of a glorious cycle of life, growing and struggling like a young plant reaching for the sun.

I didn't quit my job or decide that having a new car was totally meaningless to me. Going dress shopping hasn't become one of my all time favorite things to do.

But I did find that there were many unanswered questions in my life that I had been content to leave just that way. Questions that were too important to pass by and that my

spirit was crying out for me to answer.

I don't think that we ever have all the answers but I do think that it's important to be looking for them. I believe life is touched by that search for meaning, empty without it.

I can honestly say that the sunshine is still warmer and that I notice clouds and sunsets more often. I think more about the color of that blue wool sweater and don't just pull it over my head. I try not to hurry as often and to spend more time listening. It seemed that I would have to become another person or at least a changed person whether I had thought that I liked the person I had been before or not.

Change is something we all have some problem with, especially forced change. Change should happen because it's important to us or how can it be sustained change? It has to be more than just a different haircut or wearing red instead of yellow.

Giving up smoking was my idea, not something I did because the Lung Association told me I should or because I couldn't smoke anymore in office buildings.

It seems to me that the struggle to lose and keep weight off, quit smoking and learning to exercise more, is indicative of the problems we face when we change for the sake of other people's opinions. But I knew my daughter was right when she had asked, "What do we do now?"

There was no going back to where I had been before. The only thing I could do was to learn, change and go forward.

"A day shall come when we shall not hold

these hands - nor see these dear, familiar

faces - Therefore - let us cherish our loved

ones now while there is time - and hold

them close and treat them with all great

tenderness - for soon, so soon, we must

part and we shall not find them again

until we meet once more in eternity."

Unknown

Diabetes mellitus; a chronic form of diabetes characterized by excess of sugar in the blood and urine, hunger, thirst and gradual loss of weight; also called sugar diabetes.

Webster's Unabridged

Chapter 3 - What Diabetes is/isn't

Edgar Cayce, the famous sleeping prophet, once said that all dis-ease is caused by wrong patterns. "Spirit is the life, mind, the builder, physical, the end result."

However, finding those wrong patterns can be very difficult. Some things that are wrong with your life are obvious, diet, exercise, but the more subtle problems, probably the most important, lie buried in layers of self-protection.

My wife came home from the library with two arms full of books and set them down on the kitchen table in front of me.

I was one month past denial and gradually learning acceptance. Learning to eat food without sugar was a daily challenge but my eyes were finally beginning to return to normal and I found I was feeling more like myself each day.

I still used reading glasses to be able to see fine print and my wife suggested I find them.

"I think it's time we started school," she said. "This semester's course seems to be understanding diabetes 101, with a minor in spiritual guidance."

The first book I picked up was simplistic but a good primer.

"In diabetes, the human body does not properly convert glucose - a simple sugar - into energy."

"I suppose that explains the feeling of being tired all the time," I remarked.

The little book with cartoon drawings went on to explain that hypoglycemia or too little blood sugar was as severe as too much, causing fast reactions that could go from headaches and shakiness to unconsciousness.

Hyperglycemia, diabetes, was it's nearest neighbor, producing very similar side effects. But while hypoglycemia was treated immediately by giving the sufferer something very high in sugar, diabetes was just the opposite.

Some poor individuals, particularly diabetics on oral medications or insulin, could manifest both sets of problems. It seemed that sometimes, in trying to lower the blood sugar, the cure went too far and the blood sugar dropped too low.

Perfect balance was apparently the answer. It was also the first time I had read that natural control of blood sugar was usually good at protecting from over reaction. Diabetics walk a tight rope every day between too much and too little insulin, sometimes swinging wildly between the two extremes.

Since it occurred to me that my pancreas must be producing some small amount of insulin on it's own, it made sense that I needed to help it along. At some point in the future, I could want to use it full time again. I wanted to encourage, not cripple.

I had resisted the first inclination to take medication to help bring down my blood sugar level. This was controversial, even angering some people that I would dare not follow accepted procedure.

It had been stubbornness at first, refusing to believe that I was diabetic at all. That part was stupid and ill advised but it only lasted a short time before I would have come to my senses.

What came after was my own innate dislike of taking any drug that I didn't have to take. I've always avoided aspirin, acetaminophen, cold pills.

The irony of that moment wasn't lost on me that perhaps I had been so careful, only to find myself in the position of injecting drugs into my body every day to survive. What had started out as fear though might have been for the best.

I had the uncommon opportunity of being able to really look at what was available before committing myself to any set course of action, particularly one that might be difficult to change.

I don't want to disparage doctors but I do feel they are responsible for knowing so much about so many things that it might be difficult for them to know as much about my particular disease as I can learn.

Medical science, while being invaluable, has tried to group all people into a tried and true form of treatment that has very little to do with the individual.

From the first, being a person who likes to talk to people, I began talking with others who were diabetic.

It wasn't a matter of just going up to someone and asking if they were diabetic.

There was the fifty two year old man waiting in the cashier's line at the drug store with his supply of insulin and needles.

Shuddering at what could be my own fate, I had to say something. I asked if he always used the same kind of insulin. He went into great detail explaining all of the various types of the medication.

I've found most people are willing, even eager, to talk about their diets, medications, etc.

I met a woman at the grocery store who was looking for chocolate candy without sugar. She'd been diabetic for several years but her blood sugar was controlled.

Occasionally, she said, she liked to eat some sugar free chocolate and pretend that she was cheating.

A bank teller who had just recently been diagnosed, as I had been, was trying to figure out the food exchange program with the help of her friends.

We all mulled over the list of exchanges as they cashed my check. The teller wanted to know where McDonald's was on the program.

Some people I've talked to have been on oral medication for some time and were doing well. Some were still registering high blood sugar levels. There were more than a few waiting for their initial symptoms to go away.

Many people on insulin warned me about oral medication, saying that it was like starting to wear glasses. Once you started, there was no turning back. The jump from oral medication to insulin seemed to be a very narrow gap.

Everyone warned me about reactions. I've never met a diabetic not on some form of medication.

I took a hard look at my symptoms after those first few weeks and tried to make my decision based on them.

My eyes were better but not what they had been and there were many, both expert and not, who told me my vision would probably never return to normal.

After all, I was forty and couldn't expect to go much longer without glasses anyway. I stubbornly refused to believe that myth.

The damage was not as bad as it could have been but again, I was advised to start medication as soon as possible to prevent more serious retinopathy, an eye disease of the blood vessels chronic to diabetics.

I was still having a problem with infections. Particularly in my hands from cuts and scratches I received at work.

We kept a good antibiotic cream at the house and my wife reminded me when there was any break in the skin to soak it in warm soapy water for a few minutes first then go to the cream and a bandage. I started wearing gloves, when I could, to protect myself.

All in all, I can't say that the response to my program was overwhelmingly positive. I was better but not well, certainly not healthy.

I knew that these were only stopgap remedies at best but at that time, I took what I could and tried not to worry about the future.

I was experiencing problems with yeast infections in my feet and groin areas that were a constant source of irritation to me.

I began using antifungal medication but it was a slow process particularly since my blood sugar stubbornly refused to go low enough for proper healing.

My sleeping patterns had returned to a more normal level but I was still having problems going through a whole night without going to the bathroom.

Possibly worse than everything else, feeling better meant I was hungry again and craving donuts and Coke. I was used to taking sugar in my coffee and I didn't want to drink it without any sweetener.

My wife and I had talked it over and decided to stay away from all sweets to begin with including the 'not sweets'- fructose, corn syrup and honey.

Many nutritionists felt that those sweets entered your body differently than glucose or sucrose but I wasn't in a position to take a chance. Refined, white sugar might have been the real enemy but I wasn't letting down my guard until I knew for sure.

I was still resistant to Nutrasweet, the trade name for aspartame, a blend of dextrose and phenylalanine. Saccharine sounded dangerous. The idea of drinking a diet cola or eating diet food seemed almost as bad as the disease itself. The warning on saccharine reminded me of the warning notice on the side of the cigarette packages.

I was already diabetic. Did I need to run the risk of cancer as well?

I had started working with the food exchange system as set out by the American Diabetes Association but I felt it was complicated and difficult to use.

I wasn't used to monitoring every bite of food that went into my mouth. Thinking ahead before every meal was boring and time consuming.

I ate a balanced diet, I told myself. I had changed my tastes from the heavy fat foods that I had grown up with as a child. I even ate whole wheat bread!

Probably more a mental attitude, I realized in a surprise swing of logic. I was reluctant to change. As long as I fought the process, everything would be harder than it needed to be.

My weights sat in the corner of the library, unused since I had found out that I was ill.

Nothing could make me want to go back into weight training. It seemed years before that I had first thought of the idea of beating the 'forties' body. That was in the past

when cigarette smoking or not smoking had seemed important.

I watched people on TV with a skeptic's eye as they jumped around doing aerobics even while I read that exercise was an important part of the diabetic recovery program.

There had to be something better. I wasn't going to dress in multi-colored elastic and let someone yell at me like a drill sergeant.

It was difficult. There were still times that I felt as though my body had betrayed me. There should have been something I could have done differently. Or alternately, that I had done something that made me diabetic.

I had given up smoking after twenty years, the familiar mental recital went like a recording through my brain. I had always tried to eat well and never been so out of shape that I couldn't handle hiking through the woods when we camped out during the summer.

"There is no cure for diabetes."

That phrase went through my mind while I worked and when I was going to sleep at night. Sometimes, it was a Gregorian chant that ran in time to whatever music was on the radio as I drove to work.

No one was sure exactly how I had come to have the disease since no one I contacted in my family could remember anyone ever having been diabetic.

No one, it seemed, was really sure what caused anyone to have the disease. Lifestyle, genetics played parts in the overall picture.

For all the years of research and millions of dollars spent, there was no real reason for the pancreas to stop producing insulin and there was no cure.

It was frustrating. I clung tightly to my newly found change in consciousness. It was necessary just to stay sane in what had become an insane world.

For a while, I shut all the books on practical research. I couldn't handle one more detailed account of why diabetics needed to exercise. I didn't care what foods were the right foods. I couldn't stand the sight of one more highlighted syringe.

I went heavily into 'the great adventure'. After all, if I could truly make the transition spiritually, the rest might just fall into line.

I picked a wonderful teacher to get me through that time.

The late psychic Edgar Cayce's words made me sit up and take notice. He had produced a group of readings, about fourteen million words, in a trance like state. They covered an enormous amount of material, many of them concerned healthcare. Most were controversial but more were being proven accurate every day.

"Do not look upon the conditions which have existed as not being able to be eradicated from the system. Hold to that knowledge and don't think of it as just therapy - that the body can, that the body does renew itself."

Was this the cure that I was looking for? Just the belief that someone else believed that it was possible to be cured, not just survive, became very important to me.

It came down to whether or not I could believe in miracles, perhaps, but when faced with the option, I chose to believe.

He was right, I reasoned. The body does renew itself. We do have new cells every twenty four hours.

There was a small but growing group of non-traditional healers who wondered why a leg that had been severed didn't re-grow. What made the growth process stop? Why wasn't healing from any and all dis-ease possible?

I confess that reading Cayce made me realize that everything was interconnected, the physical and the spiritual.

I couldn't look at another diagram but I did start to increase my intake of whole grains and fresh fruits, as he recommended.

I started drinking six to eight glasses of pure water every day. Because I've never been much of a vegetable eater, I started drinking vegetable juice at meals. Raw vegetable juice was easier for me to get down. Between the juice and water, I was able to do without diet Cokes or coffee.

I began drinking grape juice after finding a reading that he had done for another diabetic. Four ounces of Concord grape juice, diluted with water, thirty minutes before a meal.

I reminded myself when I drank it that it was going to help balance my body functions. Spiritual, mental, physical. I wanted to learn how to put the three together.

I continued reading Cayce and began to understand that part of his 'therapy' included the strong belief in dreams.

"Sleep is that period," I read, "when the soul takes stock of what it has acted upon, from one rest period to another; drawing comparisons, as it were, that make for harmony, peace, joy, love, long suffering, patience, brotherly love and kindness - all fruits of the spirit."

My wife always acted as my sounding board. She and I talked it over and she agreed.

The dream she'd had about me in the months when I had first started exhibiting diabetic symptoms had shown itself to be prophetic. My spirit did feel as though it were moving away from the earthly plane of existence, rushing away from all those problems and difficulties I didn't want to face.

"What about a dream diary?" she asked, reading Cayce's work with me early one evening.

"Is Daddy having nightmares?" our youngest asked, picking up on our conversation in between watching television. "If he is, he can sleep with me like I come in your bed when I have a bad dream."

"Not nightmares," I told her. "Just dreams that might help me get better."

She looked at me for just a second. "You'll just dream good things," she nodded, understanding in her way.

I marveled at a child's ability to accept things where adults would demand proof. We lose a great deal of our acceptance as we age, settling into those 'wrong' patterns, as Cayce described them.

"Whatever is, is right," my wife quoted from a poem she'd been reading.

"That's too tough," I shuddered, refusing to see having a disease as being what was best for me.

I could accept that I had the problem and even conceive of it as a learning experience but going to that length was too much for me.

I did find an old notebook with a calendar from a few years before that I had never used and I put it on my bedside table with a pen.

Cayce's other words made sense to me. Wasn't it possible that they would lead me to something else?

For the first week, I had dreams that were scattered, not anything I could understand. Sometimes, I either forgot to write them down first thing or couldn't recall them later or the images were too fast to make any sense.

The first dream I had that made sense was a strange nightmare. In it, I saw my father, lying in an alley. There was blood on his shirt and he wasn't wearing any shoes.

When I looked more closely, there was a syringe sticking out of his arm and an empty box of insulin lying next to him on the street.

I awoke in a cold sweat and couldn't go back to sleep that night. I wasn't sure what it meant but I wasn't likely to forget it. As my first real journal entry, it was frightening and ugly.

I might have given up on the idea of keeping my dream journal at all after that but reading Edgar Cayce's material made me feel as though I were close to the answer.

During the next week, I had a dream about walking. I was walking down a long dark road, out of a black cloud, into a sunrise that was so bright, it nearly blinded me.

I didn't try to look away though and kept walking. I could feel myself growing stronger as I walked, feeling more

confident, knowing that what I was doing was the right thing for me.

I awoke that morning feeling refreshed and alert. When I tested my blood sugar, I was down twenty points. Still higher than I should have been but improved and I felt wonderful.

I wrote down my dream and as I did, I realized that this was part of my answer. No jumping around in a gym.

That day, I started walking.

To begin with, to encourage me, I suppose, everyone took turns walking with me for the one mile around our circle. I know everyone was eager for me to be well.

It was Easter break for the kids and walking with me became an occasion.

"Who's walking?" I would ask and they would all volunteer. Sometimes, all three of them went along. We would laugh at my son's jokes and listen intently to my daughter's latest poem.

I went out, rain or shine, and walked the circle faithfully once a day for the entire week they were all home. Only my wife didn't walk with me and I wondered at the time if she resented the attention I was getting in the family.

After that first week, my walks became more solitary. The kids were back at school. They were too busy with their homework or out with friends most of the time.

At first, I was resentful, liking the company and feeling a little abandoned.

I went through a phase of trying to make my wife feel guilty when someone wasn't with me. I looked at my daughter with her headphones on, music blasting while she talked on the phone. Then I looked back at my wife.

My wife looked me right in the eye and told me it was my own fault.

"Some things," she told me flatly. "You have to do for yourself."

I was mad but I knew that she was right. I dragged myself out every day anyway, grumbling about the weather and complaining that my feet hurt.

I increased my walking distance even through my resentment, walking two miles every day, around our circle then around the circle that was the neighborhood just outside of ours. Then one morning I realized what a wonderful opportunity I was missing.

I woke up, ready to complain and the morning was so beautiful. The sun was just rising from behind the new green leaves that covered the trees alongside the road. The woods were alive with birds and frogs. Baby rabbits hopped across the road in front of me.

It was like being in a Disney movie and I had to laugh. How could anyone be unhappy or depressed on such a day! From that day on, my attitude changed.

Solitary walks became a time of concentrated thought for me, taking that time out of the day to think about what was important to me, to look around me, at the blue sky and the newly budding trees.

I relived those pleasurable moments of my life that lifted my spirits, refused to think anything that wasn't healing and tried to put everything into perspective.

Once in a while, someone came with me, even my wife began to walk with me on Saturday mornings. It didn't matter if they did or not but when they did it was that much better.

Sharing my solitude was showing them my secret places to look for bird's nests and coming through early morning fog holding my wife's hand.

There was tranquility and renewal in those times. I learned more in those silences than I had from any book.

I began walking twice a day, two miles each time, morning and evening. I could start and finish in about forty minutes on a good day, a little over an hour in the rain.

I started noticing other walkers who waved to me as they passed.

There was the woman in the red sweat pants with her two big dogs. The stocky man always dressed in white who ran by breathlessly.

Being a walker made me nodding acquaintances with people I hadn't known lived near me. It was like a club. We didn't know each other's names, just faces, but when the white haired gentleman from the outside circle was absent one morning, I thought about him all day at work, wondering what had happened to him.

That afternoon, he walked by and I called out to him.

"Missed you this morning!"

He waved and pointed at his glasses. "Broke my glasses," he called out. "See you tomorrow."

I don't know how it made him feel but it made me feel like a part of something much bigger.

My blood sugar dropped again, markedly, and seemed to hold its lower level but even though my eating habits had changed drastically and I was walking regularly, I couldn't get down into what was termed my 'safe' level.

My wife and son had continued to study the more physical aspects of the disease and we discussed the information almost daily, trying to hammer out what the best plan was for me to follow.

"We're going in the right direction," my son insisted. "Stay away from the medication. Exercise, change your eating habits-"

"But his glucose level is still way too high," my wife argued. "If we don't explore some ideas on reducing that level, he's going to develop more serious problems."

"It's clear from the research that oral medication leads to dependence that has to eventually be replaced by insulin," my son continued. "Insulin sure isn't the answer."

"I agree," she nodded. "But there might be another way."

"Something that might work without medication side effects?" I wondered, wanting to feel as though I was not invisible.

"There's been some work done with chromium that's been shown to help reduce blood glucose levels," she told me. "In fact, some theories suggest that low chromium levels might contribute to diabetes."

"We could get chromium tablets at the health food store," my son enthused, ready for anything that didn't include medication.

"It would be worth a try," I agreed, still not liking the idea of medication myself. I was beginning to feel normal again. I wasn't ready to admit defeat.

We found that the best absorbed form of chromium supplements was chromium picolineate. It was fairly easy to find and the recommended dosage was 100 - 200 micrograms daily.

I started on chromium tablets the next day, taking 100 micrograms to start, slowly increasing to 200 micrograms.

The weather steadily grew warmer and I continued to walk, gradually building up my time and endurance.

Food cravings began to become less important to me.

I had made a promise to myself in the first week after my initial diagnosis. It went something like; if you can just get your blood sugar down to normal for three weeks, you can eat a cinnamon roll covered in white icing.

That promise, even those thoughts, became like something someone else had thought about in another lifetime.

I felt better than I had felt in so long that it didn't occur to me that I should want to do anything else. My blood sugar levels might have been higher than they should have been but I was willing to fight to retain the ground that I had gained.

I began to eat yogurt every day on my wife's advice that the cultures in the food were good for the intestinal tract and helped reduce the problems with yeast infections.

It certainly wasn't my favorite food, a little sour. A food one has to become accustomed to but I had come that far, yogurt was just another hurdle.

Within two weeks, I had begun to notice a vast improvement in those infections even though my blood sugar levels remained too high.

I fought off any feelings of uncertainty about being able to reduce those levels. I had to bring them down. I had to find a way. We just hadn't found the right combination. I just had to try a little harder.

The answer was there but did I have enough time to find it?

My eyes were still weak. Any time at the computer was hard, reading still a problem.

My wife was worried about the breaking of small blood vessels in my eyes that causes tissue damage, the leading medical cause of blindness in the United States.

That scared me since though I was better, my eyes were still such a problem. There had already been some blood vessel damage to my eyes but nothing sight threatening as yet.

How long I could afford to wait until I did something else, obviously medication, was anybody's guess.

It wasn't that I was trying to live life dangerously. I just didn't want to make a mistake.

Clearly, the chromium tablets hadn't made a significant improvement. I had been taking them for three weeks and my blood sugar level had fluctuated only slightly.

"It's possible that you aren't absorbing the chromium like that," my wife went back to the books. "I was reading the other day about brewer's yeast. You might be able to get what you need from it, if your body can absorb it from a food source."

"And you can stand the smell and taste," my middle daughter grimaced.

"When did you ever have brewer's yeast?" I wondered.

"We did an experiment with it in biology," she replied, shrugging as she put down her book bag on the kitchen floor. "It smelled worse than anything."

"I've learned to eat yogurt," I replied proudly.

She shuddered. "I guess you can eat brewer's yeast then."

"It's worth a try," my wife laughed. "Maybe you could learn to drink it mixed with something that would help the taste."

"You're drinking that vegetable stuff everyday," my daughter said, making a face. "Maybe if you put the two of them together, it'll be so bad, it'll be good."

I had never in my life been to a health food store. The grocery store has always been good enough for me. If you couldn't buy it there, maybe it shouldn't be purchased.

Somehow, I always imagined the kind of people that went there as being very pale, wearing only cotton, ready to eat anything that came in small, expensive packaging.

Despite that, there was nowhere else to go that had brewer's yeast. I resolved that it would be another new experience.

At the health food store the next day, the clerk told me where to find the brewer's yeast. It was sold in bulk and I was about to dip out a bag of the stuff when she asked me if I was sure I didn't want nutritional yeast.

Nutritional yeast, she explained, was formulated like brewer's yeast but with more chromium and selenium.

"What are you going to do with it?" she asked helpfully.

"I'm going to use it to increase my glucose tolerance," I told her. "I'm diabetic."

She was avidly interested since she had a brother-in-law that had recently been diagnosed as having the same thing.

"So you think this will work?" she wondered, looking at the bag of yeast I had filled in my hands.

"I don't know," I replied honestly. "But I think it's worth a try."

Her brother-in-law, it turned out, had been on oral medication for three months and was still having problems with his eyes, leaving him unable to do his job as a computer programmer.

"I think I'll tell him about it," she told me, ringing up my purchase. "Like you said, it's worth a try."

I left the store thinking that the experience had gone quite well. It wasn't at all like I had imagined it. Preconceived ideas are usually wrong.

I thought about all those others who were out there and hadn't been lucky enough to have a family who were able to do the research for them. How many books and magazines had my family gone through trying to connect all the information? It looked like hundreds watching them.

I was feeling very fortunate. My son drove me home that day as we talked about everything that was happening to him in school. He explained to me about his latest theories and what he was doing to prove them.

Once in a while, when he and my wife were doing that all important research, I felt a little strange, wondering if they resented doing the work that my eyes wouldn't let me do for myself.

I knew I would have done the same for one of them but sometimes, it made me feel a little less than I should have been, like a cripple maybe that wasn't quite able to participate in his own recovery.

I brooded a little over those feelings but it was finally telling myself over and over that they were there for me because they loved me, that brought about a change in that feeling.

After all, I was trying to get out from under those 'wrong patterns,' not develop new ones.

Brewer's yeast was as bad as my daughter predicted. Getting past the smell alone was hard. Swallowing it was terrible. I got past it the first few times by reminding myself that I could be injecting myself with insulin.

Since there was a caution in the book we'd read about starting slowly because of gastrointestinal problems - gas, I started with a teaspoon a day in my vegetable juice.

It took me a month to work up to two tablespoons a day. I still had some bloating but it was hardly noticeable.

Within two weeks of beginning to take those two tablespoons of brewer's yeast in my juice every afternoon after my walk, my blood sugar levels had dropped to a much more tolerable rate.

The first thing I noticed was that the washed out feeling that had accompanied my diabetes was gone. My energy levels were high, blood sugar levels low. I wasn't sure I didn't feel better than I had before the disease was diagnosed.

What was strange was that I hadn't realized how bad I really felt until I had begun to feel really good. Looking back, I realized how long before my fortieth birthday I had started to feel badly.

It was probably that feeling that had convinced me to stop smoking and start weight training. I had been trying to recapture some of that lost aspect of feeling good, waking up in the morning looking forward to the day instead of dreading it.

I cried the first time I picked up an old favorite book, without the aid of my glasses and was able to clearly read the first sentence.

"Stand by to reduce thrust on main drive rockets!"

My wife, who clearly knew me well, had slipped a homemade bookmark into the first page.

To order or learn more!