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- I was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio,
grew up there, went to the Ohio State University
and interviewed at the Iowa State University
and came out here to work for Caterpillar.
My wife and I have been married almost 50 years.
I've been diabetic, it'll be 60 years in March.
And I've seen quite a few changes in 60 years.
I remember we went to the family doctor.
I had lost at that time I was very thin if you can imagine,
but I continued to lose weight.
And my brother, and sister, and mom, and dad
got the old "Encyclopaedia Britannica" out
and tried to look through that
to find symptoms that matched mine
to put a name with it.
Couldn't do it,
so they took me to the doctor
and he checked me over well,
check my urine sugar, checked my blood sugar
and said, "you're diabetic."
I had a tremendous trust
and faith in my parents.
And my parents were very reassuring outwardly to me.
I think between the two of them,
they were very nervous
but I felt pretty comfortable to be honest with you.
I think it was because I didn't know any better.
I've thought about it a lot over the years.
I think it may be better in some regards,
if a person is diagnosed at a young age,
so they don't have so many habits to change.
I sat down yesterday and tried to calculate
how many insulin shots I've taken
in almost 60 years.
And I came up not anything scientific,
but I came up with somewhere between 75 and 100,000.
And that's a lot.
You can lead a normal life,
but you have to do a little bit extra to do that.
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When I was first diagnosed they said
that the disease would take a third of your life span.
So if you were, if you were on a curve
where you are expected to live to be 60
you could expect to live to be 40.
Now that has changed because techniques to monitor
and control have gotten better,
but that's still kinda frightening.
So I guess what I would tell a newly diagnosed people was
learn as much as you possibly can.
Work with doctors who are willing to share information with.
My folks built the foundation for me,
to take care of myself they're gone.
I hope they're a little come down and they're proud.
And most of all,
I wanna thank my Lord and savior Jesus Christ,
who is truly the best doctor
that you can ever have for anything.
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