他们给我们的不仅仅是信心
弟弟：Robert Cleveland:自5岁患病，今年86岁，病程81年，他是患病病程最长的。
哥哥Robett Gerald:自16岁患病，今年90岁。他是所有自幼年时期患病的病友中活得最久的。
Diabetic Brothers Beat Odds With 8 Decades of Discipline
New York Times ^ | February 5, 2006 | RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Posted on 02/04/2006 4:06:53 PM PST by neverdem
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."
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.
"My main reason to stay alive," said Gerald, "is to prove to young people there's a way to live with diabetes, to live well."
As diabetes poses a rapidly rising threat to Americans' health, the lives of these brothers from Syracuse offer the ultimate diabetic success story, with telling insights into what is possible...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
http://bbs.tnbz.com 2006-2-6 10:14 AM
|
