From the Editor: Eloise Jackson is 84 years old, and has had diabetes more than 50 years. We know a great deal more about diabetes than was known half a century ago—and, in that light, she has done an excellent job of coping.
I was born November 16, 1921. I’ve had diabetes more than 50 years, but I wasn’t diagnosed until I was an adult. I was married in 1948, and I became pregnant fairly soon after. I had a miscarriage, at about 4-1/2 or 5 months. I became pregnant again in 1952, and we had a son, but the pregnancy was difficult, with lots of problems. I delivered the baby at eight months, and after that, I was just not well at all. I would go to the bathroom day and night, I was thirsty, and I didn’t have any energy. I always looked forward to early naps in the afternoon with my new baby.
By the time my son was three years old, I was not doing well at all. I had lost weight, and had trouble eating. When I had another miscarriage, my doctor thought there must be something causing all this.
She put me in the hospital and found I had blood sugar over 400. That was in the days before HMO’s, so I stayed in the hospital for a week to learn how to take insulin! I practiced putting the needle into an orange, learning how to give myself the insulin.
Self-management was very different back then. I did my glucose tests with my urine, which was somewhat of a chore. It had to be a fresh specimen, which meant I went to the bathroom, then I waited 30 minutes, and then went again if I could. I injected insulin with a glass syringe rather than the types we have now.
When I’d had diabetes for about three or four years, I went to the Mayo Clinic. There I learned I didn’t have to boil the syringe every day, and I could put it in a test tube. My husband fixed a block and drilled it, so the test tube would fit down into the block, and that was how I kept my syringe.
The staff at the Mayo Clinic knew a lot more about diabetes than my internist did. The visit to Mayo changed my treatment and my self-care quite a lot. They had a kitchen for the diabetics to eat in, so patients could see the kind of food we should eat. They told me to measure my food, and I was careful. After I measured it a while, I learned a proper serving of meat would be about the size of a deck of playing cards.
The most important thing for me in managing my diabetes is to keep learning
all the time. We have our diabetes support group at our hospital. I go regularly,
and I have gotten a lot of help there. I have learned, over the years, that
I am a brittle diabetic. I have lots of low blood sugars now, and I always have
had. It was through the diabetes
educator I learned to start using four shots a day, and now I’m on two
different kinds of insulin, Lantus and Humalog.
I’ve had diabetes complications. I have retinopathy in one eye. My former phthalmologist would not do any laser treatments when I began to have hemorrhages. I went to the Mayo Clinic then, and the ophthalmologist there performed laser surgery on that eye. When I came back, my ophthalmologist here in Fayetteville still would not do it. He thought that blood would be absorbed, from the hemorrhages. Despite the surgery, though, my vision eventually got much worse.
My husband and I have traveled a lot, in Europe and in the States, and I have participated in lots of activities back here at our retirement village. We have committees, and I serve as chairman of some of them. I’ve been in plays, and taken extra courses at the university, and did substitute teaching. So I have lived a good full life.
I’ve always told people that if you had to have something, and most of us, as we grow older, do develop some health problem, diabetes is about the best thing I can recommend. It has not kept me from doing anything!