Stories about diabetes
I found this great web site the other day. It’s called “Diabetes Stories: Personal Tales of Diabetes through the Decades”.
Diabetes Stories: Personal Tales of Diabetes through the Decades
It’s a collection of audio transcripts of interviews with fifty people diagnosed with diabetes between 1927 and 1957. It’s searchable and there are also text-only transcripts of the interviews.
Here’s a short excerpt from an interview with Monica Winn who was born in England in 1919 and diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1927. In it she discusses her early experiences and training in how to cope with her diabetes:
Well, I remember very well to do a test for sugar. You had a little small spirit lamp and you‘d have two test tubes, and there was urine in one tube and Fehling‘s solution in the other tube, which was blue. And you had to boil it over this little stove and pour one in the other. If it stayed blue, you had no sugar; if it went yellow, you had a little sugar; if it went orange, you had high sugar, but in those days we didn‘t do blood tests.
With the varieties of oral drugs, insulins, insulin pumps, glucose meters, continuous glucose monitors, and advanced lab tests such as the HbA1C, we’ve certainly come a long way from Fehling’s solution in a test tube. But, none today’s technology constitutes a cure and it still isn’t easy work dealing with diabetes every day.
