Bloodwork: Married to Diabetes for Six Decades

Bloodwork: Married to Diabetes for Six Decades is more than my life story and what happened to me when I was diagnosed at age seven. It isn t just a book about diabetes it s about the behavioral aspects of living with a major illness. Whether it s obesity, multiple sclerosis, cancer, depression, you name it. Big-time diseases like diabetes affect your self-confidence, your family, and your relationships in other words, your psyche, your body and your love life. Personal narratives cover six decades of my life thrown off balance by childhood diabetes, including the impact of family involved in my struggles a father who starts out as a sharecropper working his way up to manager of a store and ends up deserting my mother for another woman, my matronly aunt who defends our family against a cuckolded husband with a blackjack hidden in the folds of her apron, a grandmother who believes that men were the bestowers of everything life had to offer. If you attracted the right one, you were saved. If the man turned out to be a poor choice, it was your fault. The book also finesses the science of diabetes in ways any layperson can understand. Research and hard-earned experiences describe how diabetes destroys the vascular system and major organs. Vivid depictions, but not gore, delineate procedures in my survival of the Big Three Breast Cancer, Heart Disease, and Diabetes. In these encounters, I discover that some doctors want to help me; others want to flee from me. Readers will identify with me as I achieve self-actualization and recognize my own strength, questioning a culture of treatment and research in which we have made a better study than a cure. The book ends with a look into the future and the survival of diabetics, challenging the medical community to develop a more viable method of educating us, especially our youth! Education must go beyond, Do this; Don t do that.