 | Name: Leon Cowdery
Overview: When Leon Cowdery left school at 15, his diabetes barred him from his chosen profession of sign-writing because he was not allowed to go up a ladder. He worked as a cycle mechanic and then, in order to avoid going to his parents` Seventh-day Adventist church, he took up floor-laying at weekends. This led him into the building trade and he has been going up ladders ever since! He designed the house in which he lives and, now that he`s semi-retired, he helps his wife with gardening and maintains four motorbikes from the 1950s.
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|  | Name: Patrick Grogan
Overview: Patrick Grogan was treated at King`s College Hospital by R.D. Lawrence (co-founder of the British Diabetes Association, now Diabetes UK) and he remembers Lawrence commenting on the amount of carbohydrate at a hospital Christmas party. He has always kept to a healthy diet, has had lots of exercise as a machine-tool fitter and maintenance worker, and has had no diabetic complications. He`s a member of NHS Concern and the West Midlands Pensioners Convention and says that taking an interest in improving society is what keeps him going.
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|  | Name: Philip Newick
Overview: Philip Newick comes from a working-class Bristol family which was greatly affected by redundancies in the aircraft industry. Determined to escape such insecurity, he did a degree and postgraduate work in chemical engineering. He worked for HJ Heinz until after diagnosis, when he was told that he could no longer work abroad. He then got a job nearer to his home in Birmingham and all his treatment has been in that city. He and his wife still weigh and measure all his food and he has few health problems - apart from an inability to detect the onset of hypos.
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|  | Name: Kevin Jones
Overview: Kevin Jones` father worked in a Welsh mine, then joined the Royal Navy and worked his way up from sick berth attendant to Lieutenant Commander. Kevin went to various grammar schools in Navy ports and left at 18 to train as an accountant. He worked for several large companies, unhindered by his diabetes, but has had more problems in recent years. In 2002 his leg was amputated, but he had great help from the Limb Centre and now walks and drives with an artificial limb. He loves jazz, and is pictured with a statuette of a jazz musician.
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 | Name: Mary
Overview: Mary`s father was a baker and her mother a factory worker. When she was diagnosed, the hospital suggested that they should buy a book on diabetes by R.D. Lawrence, but she doesn`t think they read it. She feels she was given very little information, and remembers thinking that her diabetes might disappear when she began to have periods at 15. She made little effort to control her diabetes until she went to a clinic in Oxford in 1983. She works as a podiatrist and reckons that about 75% of her patients have diabetes
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|  | Name: Hans Csucsmi
Overview: Hans Csucsmi`s early childhood in Vienna was disrupted by war: street-fighting; the arrival of Nazi troops; the army`s occupation of his school; evacuation to Hungary; and flight from the Russians at the end of the war. After returning to Vienna, he did well at school and worked in a fashion house before emigrating to England in 1955 to train as a mental nurse. He married a fellow trainee and had one son. While working as night manager of a hospital, he ate and smoked both day and night, and became very overweight. After diagnosis, he changed his lifestyle completely.
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 | Name: Peter
Overview: Peter`s father was a professor and both parents were well-informed about diabetes after his older brother was diagnosed in 1945. They spotted Peter`s symptoms early and at first he only needed four units of Lente insulin to last 24 hours. He was educated at Oxford and worked in the steel industry for several years. He is now a management consultant and has few problems associated with diabetes. He has recently remarried, after being widowed in 2003, and has a daughter with diabetes who is `much more able to cope with disturbances to her daily routine than I am`.
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|  | Name: Shirley Jones
Overview: Shirley Jones` parents had little money to spend on food and she remembers eating bread and jam `many, many times`. She married at 19, divorced, married again at 21, and then her second husband left her to bring up two small children alone before she was diagnosed with diabetes, aged 32. She was recruited into the UK Prospective trial for Type 2 diabetes, but rapidly became insulin-dependent. Until recently, she ran a pub with her current partner. She is now on kidney dialysis.
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|
 | Name: Francis Andrews
Overview: Dr. the Rev. Francis Andrews was diagnosed with diabetes on the day that war was declared in September 1939. He was the son of a doctor who`d worked as a medical officer in Flanders during the First World War. Francis also trained to be a doctor, and eventually became a consultant physician in rheumatology, having been advised not to specialise in diabetes. He married and has 6 children, 15 grandchildren and 1 great-grandchild, none of whom have diabetes. He took early retirement to train as a Catholic priest, and was ordained in 1994.
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|  | Name: Christina
Overview: Christina`s parents came to Oxford from Eire in 1948 and she was brought up on an Irish diet of bacon, cabbage and potatoes. Her father worked in a car factory and her mother as a cook and cleaner. Christina went to a Catholic school until she was 15 and then started work folding paper at the University Press, where she met her husband. They married when she was 18 and had two sons. She worked as a cleaner in a private school for 31 years until registered blind in 2001, four years after being diagnosed with diabetes.
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 | Name: Allan Jones
Overview: Allan Jones` father was a miner with six children. They had little money but had to pay for insulin and equipment until the National Health Service was created in 1948. They couldn`t afford cotton wool and re-used needles until they were blunt. When Allan was 15 he got a job as a messenger on the railways but had to pass a medical before being promoted. He feared he would lose his job if his diabetes was discovered, so took with him a sample of his brother`s urine! He passed the medical and worked happily on the railways for 30 years.
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|  | Name: Victoria
Overview: Victoria`s father was a bank manager and she attended a private school and a grammar school. At 16, she developed an eating disorder after a boyfriend dropped her because she was diabetic, and at 25 she briefly rebelled against her diabetic diet. Otherwise, she feels diabetes has caused few problems and hasn`t prevented her from achieving her ambition of becoming a teacher. She thinks perhaps it did influence her not to have children, but she enjoys life with her partner, and is grateful for new blood testing equipment and other developments which have given diabetics greater freedom.
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 | Name: Amy Yau
Overview: Amy Yau`s mother was a stenographer; her father was a health inspector, and they both came from mixed race backgrounds. Amy was born in Singapore, just before it was invaded by the Japanese, and was saved by the presence in her household of her Japanese grand-mother and great-aunt. She came to England to train as a nurse in 1960 and married a few years later. Her husband originates from mainland China and opened the first Chinese restaurant in Malvern. She helped out in the restaurant while her children were growing up and then returned to nursing.
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|  | Name: Bena
Overview: Bena was born in the Kigezi District of Uganda, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. She was diagnosed when nearly 12 and then shunned by children who thought diabetes was contagious. She lived on chapattis and spinach and a bitter vegetable juice thought to cure diabetes. When Idi Amin expelled Ugandan Asians in 1972, her family came to England, and she was delighted to be allowed to eat a wider range of food. She eventually married an Englishman and had two daughters. She works as an office administrator, in a social services department that supports disabled children.
There are also interviews with Bena`s daughter, Emma and her husband, Terry.
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 | Name: Margaret
Overview: Margaret developed pneumonia from living in a damp prefab and missed a lot of school. At 9 she attended an open-air school for sick children and was ostracised at secondary school because of her different background. She left at 15 with no qualifications, but earned more as a seamstress than her father did on the railways. She was diagnosed at 18 and married at 20. Her husband was in the RAF and she was treated in RAF hospitals. She has had serious hypos and many health problems, but enjoys making spectacular iced cakes and playing with her grandchildren.
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|  | Name: Lisa McGregor
Overview: Lisa McGregor was diagnosed shortly before starting secondary school. She spent two weeks in hospital, where she learnt to inject herself from the outset. She was given a `traffic light` book, listing forbidden and permitted foods, but didn`t follow the diet strictly. She injected herself twice daily for 20 years until moving to a more flexible regime, with four injections, in 2003. She describes it as a DAFNE regime (Dose Adjustment for Normal Eating), but hasn`t attended a DAFNE training course. She has had few health problems, but several frightening experiences as a result of hypos.
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 | Name: Beryl Smith
Overview: Beryl Smith first met children with diabetes when she was a student nurse and junior staff nurse at Birmingham Children`s Hospital from 1953 to 1957. She gave up nursing after she got married and didn`t encounter diabetes again until her own daughter, Catherine, was diagnosed in 1964, at the age of five. Catherine had so-called ‘brittle` diabetes, with frequent hypos – until she received two islet transplants in 2006/7. Beryl`s husband, David, developed Type 2 diabetes in 1983. At first he was on tablets, but was able to manage on diet alone after he lost four and a half stone.
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|  | Name: Gillian
Overview: Gillian was diagnosed when she was 23, while working as a
journalist in London. At the age of 26, a consultant advised her that if she
wanted children, it would be a good idea to have them soon, because "you`ve
got to consider whether you`re going to see them grow up". Her partner
didn`t want to be a father at that stage, so she decided to be a single
parent and has brought up two children on her own. Her daughter was
diagnosed with diabetes in 1999.
There is also an interview with Gillian`s son, Tom.
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| Search returned 30 matches |
