Did diabetes spoil my wedding day?
Knowing someone in your family line has diabetes, then understanding your risk, it's vital.
Looking back through the twelve official photographs of my wedding album, only my father could claim to have, what was then called, ‘sugar diabetes’.
Reg fought for our country's freedom in World War 2, firing a rifle out the back of an aircraft, bailing out twice in the channel. It was fair to say he was built of pretty strong stuff.
It was fairly soon after WW2 that his health took a surprising turn for the worse.
Following the war, the country was in the process of recovering from the awfulness of that horrid global unpleasantness. Family life was returning; a semblance of order was evolving with ration books gradually consigned to the garbage bin.
Family holidays began to return. One year, on a vacation in Hastings, my father experienced an extraordinary health incident ... his teeth began falling out.
We only have thirty-two and it was quite soon that he only had a few remaining ... the advent of dentures came to his rescue. Not ideal.
I was very young at the time, but as I grew older, I became aware of the perils of his plight. In those days there were no insulin pens, just cartridges with needles the size of javelins.
Watching him, with his test kit, agonise over his blood sugar levels before every mealtime was heart wrenching.
I was too young to properly understand.
It couldn't happen to me. Could it?
My mother was a nag. As a kid, the easiest thing was to do as I was told ... like most kids, I wasn't very consistent.
As a teen I worked hard at school though wasn’t very bright … left school at sixteen to start a career in a high street bank.
As I grew up ... you grow up fast when you first start work, I saw the world in all its colours and became quietly ambitious.
In those days, getting married, owning a house and having a family was the natural life progression.
Everything was going well. Started a family, had some promotions, and bought a house.
Yet mother persistently nagged … 'get yourself tested ... diabetes is hereditary ... you don't want to end up like your father' … ringing regularly in my ears.
Thing is, after a while, there was only one way to silence mother nagging.
One day in later November ’89, on the way to work, I stopped by at my doctor's surgery ... took a test and, phew, all seemed fine.
Later that day, the surgery rang me at work ... asking me to take the test again ... saying ‘something was up with the test strips’.
To my horror, my second test was positive … life’s cruel turning point had arrived … I had become a ‘diabetic’.
It was a shattering blow to my ego, my family and my future, with a very difficult road ahead to the one I had envisaged.
'You don't want to end up like your father' ... yet, to my horror, I was.
I had none of the traditional symptoms … excess thirst, peeing like a puppy, loss of weight, or feeling persistently tired … just that this ‘silent illness’ was in the family line.
I have a brother ... ironically, he's perfectly sugar-fine … though for me that was hard pill to accept.
Did diabetes spoil my wedding? ... as it happens ‘no’.
However, even then, it may well have been creeping quietly around my body ... a full decade before being discovered and diagnosed.
If you're reading this, knowing someone in your family line has diabetes, then understanding your risk it's vital … sooner rather than later.
No it didn’t spoil my wedding...you wouldn’t want to spoil someone else’s.
The NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme (NDPP) is available in Arabic, Gujarati and Urdu, and Know Diabetes has got videos in each language explaining a bit more about the programme. Would you or someone you know benefit from watching these? Click on the links below to view the NDPP explainer video and other helpful videos in the below languages.
