By Grace Cameron, Lifestyle Editor
Lifestyle Editor Grace Cameron tells how she watched as her grandmother died from diabetes
THE NIGHT before she died, my grandmother, lying in a suburban Toronto hospital bed, sounded strangely like she was talking to me from under water.
Her swollen breasts sat on her chest like giant water-filled balloons. She complained that they felt uncomfortable and begged me to take some bras the following day.
She didn't live long enough for me to get them to her. She died the next morning. What neither of us realised was that the night before her lungs, her heart, her organs had been slowly shutting down, submerged by water. Her 22-year fight with diabetes had come to an end.
A 'BITTERS' FIGHT
I remember when she was first told that she had sugar, as she called it. I was about 10 and we were still living in Jamaica. She stopped adding sugar to our tea and started boiling and drinking what she called bitters King of the Forest, Sinkle Bible (aloe vera) and other strange bushes that she stored in giant jars. She drank her bitters by the glassful with a twisted face, like she wanted to puke.
Not long after our move to Toronto Gran, as we called her, had to begin injecting herself with insulin and dropped sugar, pastries, and other sweets from her diet. For a while all seemed well. She worked, lived, loved, cried, enjoyed life. Still, over the years, her condition seemed to worsen, ever so slightly at first.
She slashed the amount of bread and rice that she ate and started shrivelling from a robust, full-bodied woman on her way down to a stick-like figure. Over the years her legs grew more spindly (they had always been somewhat lean for her busty frame), her hips and behind sunk and her bosom and stomach (where she carried most of her weight) decreased. Still, I wasn't worried until she started crying in the mornings when she had to find a vein to inject the insulin. Sections of her legs were black and blue from repeated injections and it became a struggle to find fresh areas and veins to pierce the needle. I felt for her, but she was coping and life went on.
WANTING TO EXHALE
Things got worse in the mid-1980s, however. Toronto's hot, muggy summer days and stifling nights left her gasping for breath. At first we would rush her to the hospital once or twice during the summer an enlarged heart, water on her chest, the doctors explained. As the years rolled on each spate of hot, humid summer weather meant a trip to the hospital.
There were other health issues. Her eyes started to dim. She was never an avid reader but she used to read the newspaper until the darkness started to cloud her vision. She took to watching and memorising daytime soap operas, game, quiz and home shopping shows to fill her days.
It might also have been about then that her left calf started acting up. At first, twinges of pain would stop her in her tracks as she would try to hurry across a pedestrian crossing. She massaged it and we all took turns massaging the calf bare hands and with automatic massage devices but it got worse and the little veins popped out. Soon the pain came to hang like a gloomy shadow that stalked her every waking moment.
She took to calling me at 2:00 a.m., 2:00 p.m., 9:00 a.m., whenever she was in the grips of a long, biting agonising spell. I listened and tried to distract her. After a while, I developed the knack of being able to talk and listen to her while blocking out the anguish in her voice. I started averting my eyes during my visits when she whined constantly about her calf. I felt mean and awful, as did my brother, but we simply didn't know how to help her.
I'm not sure when rushing her to the hospital stretched from summer into autumn, winter and then spring. I recall making mad dashes through snowy January nights and the wet darkness of pre-dawn March mornings to whichever hospital she was admitted. For a period, I was afraid of answering the telephone because I never knew what bad news it would bring.
THE LAST CUT
Just over a year before she died, the doctors decided to amputate her leg, below the knee. We were all scared but felt it would bring much needed relief. It didn't quite
work that way. Besides the actual pain of the amputation,
Gran was also left with "phantom" pains that
mimicked the terrible ones she suffered before the operation. There were times when she felt that the calf was still a part of her body.
She was well attended to and was enrolled in physiotherapy to help her adjust to living without the limb. The sessions had her hopping (or trying to) on her other leg, and pulling herself up with the help of a railing.
She tried. She really tried, but with an enlarged heart, failing sight, a wound (from the amputation) that was not healing quickly, and repeated stays in the hospital, they stopped her. For the next 15 months, until she died, the wound never did heal completely.
In late 1990, the signs of death accelerated. Gran's face became a mask of pain, black-brown like molasses, and her eyes seemed cloudy and dark. By that Christmas I believe that she knew her time was near. You could see it in the way she watched my nieces and nephew at play.
Still, she fought it every step of the way. Her hearing remained sharp and in between the times when she would make up stories about the nurses picking her up and dropping her on the floor, she could hear a pin drop from a mile away. Unbelievably, my grandmother on one occasion mustered up the strength to 'fight off' two nurses when she felt they were out to get her. I visited the hospital to see her sitting in a chair, her hands tied to the armrest. The explanation: She thought she had overheard a whispered plot, from the next ward, to kill her. She decided that she was not about to die and so when the nurses came to tend to her she fought them off, screaming bloody murder. They were forced to call a male nurse to help them wrestle her back into the chair and secure her arms.
In the months before she died, after a frank conversation with her doctor, I brought myself to have a no-revival note included on her chart. It meant that while they would make her comfortable and lessen her pain as much as they could, the time had come to stop fooling ourselves. It was time to let her go. March 28, 1991, Good Friday, Gran died.
She was 68.
A waisted story
The classic
diabetes
body shape
GUT FAT is more dangerous than butt fat.
Abdominal fat deposition is linked to high
cholesterol, high blood pressure, blood clotting abnormalities, insulin resistance and diabetes. It also increases the risk of heart attack, stroke, some cancers and impotence.
In studies, men with 42-inch waists were twice as likely to have erection problems as men with 32-inch waists. Men tend to store more fat in their abdomen than women, but more women are getting fat tummies as they eat more and exercise less.
You can't see most of the fat around your middle because it's inside the abdominal cavity, surrounding the organs, but your waist size is a good measure of abdominal fat content. Women should keep their waists below 35 inches and men below 40 inches to avoid health problems. You can't spot reduce specifically target your gut you must lose fat from all the fat stores in the body. (For Women: Fitness Rx, October 2003 Consumer Reports, August 2003.)
BARREL-ON-A-STICK
Along with the central deposit of fat around the waist, the classic diabetes body type carries far less fat on the hips and legs, explains Professor Errol Morrison, head of the Kingston-based Diabetes Association of Jamaica.
In the medical profession this body structure is known as the
barrel-on-a-stick, and people with abdominal girth that spans more than 36 inches are at greater risk for diabetes, he explains.
Professor Morrison notes that many Jamaicans tend to have the
barrel-on-a-stick body type, which therefore fits into the concept that genetics is an important factor in
developing diabetes. He adds, however, that while people of African (as well as Asian, Indian, Latino, Pacific Island) descent are prone to diabetes, there is not a high prevalence of diabetes in Africa. The same is true for Asian populations that did not move to the West.
Genetics is therefore only one of the factors.
Note: It does not mean that everybody with this body type will get diabetes, nor does it mean that others with a different shape cannot develop the condition.
G.C.
