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Diagnosing the Common Disease
Denise Armstrong kept trying to explain her symptoms away. The fatigue was so acute that even after eight hours of sleep, she'd wake up exhausted and drag through the day. She was probably working too hard, she thought. A raging thirst forced her to bring a water bottle everywhere she went, but she figured that her sinus medicine was making her dehydrated. Her frequent need to urinate was understandable, considering how much water she was drinking. Then she developed a series of yeast infections that prompted her to seek medical care.A few days after the exam, Denise got an alarming call: Her blood work was back, and the nurse-practitioner wanted to see her right away. The timing couldn't have been worse, since Denise's daughter-in-law had gone into labor early that morning, and Denise was babysitting her two-year-old granddaughter, Allyson. After strapping the toddler into a child seat, she drove to the medical building and sat with the child in the half-empty waiting room, surrounded by photos of hunting scenes. She was excited about the new baby coming -- and apprehensive about the test results.
She'd just finished making a phone call to check on her daughter-in-law when the nurse beckoned her and Allyson into a small exam room. Holding up the lab report, she told Denise what was causing her symptoms: type 2 diabetes. "I was so shocked, and I was scared," says the 52-year-old secretary from Mount Carmel, Illinois. "My first thought was, Oh my God, am I going to die?"
She had every reason to consider the diagnosis a death sentence. The disease had killed her first husband's mother after the older woman had developed diabetes-related complications and undergone operations to amputate both legs below the knee. Denise's own mother, also a diabetic, was nearly blind, had suffered two strokes and was in a nursing home with Alzheimer's disease -- all conditions linked to diabetes.
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