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| - I was diagnosed with insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus in September of 1993, at the age of 20, in the first weeks of my sophomore year at Cornell University. Mine was a textbook diagnosis. For three or four weeks I'd been feeling very poorly, mostly including exhaustion, a feverish feeling with heat in my thighs, and my blood feeling "muddy", hot and thick, after meals. The next morning I visited the student health center where they measured my blood glucose at 580, thus diagnosing me with Insulin Dependent Diabetes Melitus, and admitting me to the Ithaca County Hospital.
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| abstract
| - I was diagnosed with insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus in September of 1993, at the age of 20, in the first weeks of my sophomore year at Cornell University. Mine was a textbook diagnosis. For three or four weeks I'd been feeling very poorly, mostly including exhaustion, a feverish feeling with heat in my thighs, and my blood feeling "muddy", hot and thick, after meals. I felt I was losing weight and very clearly losing strength and muscle. I had been an active athlete for five years, including running cross-country and track, wrestling, gymnastics, diving, swimming, and a variety of martial arts. I had an exceptional build, like a body builder's but still athletic: a narrow 30-inch waist and beefy 44-inch chest, big shoulders and ripped, muscular arms. In those first three to four weeks of the fall semester, my arms, shoulders and chest visibly shrank. Some curious incidents in this pre-diagnosis stage included waking in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, with outrageous cravings for chocolate. I remember once waking at 3:00 with a craving so sharp, I began dressing and planning how I could find a store, open 24 hours, to buy chocolate. I lived in off-campus housing and without a car or bicycle, so I planned to walk more than a mile to a supermarket. I woke my girlfriend up, telling her my plan, and we both marveled at the insanity of it. She lived through and witnessed my symptoms during this period, and soon she was instrumental in my diagnosis. This pre-diagnosis period also exactly coincided with my introduction to the internet, and my discovery of email discussion groups (and, incidentally, my meeting with Jimmy Wales (PBUH) by joining a discussion list he was managing.) I had been experiencing very blurry vision -- a well-known symptom caused by too much free glucose in the blood vessels in the retina due to hyperglycemia or high blood glucose. So I borrowed a pair of very strong magnifying goggles from my research lab, used for working with samples on microscope slides. I must have looked a bizarre sight, or merely visually handicapped, as I began having to use these goggles to read my email in the computer labs. Other textbook symptoms: I was drinking water and thirsty constantly, and I was urinating constantly. At one point it seemed I had to urinate every 15 minutes. I had lost more than 15 pounds in a three week period, dropping from 177 to 160 lbs. There was a clarion signal to me that something serious was wrong, when one morning I woke up, noticed how gaunt I'd become and how my arms especially had lost muscle, and I dropped to the floor to do push-ups. I did three push-ups and then fell on my face, unable to lift myself again. Just three months earlier, I had been able to do three sets of 100 repetitions each in a 15-minute period. That evening, I summarized all the strange symptoms I'd been experiencing to my girlfriend, as she spoke with her father, a radiologist, on the phone. His answer was decisive, unhesitant: Kirez has diabetes. I didn't even know what diabetes was. The next morning I visited the student health center where they measured my blood glucose at 580, thus diagnosing me with Insulin Dependent Diabetes Melitus, and admitting me to the Ithaca County Hospital.
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