Richard McCormack of Jersey City has very vivid memories of the summer of 1972.
It’s not because it was the year he kissed his first girl, took his first bicycle ride or learned how to swim. It was the year he learned he had diabetes.
“We were supposed to take a vacation to Miami,” McCormack recalled. “My mother made us go to the doctor to get a check-up.”
As a result, McCormack didn’t go Miami right away; he went to the hospital first with soaring blood sugar levels, a fact that changed his life forever, forcing him to live with medical routines ever since.
“I didn’t even know I had it,” he said, even though his father had also suffered from the same disease.
McCormack recalled the horrible times his father had, using glass syringes, boiling down a formula to inject.
While McCormack had an easier time than his father due to advances in medicine, life was a routine of pin pricks, monitoring blood sugar, and frequent and measured meals.
Over the years, technology has improved with the development of small, dependable computers that allow McCormick to wear what it called an insulin pump, a device he inserts into his skin at one point during the day that automatically monitors his blood sugar, giving him a shot of insulin when it falls too low.
“I change the place I put in it so that I don’t develop an infection,” he said.
Early on in his disease, McCormack suffered what is called “bleeding eyes,” a very common problem with diabetics. The retinas bleed inside the eyes.
Diabetes is number one cause of blindness, amputations and kidney disease in the United States. Asking the feds for more help
In early May, McCormack and thousands of others from across the nation went to Washington D.C. to lobby for more federal money to fund research projects that would keep future victims from having to go through what current victims do, and promote other legislative solutions to the problem.
“A woman from Bayonne was supposed to come with us,” McCormack said. “But she couldn’t afford to come. We had to pay our own way.”
McCormack and other lobbyists paid visits to the congressional offices, as part of an effort to get New Jersey’s representatives to support their cause.
McCormack met with aides from local federal representatives such as Rep. Steve Rothman, Rep. Donald Payne, Rep. Bob Menendez, Sen. Jon Corzine and Sen. Frank Lautenberg.
The delegation brought several children who suffer, and Lautenberg talked with the kids, asking how the disease affected them.
One child handed Lautenberg a needle and asked him to make history by putting it in the Smithsonian, a symbolic act to say that if such things had to be preserved, they were no longer a problem.
“The senator was shocked,” McCormack recalled during an interview this week. “That was nothing I could have done. But it got Lautenberg’s attention because he asked the kid how many shots the kid took a day.”
The news was disturbing to the senator when the child talked about the seven shots needed to keep insulin levels in line with heath recommendations, and the seven to 12 daily finger pricks to check.
The group got Lautenberg to sign onto their cause.
“He said he would support us, and asked what he could do to help,” McCormick said. The numbers are staggering
As of 2003, 18 million adult Americans have some form of diabetes, a 61 percent increase since 1990, with another 40 million suffering what experts call a pre-diabetes state. Federal statistics show that 213,000 people die from diabetes each year, although some claim this figure is under-reported by as much as 40 percent. For people born in the year 2000, estimates claim 33 percent of them will develop diabetes in their lifetime.
California leads the nation in diagnoses, with 1.8 million people diagnosed with diabetes by the end of 2002. New Jersey had about 426,000 reported cases.
McCormack and others who went to Washington D.C. were seeking to get the federal money to boost its allegation for diabetes research by $10 million. They estimated that a comprehensive program for all 50 states would cost about $120 million.
But other issues were also on the agenda, such as the possible decrease of insurance coverage and the promotion of legislation that would help minorities and other groups hardest hit by the disease. Seeking more federal money
While Gov. Jim McGreevey and the New Jersey State Legislature have taken bold steps in seeking solutions for diseases such as diabetes through legalizing stem cell research and establishing a stem cell research institute, the federal government has banned the use of federal money for using human cells, thus voiding the most promising scientific avenue of research.
An idea for a three-day Diabetes National Call-in Day would have people from around the nation calling their legislators while teams showed up to lobby for more federal money for research.
The annual estimated cost for treating people with diabetes is $132 billion in the United States. Current statistics show that treatment for people with diabetes costs the nation $7,333 annually per person, but that the federal money spends only about $51.33 annually per person on research and less than $4 annually per person on educating the public on prevention.
Education is a key piece in the program to deal with diabetes, which has taken over as the lead cause of death in the United States, exceeding AIDS.
McCormack recalls the sharply negative reaction he got from a girl he once dated just after his being diagnosed. “She didn’t want to see me because she was afraid she might catch it from me,” he said. “But you don’t catch diabetes like you can a cold.” What is diabetes?
Diabetes is a disease in which the blood has too much glucose or blood sugar. This comes from food, muscle and the liver. In a normal system, the glucose – using insulin manufactured by the pancreas – feeds the body’s cells. When the pancreas fails to produce enough insulin, the blood sugar remains in the blood.
There are several types of diabetes: type one, type two, insulin resistant and gestational diabetes.
Type one diabetes, once called juvenile diabetes or insulin-dependent diabetes, is usually first diagnosed in children, teenagers or young adults. It results from the body’s immune system attacking the insulin, forcing a person to take insulin shots or use an insulin pump, along with diet, exercise, aspirin and control of blood pressure and cholesterol.
Type two diabetes, sometimes called adult-onset diabetes or non-insulin-dependent diabetes, is the most common form of diabetes. People can develop this at any age, though it has become more and more common as people age. The pancreas simply doesn’t make enough insulin or the body does not use the insulin properly. Excess body weight can increase the chances of developing this type of diabetes. Some people can control this type through diet, various medications, exercise and control of blood pressure and cholesterol.
Some people get type one and type two for what is called insulin resistant diabetes.
Some women develop gestational diabetes during the late stages of pregnancy, when excess hormones cause a shortage of insulin. This frequently goes away once the baby is born.