by Peter Corris
Sweet & Sour
A Diabetic Life
Peter Corris
Copyright © 2000, Peter Corris
In memory of Fred Hollows
For giving of their knowledge and providing information from my medical records, thanks to Drs Paul Beaumont, John Burgess, Warren Kidson and Gordon Ennis. Thanks also to Ruth Corris.
CONTENTS
PHOTOGRAPHS
INTRODUCTION
PROLOGUE 'What the hell is happening to me?'
1 'Does this mean I can't get married?'
2 He was only sixteen…
3 Hypodermics and 'hypos'
4 Bad habits
5 Six quid a week
6 Going off the rails
7 Sex in the sixties
8 Punishment in the Pacific
9 Warning signs
10 'By the way, he's a diabetic'
11 Going blind
12 Meeting Fred Hollows
13 Getting better
14 Going straight
15 Life with diabetes wasn't meant to be easy
CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
AFTERWORD
GLOSSARY
RESOURCES LIST - DIABETES AUSTRALIA
PHOTOGRAPHS
1. 1958, aged 16, shortly after I was diagnosed with diabetes.
2. 1968, looking plump in Canberra.
3. Roughing it at Wanderer Bay, Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, 1969.
4. Passport photo, 1970 – this look plus needles and syringe aroused suspicion at Moscow airport.
5. Boozy in Canberra, 1973.
6. After a lasering session, 1977, in Sydney with my four-month-old daughter, Ruth.
7. After a dressing down from Fred Hollows, running with four-minute-miler Merv Lincoln, 1980. (Courtesy Fairfax Photo Library.)
8. 1998, 40 years a diabetic – fit and well with Jean on Coochiemudlo Island, Queensland. (Courtesy Queensland Newspapers Pty Ltd.)
Cover Photograph - Peter Corris' plaque at the Sydney Writers' Walk, Circular Quay, Sydney
INTRODUCTION
This is not a 'how to live with diabetes' book. It contains no recipes, no diets, no advice about injection equipment or technique. Excellent books on the management of diabetes are available in any good library1 and many public hospitals now have first-rate diabetic support services. On the Internet my usual search engine throws up 14 categories and 409 sites for 'diabetes'. A telephone call to Diabetes Australia can supply the diabetic or his or her carers with all the information needed to allow the diabetic to lead a close to normal life.
And yet all this support and information can be seen as somewhat clinical, and I'm encouraged to think that an intimate, frank account of one person's experience as a diabetic might serve some purpose.
At the time of writing I've been a diabetic for 41 years. Broadly speaking, I spent the first half of this time behaving precisely as a diabetic should not, and set myself on a course that would have led to blindness, amputation and an early death. I have spent the second half behaving as a diabetic should. This journey has provided the structure for this book – a long downward swoop and an upturn just in time.
The approach is basically biographical: I've sketched the events of my life and tried to outline the part diabetes has played in shaping those events for better or worse. When I look back I see how foolish I was to neglect my diabetes as I did and how lucky I've been to escape the worst consequences of that neglect. As I examine my life now I realise that being a 'good diabetic' is not so difficult (and far easier now than when I was first diagnosed), and the reward – being able to live a useful life for a normal span – is beyond price.
I don't want to give the impression that diabetes has dominated my life. Modern philosophers insist on the fluidity and multiplicity of identity, and 'diabetic' is only one strand in the skein that has been my experience. I have had three professions – academic, journalist and writer; I have travelled to many countries and lived in all three of the eastern Australian states; I have been twice married and a parent to three children.
So this is a very selective version that focuses on the diabetic strand rather than the others. I hope that this account of what I might call my diabetic life may help some people avoid the mistakes I made and tread a more intelligent and responsible path.
Peter Corris
PROLOGUE
'What the hell is wrong with me?'
I rush down the corridor and take the steps four at a time, risking a broken leg, to get out of the school building and into the grounds. I spring for a tap, but not just any tap. This has to be the tap hidden around the corner from the quadrangle where everyone will be milling about in the mid-morning break.
I reach the tap, turn it on hard and put my head under it. I swallow as fast as I can, gulping in the water, gasping for breath. It seems to take minutes before I can get enough water down to satisfy me. Then it's a dash for the toilet so that I can make it through the next two classes before my bladder bursts.
I hate myself. Why am I doing this? What the hell is wrong with me? This is the third day. I think it is some kind of moral weakness, like excessive masturbation. I know all about that. My mouth is dry within minutes of sitting down and thirst begins to torture me, although I must have drunk a gallon of water. I can't concentrate on the lesson. All I can think about is a running tap and how wonderful it would be to have my head under it with my mouth wide open. Now both weaknesses are clobbering me – the thirst and the bursting bladder. My skin is dry; I feel as if I am burning up but I am not sweating; I feel cold if anything, and weak and shaky. Perhaps I am sick? But I am rarely sick – the occasional cold or bout of flu – and I've never heard of a sickness that makes you drink like a fish and piss like a fountain.
Somehow, I get through to lunchtime. Another rush to the tap, then several long, gushing pisses during the 40-minute break. I wolf down my lunch of sandwiches and fruit and buy a pie and a drink at the tuckshop. I did this yesterday, too, and it is unusual because my pocket money is minimal and has to be made to last. I don't even like pies much but I want the bulk. The sweet drink doesn't do the job. Off to the tap again, and to the toilet. The afternoon session is a misery, but I manage to achieve the most important thing – concealing from my mates that anything is wrong.
The train ride from South Yarra – the station nearest Melbourne Boys High School – to my home station, takes about 40 minutes. Robert, one of my friends, is on the train with me. He gets off at Caulfield, four stations before mine, and I can hardly wait to see him go. I jump off the train at the next stop so I can piss and drink water, then I have to wait 20 minutes for another train. A leak at the station and a long, long drink and then the 10-minute walk home.
As I make the walk on a mild September afternoon, my schoolbag feels heavy, although there's nothing unusual in it, just the normal stuff for a night's homework and the novel I'm reading. I am an addicted novel reader, snatching pages whenever the opportunity presents, but I haven't opened the book for two days. Thirst and shame have been my companions. The bag is a dead weight and my limbs feel weak.
The dryness is on me again and I steel myself to act normally in front of my mother before I can get my mouth around a tap. Not for the first time, I notice how thin I am. I am ashamed of this, too. Ashamed of my chick-wing shoulder blades and scrawny chest. 'You're only sixteen. You'll fill out,' people have told me but it doesn't seem to be happening. Instead, I seem to be getting thinner.
As I open the gate, I think of the last two nights. They were terrible. In the small room I share with my younger brother, I had lain awake feeling my throat get drier by the second. I drank the glass of water I'd taken to bed but it didn't touch the sides. I was up and down, processing water, half a d
ozen times, with the house all quiet and my brother sleeping soundly. I envied him. It seemed that no sooner had I got to sleep than the pressure in my bladder would build and I'd be up again. It is a small house with only two bedrooms. My sister occupies a sleep-out in the yard, but the toilet is on the back porch and I can flush it without waking anybody, or so I think.
I am almost in tears as I have to summon strength to push open the light gate. My throat is on fire. It's no use. I'll have to tell them something's wrong with me.
1'Does this mean I can't get married?'
diabetes mellitus: a disorder of carbohydrate metabolism in which sugars in the body are not oxidized to produce energy due to lack of the pancreatic hormone insulin
Concise Oxford Medical Dictionary
When I got home from school that afternoon my mother was probably in the garden. We had a standard quarter-acre block and my parents were very proud of their garden. It had cement paths and borders to all the flower beds, a few shrubs and several fruit trees in the back. There was a lot of grass, front and back, and it was my job to keep it cut close with a hand mower. My mother seemed to find plenty to do in the garden, as she did in the house. She weeded, pruned, replanted and sprayed, none of which held any interest for me.
We had moved from Yarraville, a working class, western suburb of Melbourne, to Bentleigh in the south-east. Bentleigh was comparatively new. The area had formerly been known for its market gardens but the post-war suburban sprawl had engulfed it. Brick veneer was the dominant building style, and most of the residents, like my parents, were trying to better themselves.
I used the toilet when I got to the back porch, stumbled into the kitchen, drank glass after glass of water and dragged myself into my bedroom; no high-jumping or weight-lifting or tennis-ball-hitting this afternoon. No homework, either. I pulled off the hated grey suit jacket and tie, collapsed onto my bed and fell asleep.
My father was in the bedroom, looking concerned, when I woke up. It was rare for him to come into the room. Working and lower-middle-class families in those days were extraordinarily prudish – I never saw my parents naked – and bedrooms were off-limits.
But here he was, sitting on my brother's bed looking worried. He told me that they had seen what was happening to me and they'd made an appointment for me to see the family doctor that evening.
'I can't stop drinking and going to the toilet,' I said.
He told me that when he was young and working some distance from home in a factory, he'd had a similar difficulty and had to wear a truss for a time to relieve the problem. He was no doubt trying to comfort me, but I couldn't see much connection between my plight and his.
After dinner my father drove me to the doctor in his old Vauxhall soft-top. I doubted I could have walked the mile to the surgery.
Dr John Storey was a typical family physician of the period – affable, overweight and overworked. He chain-smoked Craven A cork-tips and nobody thought anything about it. His bulging waistcoat was always ash-streaked. Exercise would have been unknown to him, and his diet would have been like my father's – bacon and eggs for breakfast and red meat for the evening meal, seven nights a week. Both he and my father died in their fifties from heart disease.
We sat in the surgery, waiting our turn. My father's dry sense of humour often amused me, but there was always a distance between us. This must've been partly my fault; I was introspective and withdrawn, not a sunny youth. But I suspect that he was disappointed in me. He was a skilled carpenter, plumber and mechanic and I had none of these abilities and no interest in them. We had little in common and I didn't find conversation with him easy. That night, he probably looked at the magazines.
Appointment times with Dr Storey didn't mean much. If he felt like a chat with a congenial patient – about books, politics, religion – he'd have it, and the other patients could wait. I had seen the doctor off and on for minor things over the years – a bit of asthma when very young, a touch of bronchitis, eczema, a boil. Normally, I'd have taken a library book with me to read while waiting, but things weren't normal.
In what I later saw as a remarkable piece of serendipity, I picked up a copy of Reader's Digest and flicked through it, looking for sporting articles and checking to see if the condensed book was of interest. My favourite sections were 'Humour in Uniform' (a Cold War exercise, although I didn't know it then), and 'My Most Unforgettable Character'. I read those and then my eye fell on another article with a title something like 'Do You Have Diabetes?' I have often thought of searching the Reader's Digest index for the exact title of the article, but given the random and ratty state of Dr Storey's magazines, the issue could have dated from the '40s or even earlier.
I looked at the article probably because I had heard of diabetes as something suffered by the American tennis players Bill Talbert and Ham Richardson, but I knew nothing about the causes, symptoms and consequences. A few paragraphs were enough to convince me that I was a diabetic. The symptoms for juvenile onset diabetes mellitus were raging thirst, hunger, excessive urination, loss of weight – spot on. The disease had been fatal until the mid-1920s when control, but not cure, was achieved through the injection of insulin, combined with a diet that measured carbohydrate intake.
The article stressed that diabetics could lead normal lives, although the talk of injections and weighing food for every meal didn't sound so normal. I was not alone – as much as one per cent of the American population was diagnosed as being diabetic and the true figure was probably higher. Apparently, the disease did not hit everybody like a thunderbolt the way it had me. Some people displayed the symptoms in less drastic form over time and went into a slow decline. The Reader's Digest was not a publication that shirked the issue – the downside of diabetes was an increased risk of heart disease, a high incidence of blindness and in males (the word struck a fear into my heart that remained with me for almost 40 years): impotence!
I knew what impotence was. Henry VIII suffered it through disease and self-indulgence, Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) through injury, and sundry other characters in fiction through illness, weakness of character and sexual ambivalence. It was a scary word, suggestive of doubtful territory; I remember reading it and closing the magazine. It meant you couldn't, didn't it? But my masturbatory excesses suggested that I could. It was a very confusing and frightening moment and, through no fault of his, being a man of his time, my father was the very last person in the world to talk to about it.
We went into the surgery, sat down and my father elaborated on what he'd already told Dr Storey on the phone. I confirmed a detail or two and was given a plastic beaker to piss into.
'Just a sample,' Dr Storey said.
He knew, as I knew, that I could have filled the bloody thing 10 times over. In those days urine was tested for sugar by means of an eye-dropper, a test tube and a reagent tablet. The result was never in doubt – the sample must have turned a bright red.
I can't remember the conversation that followed. My mother has told me that my father wept after he brought me home, but no man in those days would display that sort of emotion to his son. My recollection is that it was all business – another medical appointment first thing in the morning, nothing more to eat that night, and assurances all round.
Quite how the early appointment with the endocrinologist, Dr H Pincus Taft, was organised for early the following morning, I don't know. Perhaps Dr Taft had an answering service that would respond to urgent cases referred by a GP. However it was contrived, I was in Dr Taft's rooms in Collins Street with my father at 8am and a bag had been packed for me. I was going to miss some school in the important fifth year because I was going to hospital.
Dr Taft was a stocky, olive-skinned man with a shiny bald head and Semitic features. He was possibly the most urbane and sophisticated man I had met up to that time. He radiated intelligence and charm and I felt immense confidence in him. Like many, perhaps most, doctors of the time, he smoked. He offered his silver cigarette case to my father,
who refused.
'I gave it up 10 years ago.'
'I wish I could.' Dr Taft tapped his cigarette on the case before lighting it. 'How did you do it?'
'Stubbornness,' my father said, an answer that accurately summed up a key element of his personality.
Dr Taft explained that I would have to have insulin injections and follow a strict diet and that this had to begin at once. I was not told why, but I later realised that the high sugar and ketone levels in my system, the result of my pancreas having completely failed to produce insulin, constituted a real danger of coma and serious damage to my health. Remarkably, after the time that has passed, some of the details of this meeting – like Dr Taft's immaculate white shirt and dove-grey suit – are clear. There was talk of health insurance and there the Corris family was well-covered. My father was a lapsed Mason but still subscribed to the health insurance scheme of the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows.
Dr Taft favoured the Bethesda Private Hospital in Richmond as a stabilisation base for his patients. How I got there I don't remember… possibly in the Vauxhall. It's likely that my father took a day off from his job in the furniture department of Myer's store in the city.
I was given a bed in a ward shared with three other patients. I hadn't been in hospital for over 10 years (a brief admittance as a scarlet fever patient was my only other experience), but I was not particularly alarmed by it. There was a locker for my clothes and a bedside cabinet for books and other items. I still had the raging thirst and the weakness. I don't remember, but I imagine that I drank, pissed and slept.
Early in the afternoon, the girl in the bed next to me was visited by her doctor. This is a puzzling memory… it seems unlikely that they would put males and females together in a ward, but as I have a distinct recollection of a girl a few years younger than myself injecting her doctor in the leg with water (as a training procedure directed at teaching her to inject herself), I assume boys and girls must have been lumped in together. I remember seeing the doctor's white hairless thigh – he must have worn very wide trousers, but then they did in those days.
