Diabetes: Just as Deadly as Ever

Jim moved to Southwest Florida just a couple months ago. He was a young man in his early 30s, a professional who worked the second shift in front of a computer at an area publisher. He had no family there; it was a new job that brought him, and he was still getting to know folks and just beginning to make friends. So if anything seemed amiss with Jim, nobody would have been likely to notice it as out of the ordinary.

But a few days before Thanksgiving, he called in sick to his new job. The next day, feeling worse, he took himself to the hospital. Within two days, he was dead. Diabetes. Previously undiagnosed.

Diabetes kills people. Sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly. Sometimes it's not the primary cause of death; people end up dying with their diabetes, but not necessarily from it. It's a disease that can be managed with careful monitoring and good medical care once it's been identified. The trouble is that more and more people are becoming diabetic at earlier ages, and the younger people are, the less likely they are to consider themselves at risk of serious disease. But there are few diseases more serious, and increasingly, there are few more common.

Maybe you've heard this before. Maybe you're tired of hearing it. Perhaps all the comfortable advertising with kids and musicians and athletes talking easily about their blood-testing devices has made this killer disease seem somehow familiar and less deadly. But it is deadly. And when a productive young man suddenly dies without ever knowing what was ailing him, it simply shows that the message is still not getting out enough.