Without regular doses of insulin, diabetic Douglas Brand is convinced he wouldn't have lived past the age of 13.
But on the 90th anniversary of the first use of the drug to treat the condition, the 66-year-old Kidlington man celebrated picking up his bus pass by taking part in the Cannes Marathon. The maths teacher was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes 53 years ago and has carefully managed his condition over the past five decades, and said he had seen major advances in medical technology during that time.
Douglas spoke to the Guardian on Monday, 90 years to the day since 14-year-old Canadian boy Leonard Thompson became the first person to be successfully treated with insulin. He said: “When I started off you had old fashioned syringes that you had to boil and put them in spirit, and it was pretty clumsy.”
Douglas used syringes for 10 years before switching to insulin pens, the most commonly used method of administering insulin, which he used for over 30 years. He now uses a pump, a small device the size of a compact digital camera that contains insulin and delivers it into the bloodsteam via thin wires and a syringe connected to his abdomen. Douglas keeps the pump, which is connected to him at all times, in a small pouch tucked under his belt.
“The pumps are permanently connected to you so you have plumbing into you," he said. "It contains a cartridge of insulin that you have to fill up. In here is a battery, a computer and a screw, which is like a pump. It doesn’t suit everyone.”
Douglas runs 30 miles a week and every time he exercises or eats a meal, he has to calculate how much insulin he will require. He said: “You have to think ahead if you are going to manage it effectively. I have to think what I am doing today. If I am going to be doing more energetic things I have to realize that I will need more fuel and less insulin.
"I am in a habit of managing my food and managing myself. On a day-by-day basis I take blood glucose readings to know where I am and then I calculate the carbohydrate content of everything I eat and I make sure that I have the right amount of insulin to process that food. I dial it up on this thing and it goes in. I do it meal-by-meal.”
Without this medical breakthrough, a million people in the UK who are kept alive with daily insulin injections would not be here. Prior to insulin treatment a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes was an invariable death sentence, with patients usually surviving for only a few months, and often just weeks or days.
But rather than being hindered by the condition, Douglas believes his diabetes has strengthened his character and helped him be effective in his career as a computer programmer, engineer and teacher. “I personally have never ever got up and said, ‘I wish I didn’t have this, there isn’t any point,’” Douglas said.
“I believe in turning negative into a positive. It is one heck of a valuable skill to acquire, the ability to think ahead. I think diabetes helped me to do that and be reasonably effective in my working life and think ahead of the consequences of things. I think it’s had a significant influence on me. I tell youngsters as well to try to get them to be positive about it.”
A father-of-two with five grandchildren, Douglas owes his life to the discovery of insulin as a way of treating is condition. “Without insulin, I reckon I would have lasted about three months,” he said.
In 1922 Dr. Frederick Banting discovered insulin and its positive effect on the body, originally using dogs in medical trials. Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old boy who had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes two years previously, was the first person for whom insulin came to be a life-saving drug.
Thanks to insulin injections he went from a 65 pound boy close to death through malnourishment – the only treatment at this time for diabetes was a starvation diet – to live into adulthood.
Not long after Leonard Thompson’s treatment began, in 1934 novelist HG Wells and his practitioner Dr RD Lawrence, both of whom had diabetes, set up the Diabetic Association aiming to make sure that everyone in the UK could gain access to insulin. The charity called for a national health service and stressed the importance of self-management of diabetes, given that the condition was life-long. This charity later became Diabetes UK.
Today Diabetes UK is the leading charity for over 3.7 million people in the UK with diabetes – 2.9 million diagnosed and an estimated 850,000 who have diabetes but do not know it - their families, friends and healthcare professionals.
