Carrie, My hubby is Type 2 diabetic. Discovered it during a physical for a new job in 1998; blood sugar was over 400. His vision had been bad but he did not tell me. A few months before he had been on steroids for an ear infections..2 rounds and during that time lost 30 pounds without trying. He told his dr that he thought he had diabetes because he was in the bathroom peeing all night and drinking lots of water plus the weight loss. Dr. supposedly ran bloodwork and said he was fine. It was just 3 months after that bloodwork that they found he was indeed diabetic. I checked his file from the old dr. and his blood sugar was over 400 then...not sure why he lied or maybe he didn't even check his file. First drug they gave him brought it down quickly...cutting back on sugary soft drinks made a big difference until we discovered he could not use aspartame because it was causing him to have numerous vertigo attacks. He has Meniere's disease and aspartame can cause attacks. We realized after the fact that the dr. who gave him the steroids did not realize he had Meniere's nor did an ENT dr who ran an MRI to see if he had a tumor in his ear. He has lost all hearing in his right ear due to this disease. Thank God we found a dr. who knew right away he had Meniere's and explained what was happening. Unfortunately, his job was very stressful and his diabetes required more meds...this has happened several times and the dr just kept adding more meds. He walks a lot on his current job but it is very long hours and stressful which seems to be the cause of his high blood sugar. We have a new dr as of last month...see him next week for followup, we will see if he has a better approach. I suggested he might benefit from some classes on what foods he needs to be eating. He works a very long shift and meal time is very irregular so he takes things to munch on during the day...veggies, peanuts. He keeps doing the sandwich thing and I keep telling him he is shooting himself in the foot! He loves potatoes, rice, etc. It is a very hard row! His parents developed diabetes late in life...80's...he was in his 50's. Stevia is good...expensive. I need to grow it and learn how to use for him. I just pray I don't come up with it...If I do not have my chocolate occasionally, they will have to lock me up! Peggy

DH said the other day, "We'll pay for it in our taxes or we'll pay in the ER" which is true. I don't mind at all paying taxes to cover more american's health care costs...but I do mind paying taxes to fund thee deaths of thousands of our youth in wars we shouldn't be fighting. My biggest issue with this debacle is that it's not health care reform (call it that all you want but it's not!) It's just a screw around issue with insurance companies that obviously isn't working terribly well for most. I like parts of it, but the ability to hop prices up the day after the bill passed should have been addressed if our congress wouldn't have tried to rush this through. Goldie shouldn't have to "win"...it should have been a clear mandate to be enforced immediately. This staggered crap just means that when we have a new administration, and we will, it will be available for debate and for new laws to remove all that this bill might have done good. Health care reform though was desperately needed. At every hospital we visited we saw this need. Families that weren't devistated by costs so much as they were by lack of a good system of diagnosis. No standard of care from state to state, no central records keeping....transfering records from hospital to hospital is a nightmare! And that pile of lost paperwork (they forgot to include an early bloodwork result in our package and that carried over from hospital to hospital because we were copying the original package with the forgotten piece). that one little slip was the answer to our son's pain taken within the first month of his life, he suffered for three years because the other doctors didn't see that one piece. And this is not the first case of a medical clue gone astray. So many things aren't covered, so many issues of health care and drug costs that were swept under the table....terrible stuff. And as to the life expectancy issue.....life style does come into play there. I know that at all of the hospitals we went to for rare diseases, the beds were full of children from other countries. Most paid cash to get to America for the quality care of someone who actually specialized in their condition. At Johns Hopkins half or more (it varied) of the children in the program we were in were from other countries, including Canada, Japan, Quatar, Mexico, England and Germany. They paid cash to get in because it was the best program in the world. America is tops in many many areas of the medical world, but getting the kids or adults who need the special care to the specialist facility is an exercise in futility most often. My frustration shows :) I know that many know what real medical trials are....and I can easily say I'd probably view the insurance reform differently if I hadn't experienced what we did. But my experiences led me to see that this is all a silly joke without addressing the real issues that needed to be addressed.

I won't comment about the fibroids and enlargement of your uterus, but I've been an ENT nurse for 22 years and I urge you to seek a 2nd opinion prior to having surgery on your sinuses. Have you had a CT of the sinus yet? or at least a limited CT or a sinus series? There is no way (no matter what any doctor may tell you) to tell if it is your sinuses without one of these studies. The CT is the best. There are many ENT specialists who jump the gun, performing sinus surgery that isn't needed. It's fast and easy money for them, and many of them take advantage of their patient's "ignorance" of his/her sinuses. I do not mean ignorance in any sort of demeaning way, but we are all ignorant at some point about certain areas until we are educated about them. So, ask questions, get studies, and don't let someone start "reaming" out your sinuses at the drop of a hat. We have a friend who had sinus surgery with a clear sinus x-ray (he found out later) and he was left with meningitis after the surgeon knicked his brain case and he developed a cerebral spinal fluid leak. He is now deaf in his right ear and suffered from vertigo for 7 years until another ENT surgeon finally had to cut his nerve of hearing to control it (and this, I might add, doesn't always work). He suffered with this for 7 years because the 2nd surgeon waited until the statute of limitations was up for a law suit from the first surgery. They do stick together most of the time. Andierut

Leslie...This is good news....I hope it never gets active again and he will be able to live a happy normal productive life, as any handsome young man shoudl be able to.....Hope he grows old and gives you some handsome little great grandsons to hug. Okay...now that this tragedy is behind him...it's time for all that c r a p to stop in your family. Hugs and happy dancing to you all. patti