At first, Jules Smith could only walk 15 minutes at a time.
(JULES SMITH)
As the pastor of the Rising Star Missionary Baptist Church in Denver, I'm often called upon to visit parishioners and friends in the hospital. Our congregation is predominantly African American, a group that is at particularly high risk of type 2 diabetes. So when I go to the hospital, I'm sometimes visiting people who've lost their toes and even legs to diabetes, or who have other diabetes complications.
That kind of sight puts the fear of diabetes in me, because you see, I have it too. And that is one of the things that keeps me on track with controlling my condition.
I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 1992, when I was 45 years old. I was carrying 205 pounds on my 5'5" frame before my diagnosis, and I didn't exercise as much as I could. At the time, I just wasn't interested in any type of exercise.
Then I started feeling fatigued all the time. Even when I woke up in the morning, I felt tired, and later on in the day would feel so bad it felt like a Mack truck had hit me. At first I thought it was simply because I was overworking myself. But then I became unusually hungry and thirsty and developed flu-like symptoms. My doctor figured out pretty quickly that I had diabetes. When he checked my blood sugar, it was 550 mg/dl, which is very high (a normal fasting blood sugar is between 90 and 130 mg/dl).
My mother and father had diabetes, and my older brother and younger sister have it, too. So I knew my family history put me at higher risk of developing the disease. I wasn't shocked about my diagnosis. I wasn't depressed. I really just took it in stride—quite literally, as it turned out.
