Re: Cheating Destiny (book excerpt)
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Posted by klausen on 08:37:41 2006/07/12
In Reply to:
Re: Cheating Destiny (book excerpt) posted by Aussie gal
If you read my other posts you would see that I am advocating a much more sophisticated position than your caricature suggests. I believe that parents have to judge the risk/benefit ratio of having children based on a careful assessment of a number of factors. The genetic loading of the family with risk for serious illness, the degree to which the illness is inheritable, the likelihood of a very rapid cure for the disease being found, the seriousness of the disease, the effectiveness of the treatment of the disease, the adequacy and humanity of society's response to people with the disease, the suicide rate among patients with the disease, are all factors which have to be taken into account. In a disease as serious as type 1 diabetes, it seems totally obvious that a type 1 patient should never be so reckless and arrogant as to impose the significant risk of it on an as yet unborn person, especially one to whom one owes a special responsibility to protect it.
As for type 1 diabetes being manageable, that is simply not true. For many of us, the blood sugar swings are so dramatic and unpredictable that we are caught between a) suffering an endless series of hypoglycemic emergencies all the time in an effort to keep the blood sugar low; b) having high blood sugar in an effort to live a safe and productive life for as long as we can; or c) staying home, giving up all hope of a creative and productive life, and testing blood sugar 20 times a day, injecting insulin 15 times a day, calculating and weighing every grams of food; and wearing a dynamometer to calculate all energy expended, all in an effor to normalize blood sugar. All three options are unacceptable for a decent life.
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