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When I Decided to Live With Diabetes

Excerpts from Dannenfelser's Manuscript

Complete Text of Dannenfelser's Manuscript

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When I Decided to Live With Diabetes...

Excerpts from manuscript

55. John Dannenfelser circa 1935 Courtesy of Selma Dannenfelser Brigham

My diabetes was discovered in December 1924. I was barely fourteen and the discovery was occasioned by excessive urination and an unusually tired feeling. The family physician tested my urine and said it "was about ten percent sugar" and that I "might live six months if I ate right." The physician gave my mother his twenty year old medical book on diabetes which listed which foods should and should not be eaten by diabetics. . . . . diabetes was an active factor in shaping my viewpoint and encouraging my social limitations. I was a high school freshman when the disease was discovered. I started taking insulin in 1927 when I was a senior and never returned to school. I translated six books of the Aeneid at home in bed and did the other necessary work to get my credits and graduate with my class.

For a year or two prior to this recognition of diabetes I had always felt a little tired and despondent and had on numerous occasions pondered the merits of suicide for no particular reason that I can now recall. I had never been as active physically as most children in my age group.

My unusually good scholastic record and a childish snobbiness that my parents never discouraged properly confirmed my feeling of isolation and frustration. . . .

For three years I was president of my high school class and took an active interest in school affairs - chiefly by stirring up controversies on politics, student government, religion, and numerous other subjects that intrigue adolescents and scare teachers. I always thought the athletic events were silly and persuaded a vociferous minority of students that this viewpoint was sound - thereby meriting the wrath of right thinkers.

. . . . for nearly three years I lived on a diet of meat, butter, gluten bread and five percent vegetables . . . . The new diet very promptly eliminated the sugar in the urine and the physician decided that maybe I didn't have diabetes after all.

I became increasingly hungry regardless of the quantity of cabbage and sauerkraut I ate and was thirsty all the time. When the disease was discovered, I was nearly six feet tall and weighed 150 pounds. In the next three years my height increased to slightly over six feet and my weight gradually declined to a low of 120 in the fall of 1927.

In spite of the restricted diet sugar soon returned to the urine and control continued to become more difficult as my physical condition declined. We went to all four of the local physicians for medical advice. They all insisted that we should under no circumstances use insulin and that they could not do anything to greatly postpone my imminent demise.

Numerous well-meaning people with all sorts of sure cures for diabetes called on us. Mail order doctors with special water cures and all sorts of odd nostrums found out about my diabetes and tried to do a selling job. Farmers who knew of sure cures with exclusive diets of cider, sauerkraut, milk, cheese and other foods offered their advice without charge but I continued to grow worse and no doubt developed an increasingly disagreeable disposition.

My parents decided that a trip to visit my mother's brother in Texas might be helpful . . . . so in October 1927 my mother took me to Texas. We immediately went to my uncle's doctor who thought my diet was exactly right.

He felt that the use of insulin would be fatal. It is difficult now to understand why so many physicians in the 1920s were afraid of insulin, but I can only say that this was the attitude of every doctor I knew until I went into that Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio about two o'clock one morning in diabetic coma. The doctor who had treated me decided that I was going to die anyhow and being very tired, he left.

In this critical situation one of the senior interns at the hospital heard about my condition and induced my mother to let him try the use of insulin. With the use of saline solution, glucose, and some 300 units of insulin I was out of the coma the next day.

My improvement seemed very rapid. For two or three months I got by with three daily doses of insulin totaling some 50 units. For the first time I was on a carefully weighed diet.

My second diabetic coma occurred in my home in 1931 and was more difficult than the first. My physician, Dr. A. Hayes Davis of Louisville spent several days at my home and in less than 24 hours administered over 1200 units of insulin. The coma was preceded by a bad cold and indigestion but came with little warning.

My last diabetic coma came in 1934 when I was living in Louisville. At noon I was unconscious with insulin reaction and before evening I was in the hospital in coma.

From 1928 until I began the use of protamine insulin in January 1936 I continued to take insulin at midnight - with orange juice if the test was negative and without orange juice if the test was positive. For another period of some two years I took both kinds of insulin before breakfast and supper.

With the development of insulin zinc crystals I discontinued the use of unmodified insulin and have since taken from 65 to 70 units of protamine insulin and about 10 units of insulin zinc crystals before breakfast and about 10 units of insulin zinc crystals before supper. Reactions have been more severe and less predictable since the use of newer types of insulin but the danger of diabetic coma seems also to have been greatly reduced. My disposition is stable and I do not have moody spells, despondency and elation as diabetics are reputed to. When I decided to live with diabetes in 1927 I deliberately decided to make life as pleasant as possible for myself and went about overhauling my disposition. I never use liquor, and I rarely use beer as its effects are too easily mistaken for reaction. I never learned to smoke and have outgrown any urge to smoke for sociability.

56. John Dannenfelser circa 1945 Courtesy of Selma Dannenfelser Brigham

As to my heredity background, my father and uncle have diabetes and take insulin and another of their brothers died of diabetes in 1917. . . . . . Kidney diseases were common in her [his mother's] family and few of her immediate relatives lived past seventy. Insanity and organic diseases other than diabetes seem to have characterized some of her other relatives.

In Memory of John Matthew Dannenfelser, Jr. (1910-1949)

57. Certificate of Death
December 21, 1949

Dannenfelser was born in 1910,
contracted "juvenile-onset" diabetes in 1924,
and died of leukemia in 1949.

Courtesy of Selma Dannenfelser Brigham