My mother had diabetes the last 20 years of her life. She was insulin-dependent but she wasn't Type 1 or Type 2. Mom had acute pancreatitis throughout the early '70s and had 90% of her pancreas removed just after the Blizzard of '77 in Buffalo. There was later some speculation that she had some beta cells left or some regenerated because Mom would have horrendous blood sugar swings seemingly out of nowhere.

I remember once going to a mall in a big city 2 hours from home a couple years after the surgery and ending up having an ambulance called for her. Mom kept eating sugar packets thinking she was low, and kept getting worse and worse. As I remember it, when she got to the hospital she was extremely high.

It took the doctors a long time to diagnose her properly. They took her gallbladder and then her spleen; finally they just cut her stem to stern and did exploratory surgery. She was very frail and ill by then and had been in the hospital for several months. The surgery to remove her pancreas took 9 hours, pancreatectomys were very rare then. Altogether she was in the hospital for 9 months. I was just a middle-schooler (giving away my age here). It was traumatic, to say the least.

As I got older, I was sometimes judgmental about how she treated her condition. Didn't she know she would feel so much better if she didn't eat so much candy or if she walked every day? If I ever got that sick, I would surely give up chocolate before living a poor quality of life. Why didn't she just lose 20 pounds?

As is the way so often in life, this has come back to haunt me. I'm definitely not as sick as she was,YET. I have a lot more sympathy now for what she went through. The remaining tenth of her pancreas was diseased and she had very painful attacks. She had to take enzymes before every meal, and a slew of other medications, as well as multiple daily insulin injections and glucose level tests.

My point is that now I understand how hard it is to change your eating behavior, especially when food is so much more than fuel. I probably learned my unhealthy relationship with food from Mom, just as she learned it from her parents - Grandpa had Type 2 and died of heart disease caused by not taking care of his diabetes.

Can I and will I be the generation to break this cycle? I think it's possible, it's the will that has me worried.