In today's environment of cheap-to-the-patient pills that can cure almost anything from a hangnail to cancer, it's sometimes difficult to make significant and often-difficult lifestyle changes on account of a disease or a medical condition. Rarely is this more evident than in the public appearance of Type 2 diabetes.

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There's something to be said about being diagnosed at a stage in life where one has memories of family and friends living with diabetes, and how well they have (or have not) managed their condition: we have real-life role-models to help us understand what we can do, and what we can avoid doing, to optimize our health. This is particularly important when we are newly-diagnosed and need to set in place the lifestyle changes that diabetes requires of us.

While I'd known several people with diabetes -- friends, family, and colleagues -- in the forty-two years leading up to my diagnosis, two stood out in particular: my childhood orthopaedist, and my stepmother's father.

"Why these two?" one might ask. "Why not your mother's grandmother, or your father's mother, or even your own mother? You knew these women a lot longer, and a lot more intimately..."

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