For the past 50 years, Whittlesea resident Diane Leahy has lived life to the full. She has two grown-up daughters, five grandchildren, she has travelled and played sports, yet she has been living with diabetes since she was 11.
“Live life, that’s my motto,” Leahy says. And that’s what she does, although these days a consequence of her condition means she also lives with heart disease.
This is an all-too-common offshoot and diabetes can also attack the kidneys and cause blindness and poor circulation.
In the half century that has passed since Leahy was diagnosed, things have become dramatically easier.
“Everything was so strict; they were still in the learning stages. Everything with carbohydrates in it had to be weighed. My mother prepared meals and would have a tablespoon at the table to measure mine out.”
Leahy also learnt to inject herself with the life-saving insulin that her pancreas was failing to produce.
She does not have the type of diabetes that has become the fastest-growing chronic condition in this country; only about 11 per cent of Australians with diabetes have type 1, which is genetic. But all types of diabetes, including gestational diabetes, are on the rise.
More than 100,000 Australians have developed diabetes in the past year alone, and more than 93,000 of these people have type 2 diabetes.
The most recent estimates show the cost of diabetes in Australia is $14.6 billion a year, and rising.
Managing diabetes is Leahy’s forte. She lost her first child in the early ’70s when 50 per cent of the babies of diabetics died in the last month before birth. Now early induction prevents most of these tragedies.
By the time her second and third children came along, the system knew what to do. Now, her daughters are her backstops.
And they were by her side last week when Leahy received a Kellion Victory Medal from Victoria’s Lieutenant-Governor, Chief Justice Marilyn Warren AC, at Melbourne’s Government House for the inspiration she has been for others through her quest to prove life can be lived, and lived well, even after 50 years with a killer disease.
The Kellion Victory Medal was named after the late Claude Kellion AM, a Sydney businessman who established a foundation to promote diabetes research after his son died aged 38 from diabetes complications.
