The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

A4 -The Oakville Beaver, Wednesday December 8, 2004 R u n n i n g f o r h i s l i f e By Lawrence Hill SPECIAL TO THE BEAVER Writers have a reputation for being harddrinking. hard-smoking, wild-partying anar chists. Not this one. These days, when not at the computer keyboard, I'm running for my life. Over the next year, on top of chipping away at a novel, I have committed to train for a "Team Diabetes" 21-kilometre race in Amsterdam and in so doing, to raise at least $5,600 for the Canadian Diabetes Association. My partner, Miranda Hawkins, is also going to run and raise that same amount. It must be out of love, because she is neither a diabetic nor, until the very recent past, a runner. At age 13 - the same year that I taught myself to type with my eyes shut while pounding out short stories on my mother's LC Smith type writer -- I discovered long distance running. Although I was only a middle-of-the-pack com petitor in high school and university, the love of running has been a life-saver for me. It has helped me stay fit, which is crucial for diabetics. People who are overweight have more trouble controlling their blood sugars and face greater risks of diabetic complications. I have been run ning for some 35 years, but now when I run, it's no longer just about feeling good, it's about knowing that regular exercise prolongs the time that I can live with the disease, and live well with itMedical research, public education and advo cacy, and adequate funding stand out as our greatest hopes that Canada can continue to play a key role in the struggle to improve treatment for the disease and eventually find a cure. Compared to Frederick Banting, the Canadian physician who won the Nobel Prize for discover ing insulin in 1922 and opening up the first viable treatment option for millions of diabetics around the world, I can't do much at all about the disease. Not all alone. But teamed up with the Canadian Diabetes Association, I can make a difference. Through Team Diabetes, hundreds of walkers, runners, cyclists and triathletes sign up each year for sporting events such as internation al marathons, and commit to raise serious money along the way. It has turned into the biggest national fundraising campaign of the Canadian Diabetes Association. Since 2000, about 1,500 recreational athletes - many of them dia betics as well as first-time marathoners - have raised $4.2 million for diabetes research, educa tion and advocacy in Canada. They call diabetes the silent killer. One-third of the estimated two million Canadians and 18 million Americans who have diabetes don't even know they've got the disease. If you have dia betes, either your pancreas doesn't produce enough insulin (or any insulin at all), or your body doesn't use the hormone properly. But insulin carries sugar out of the bloodstream and into cells where it can be stored and used as energy. If you don't have enough insulin or can't make good use of what you've got, sugar levels rise too high in the blood. Sustained over time, elevated blood sugar levels can lead to nerve damage, heart disease, kidney failure, blindness, amputation of limbs, and death. For me, it's personal. Very personal. I've seen it all first-hand. For some 30 years, I watched diabetes take down my father, Daniel Hill, organ by organ, limb by limb. In my child hood and adolescence, he stood tall as a powerful black man, who was devoting his life to human rights and celebrating black history in Canada. He is remembered as a civil rights pioneer in this country, as the co-founder of the Ontario Black History Society, and as the first person to write a popular history of blacks in Canada. He had an amazing sense of humour, a love of storytelling (I must have inherited that gene from him), and was one of the most charismatic people I have known. But in his final years on the job as Ontario's Ombudsman, diabetes weakened him badly, and he had to dig deep to find the strength to finish his term in office. While prominent in the public eye, Dad kept his disease a secret to all but those in the family. One of the best parts about being on the top of the food chain at work was his plush office on the southeast corner of Bloor Street and Avenue Road had a private bathroom. Nobody could see him injecting insulin to stay alive. After retiring at the age of 65, he became too ill to enjoy even the quiet pleasures of read ing and writing. That was some blow for a man of intellect, who had devoured Hemingway to keep up his spirits during the Second World W'ar, and who had always hoped to write yet another book - a story about the Underground Railroad in Canada -- after he retired. But diabetes, which eats away at the nerve endings feeding the organs, rendered him functionally blind. Dad was never able to write that second book. Diabetes next ruined his kidneys, and required my mother to hook him up to a dialysis machine at home until the treatments became more com plicated and had to be carried out at St. Michael's Hospital. The bones in his feet grew deformed, which made walking painful. He limped in the house and hobbled up and down stairs. Blood didn't circulate properly in his feet and eventually, he lost both legs to amputation. One leg had to be re-amputated, higher up. He persevered until the age of 79, enduring many surgeries and other painful procedures. He never complained, however, and even when confined to a wheelchair, he joked to me that he was sticking around "to take care of your moth er", with whom he shared a 50-year marriage. Sometimes, during his hospitalizations, nurse6 entering his room early in the morning were surprised to find my mother snuggled up beside him in the single bed. Ironically, the man who was an American ser geant in Second World War, and who dared to marry a white woman in the American South Diabetes killed Lawrence Hill' s grandfather and father, and now it has gripped his brother and the Oakville writer himself. Hill has decided to fight back, and go public over the matter. BARRIE ERSKINE / OAKVILLE BEAVER Oakville writer Lawrence Hill prepares for the upcoming Team Diabetes 21-kilometre race in Amsterdam. He hopes to raise $5,600 for the Canadian Diabetes Association. before moving permanently with her to Toronto in 1953, and who spent his working life fighting for the introduction of human rights legislation and practices in Canada long before such causes became acceptable, would die not at war, or at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, but of complica tions related to diabetes. It isn't just prejudice that strikes down people of colour. Diabetes goes after them, too. Aboriginal peoples are three to five times more likely than the general population to have or to develop diabetes, and the disease is also more prevalent among blacks, Asians, South Asians and Hispanics in North America than it is among whites. Diabetes not only disables and kills its worst victims, but draws family members into the diffi culties. T^ke my mother, Donna Hill. She spent 10 years checking Dad's blood sugars, injecting insulin into him, feeding him and changing his clothes and bathing him and reading him the newspapers when he could no longer do those things for himself. She hooked him up to dialy sis machines, drove him to endless medical appointments, and slept in his hospital room during times when he was recovering from amputations or illness. In the last 10 years of my father's life, my mother didn't have a life of her own. She had waited all of my father's working years for a retirement that would allow them time to travel and to enjoy life quietly, but by the time retirement came, it was too late. Keeping my father alive and as comfortable as possible became her full-time job, her single and sole obsession. Now that her husband has'gone - he died about 18 months ago - she is grieving, exhaust ed, demoralized and striving to find her own meaning in life. She's one tough cookie. In fact, she's the only 76-year-old I know who hires her own personal trainer. I believe that she will find reasons to keep doing things that are important to her. But no person should have to go through that. And we have to understand that making huge advances in the fight against diabetes will not only prolong and hopefully save the lives of millions of Canadians, but it will also improve the quality of live ' of the millions more who love them. My father was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 43, and my older brother, the singer-songwriter Dan Hill, developed it at the same age. When my 43rd birthday rolled by, I went in for a medical checkup and blood tests. The results came back negative. Was I the lucky male in the family? The one who ducked the genetic marker streaking like an arrow down my family line? Not a chance. Like a ticking bomb, diabetes made its presence felt a mere two years later. I didn't know I had it. Didn't feel a thing. But because of the family history, I was careful about getting blood tests every year, and sure enough, within two years, I too had crossed over the line. T\vice, my fasting blood sugar levels exceeded the threshold of 7.0 millimoles of glucose per litre of blood, which meant that I had crossed into the land of diabetes. So far, the adjustments and inconveniences I've faced pale in comparison to those of people who are seriously ill. On a day to day level, the biggest change in my life involves food. I've had to cut down on fruit, toast, pasta, rice, potatoes and desserts, because they all convert to sugar in the bloodstream. Even natural fruit juices are loaded with sugar - just as hard on your pan creas as regular pop, if you're a diabetic -- so they've gone the way of the dodo bird. I still eat carbs - we all need them -- but too much at any one time throws my blood sugars out of whack. Carbs taste great on the way down, but eating too many of them makes me feel lethargic and dozy. I can barely get out of a chair. And this, from a guy who has always felt an abundance of energy. So I watch what I eat, and prick my fingers several times a day, extracting drops of red stuff and guiding it into a glucometre that measures the amount of glucose in my blood. Why? One of the keys to staying on top of the disease is to monitor your blood sugars regularly and to adjust your eating and exercising patterns accordingly. If you can stay within an acceptable range of blood sugars, you have a chance of avoiding the symptoms that affected my father so gravely. But if your blood sugars swing high and low and all over the map, you're in trouble. After the bloodwork showed that I had diabetes, it took me about 24 hours to overcome a lifelong anxi ety over needles and blood. I've had a charmed life. I had good parents and a good education, I've worked and traveled in many parts of Canada, the United States, Europe and Africa, and I have a fantastic partner and five wonderful children who love me - even the teenagers. I feel lucky to have come across my life's passion, writing, at the age of six. Not that many people can say that they truly love their life's work, and for me, that's one of the greatest of the privileges I've known. So far, I've got the diabetes under control. One day, just like an unrelenting runner, it will probably pull even with me, and then it will get the better of me. But not before run ahead of the disease for as long as possible, helping people to understand more about it and by raising money for research, education and advocacy. I've never done any fundraising before, but I am committed to running that race in Amsterdam and to raising $5,600 or more for the Canadian Diabetes Association. I'm shy about approaching people for money, and like my father, tend toward personal privacy about the disease. But I'm speaking out because I believe that I can do more by addressing diabetes publicly. I don't intend to let my father's death to be in vain. I won't let my mother's decade of intense caregiving be for naught. I won't sit down pas sively and let diabetes cripple me while my own loving partner looks on in pain, and I certainly won't look my own children in the eye without being able to say that I am doing what I can to help them and others escape the ravages of dia betes. At a certain age, you look for reasons for existence that go beyond books published or roy alties earned. I'm still interested those things. I still love to write. But now I have diabetes on the brain, as well as in the blood. I have almost a year to meet my fundraising goal, and will try to so by meeting with book clubs, speaking about literature or black history, giving literary readings, writing articles and speaking publicly about diabetes, and making special meals for friends and supporters - all in exchange for tax-deductible donations to thfc Canadian Diabetes Association. People or groups who wish to help may contact me by email at lawrencehill@sympatico.ca, or send donations (cheques payable to the Canadian Diabetes Association) to me at 1240 McCraney St. East, Oakville, ON L6H 4S6. More information about the Canadian Diabetes Association is available at www.diabetes.ca Lawrence Hill has written five books, includ ing two national bestsellers, as well as the screenplay for the recent documentaty film Seeking Salvation: A History of the Black Church in Canada. He is currently at work on an historical novel called The Book of Negroes. He lives in Oakville with his partner, Miranda Hawkins, and their five children. They are all avid runners and jog often on the Oakville trails.