Reclaimed Energy and Prevented Diabetic Complications After Forty Years on Insulin

Dr. Rangi has really been super helpful to me over all these years. So I, I started going to her, that would've been 16 years ago now. My name is, uh, Dave DeRuus. I'm in El Dorado Hills, California, and I'm retired now. But 35 years ago, I co-founded a management consulting firm. I've been on insulin for 40 years. I was initially diagnosed as a type 2 diabetic. However, I was losing weight and I got in trouble. I wanted to avoid taking insulin because I was gonna lose my private pilot's license at that point. That was the policy at that time for the FAA. I got down to 140 pounds. I'm five feet eleven, and I was just too light. So I went to my primary care doc and said, "Okay, Doc, I need to go on insulin." And that worked very well for a couple of decades actually. But about age 55, I felt like I hit a wall. I just... I had no energy. I could not get out of my shadow, and it was totally unlike me, 'cause I just had all this energy, all this drive and ambition. I was industrious. And he goes, "Well, you may have some underlying conditions. It's time to send you to an endocrinologist." And that was Dr. Rangi. She took me through a series of tests and determined right away that I had low vitamin D, I had low thyroid, and that I had low testosterone. So we started attending to those three matters, and after about two months, I started to feel better, and after six months, I was like a new man, and I have been ever since. Dr. Rangi has seen me through thick and thin. Had a much deeper understanding of diabetes than, uh, my primary care doc, and, uh, that was very helpful. So from the get-go, I started learning a lot that I thought I knew from before. I'd taken classes in nutrition, taken classes in physical exercises. To this day, I'm at the gym four days a week, and of course, that really diminishes my resistance to insulin. So I'm doing everything I can on my end to maintain good control, and actually, it's worked. Uh, at age 71, I have no retinopathy. I have no neuropathy. My heart is healthy. My pulmonary system is good. I've been under just really remarkable medical care. What a relief, and it's a real blessing actually, to feel good, to be healthy, and to have the energy to do what I wanna do, and that has included 10 annual trips to Nepal, Kathmandu. And it's the capacity to be able to be ambulatory and walk through airports and not have any trouble with that, carry heavy bags, and all these other matters. To be able to withstand all of that at my age is a great blessing. And to compound the difficulties, you know, doing that as an insulin-dependent diabetic. She knows everything there is to know about endocrinology and her specialty in diabetes in particular. And I'm still going in to see her quarterly, which is the requirement, and it's just been really great partnership with Dr. Rangi.