Читать книгу White Devil - Bob Halloran - Страница 11

I’VE BEEN TO a lot more funerals than birthday parties,” John Willis often repeats with a smile.

Surrounded by death, yet so full of life, John suddenly found himself feeling weak and lethargic, and he was urinating a lot. Instead of going to a doctor, he decided it was time for the first vacation of his life. He went to Rock Hill, South Carolina, to visit his uncle.

“I was riding my uncle’s horse, and people going by kept waving,” John recalls fondly. “I went back and told my uncle, ‘Hey, everybody knows your horse.’ He said, ‘That’s just people saying hi.’ I thought it was the greatest thing in the world.”

And then he passed out. He doesn’t know how long he was out, only that when he awoke, there were five doctors staring down at him.

“What’s going on?” John asked groggily.

“We’re trying to figure out why you’re still alive,” one of the doctors explained.

John was not quite twenty years old when he found out the hard way that he’s a type 1 diabetic. When he was taken to the hospital in South Carolina, his blood sugar was 1,680 mg/dL. Non-diabetics tend to fluctuate between 70 and 140 mg/dL. John was supposed to be dead. Instead, he was released from the hospital five days later, and before heading back to Boston, he went to see his father on the nearby Catawba reservation.