Living With Diabetes Is Still A Life To Be Lived

By Wil Phinney
Special to Tribal Connections

Yvonne and Frank Ball
(Photo courtesy of Wil Phinney)

Umatilla Reservation – Diabetes now runs Yvonne Ball's life.

The disease took her right leg just below the knee last year when a toe became infected and turned to gangrene. She can't wear a prosthesis because of the swelling caused when she fell in March, shattering two bones at the end of her amputated leg. She's been on dialysis – three times a week – since August of 2001 after doctors were alarmed by kidney problems. Her illness has required twice-a-day insulin injections for about 24 years.

"Diabetes controls my life," she says. "At times I feel good and at times I can't do anything."

And as dire as her circumstances sound, Yvonne isn't alone on the Umatilla Indian Reservation where about one in 10 natives – a total of 166 – are diabetes patients at Yellowhawk Tribal Health Center. The disease does not discriminate. The Yellowhawk total is an even split – 83 women and 83 men. By age, nearly half the diabetics are between 45 and 64 years old with one in three older than that and one in 10 as young as 15. And, while diabetes education and prevention information is available, the number of diabetics continues to increase. Almost 60 percent of the diabetics on the Umatilla Indian Reservation have been diagnosed in the last 10 years. A panel of tribal diabetics will share how the disease has affected their lives during a Diabetic Education Day, scheduled from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on May 19 at the Longhouse on the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

Last spring, surgery removed bone from a toe, the trauma triggering infection. But there was no pain, no discoloration so it went unnoticed.

"About six weeks later I called my sister to come see me," Yvonne remembers. "She walked in, saw me and said 'Call an ambulance.'"

Yvonne arrived at St. Mary Medical Center in Walla Walla "hallucinating, talking and saying things I'd never said before," she says. She terrorized the nurses for several days as tests were conducted. On the twelfth day, doctors said her foot needed to come off. Yvonne's daughter, Betty Ball, remembers arguing with her mother, who wanted to keep her leg.

"I said, 'Mom we want you,'" her daughter recalls.