This is Where the Battle Begins," "A Woman's Fight to Beat Diabetes," "A Fight to Feed Her Child's Hunger." "This is where the journey ends," is my closing, to my patients, my patients' families, to the general public. I say, in a roundabout way, they should stop trying, give up, because my journey from being the sickest kid on the block, to now, to where I am now, to them is a story of struggle, failure and hope. I cannot fail you in this process. If you walk out today with understanding of what you are fighting against, and now how you might possibly defeat it, it is my job to help you be better able to defeat it. I don't give up easily and you won't either. It's time for you to be up front, face the challenge and win it like I've done. My Patients Love Me! My patients love me, truly love me and trust me. They know I am being honest with them about every single minute detail of what they face. I'm honest in everything that I do, for my patient's benefit, and so that their journey will be a simpler and easier one. I want you to want to come back to me again and again, to understand you, take care of you, and be your guide, your lighthouse to take you through your journey. I want you to never want to abandon me, ever. I always will, have always, given my patients the best of my skills and my heart, to help them achieve success. In return for that generosity of spirit, they love me in return. Fear is a great thing. Fear can also kill you; when I felt fear of being seen as a doctor that didn't know anything, I became more motivated to take my education and learn as much as I possibly could in all the medical fields. I am now qualified and licensed to diagnose and treat anything that a heart surgeon can do. In other words, I can treat any health condition from your neck down to your ankles, whatever you can imagine that may be in the world of medicine. We've had many great successes, and many more great failures, in this process. But when I have to try and make a choice between the two, between staying with what I know will work, and leaving it behind, I know the latter is the only right answer. Now I feel truly comfortable in what I'm doing and I have made my peace with my patient. I think you should try it too. "They just wouldn't go away," which is the classic phrase of my patient, Richard, that I still have in my mind and heart. He was such a young man, and it saddened me that this person who was so healthy, with his whole life ahead of him, would come to this. He knew he had an issue with his kidneys, but no one would listen to him, and so he had the kidney disease and his life was over. He was only twenty-three, but his life was over. His last words to me were: "They just wouldn't go away." And my answer to him, today, is this. "They just wouldn't go away." Yes, they won't go away. But they can and will, as they have for so many other patients, not go away from your life. They're here to stay with you, every day, of your life, because you have allowed them to do that. If you haven't accepted your situation and your challenge, in this process, today, today is the day that you will have to accept the fact that you have a challenge, that you will not be able to change what you see in your life. Richard's story is one of a lifetime. It was the spring of 2007 when I met Richard and his family and family medical history. This was back when people in this country still knew nothing about diabetes and no one understood it. I started to make this happen by using social media to my advantage, with YouTube. Back then, I was a big Twitter guy, but now it's Facebook that people are using. The point is that it was really hard to find good diabetes material on YouTube because of all the spam and spammy stuff and crap out there. I know how to get past the spam, so I started sending the people who didn't know about YouTube, who didn't understand what a YouTube video was about, like Richard, video material. I just started sending it over to him by e-mail. I said, "I have all this great medical stuff out here that you might like. Can I send you the links to some videos?" After I sent them to him, Richard responded and said, "Wow, you don't know me very well. You don't know anything about me yet, but you're still helping me and my family." I would send him YouTube links and he would write back and say, "Thank you. You're an angel," or, "Thank you for being a friend to me and my family." I guess I was just another person who had gone through what Richard was going through. I told Richard I was sending him videos, but I didn't go into details of what had happened to him. I told him that his kidney function was so bad, and he went from being a healthy young man to having kidney failure. Now I wasn't sure he was ready to hear it all, as he said. He was ready to hear it, and he started searching around the Internet for information on diabetes, and then I had to find the right words for him to understand what his options were in terms of treatment, and what they were, and he could get it. At first, he resisted it, but after some conversations with him and with his mom, eventually they embraced it. I just kept telling him, "You're not going to get any better without your family here." Once he realized what the family was able to do, and that's being here, that's making sure he is taking care of himself, staying away from bad influences, going back to school, and getting him involved with things he should be doing, he embraced it. He took on the fact that he would be taking care of himself. In his head, he started thinking about it. He was willing to do it and he was the first one who did it, although his mom was behind him, I think. I remember the day, he was in tears, finally, telling me he did what he had to do, and I said, "Good, and thank you for letting me help you. I can do this." It wasn't a shock to me. I was just happy to be able to be there to help. Over the next couple of years we became friends. As long as he was keeping me in the loop on what he was doing, in terms of dealing with his health, or whatever was happening, he would let me know, at least in terms of, "Look what I'm doing." He was always happy, he was like a little kid. He'd get into it, I'd be happy that he was doing so well, and he'd call me up and say, "Look what I did today." I would say, "What did you do?" And he would say, "I can't even talk about it, because it was so intense." You can feel the excitement on his end, and I am not into that much. I'm a normal person, but I'm in there, I'm part of the puzzle, and I'm just hoping for the best. I've met many patients in their young years, but it's hard to meet a kid at the young age of twenty-three and have it end so quickly. It's hard, because he had a life ahead of him. He was the life of the party, the life of the family. They had just built a new house, he had met someone and was excited about being engaged. He felt he was doing really well, but in many ways, he was in denial. A lot of people aren't aware of it and sometimes doctors aren't aware of it either. We are living in a crazy world, with a lot of other things in life you don't need to worry about like this. The patient was busy living his life. I feel that for people like me, he's still in my head and my heart, and I can feel his memory with me. I really do think about him a lot. When I looked back at what I've learned from this patient, you see it's about a lot of things, but more than anything else, it's about that time when you are alive. I mean, he could have died very quickly if I hadn't taken this patient on. I am now helping other patients as well, but you can see from his story what a simple thing he had to do. He wasn't very educated, but the people around him who were also in his life, they were his friends, and they said, "He's having kidney problems. You have to get him some medical attention." The doctors said, "No, you can't change your lifestyle. You can't change anything about your life. You have to let him go, because it's not as bad as you're saying." I remember when the doctor told me that, I couldn't believe it. So many people lose that person. It's one of those things where you can be sitting on the couch and there's a call and you pick up the phone and it's the patient who's on the other end of the phone. A lot of times when you don't get a chance to hear what happens later