The Dark Medical Tale of Jonathan

 Hey visitor, this is a project for a class called Disease. The project is about the impact of disease to our body systems through a medical lens and through a layman's lens. We were asked to interview a person about a disease and ask them about the whole experience, the diagnosis, and the symptoms they had before they were officially diagnosed.

The  preparation for this project was first thinking about the 5 questions we asked the people we were interviewing, take notes, and write down direct quotes we can use from the interview. We then characterized these diseases, found out about the anatomy and physiology of the diseases, who is most common to get these diseases, how many people have the disease, and etc. So now that you have some background knowledge of the process of what went into it let's get into the project shall we? 

This is a portrait of how Jonathan's body was affected. Due to this disease (Type 1 diabetes).


Jonathan was bowlegged, but it was really bad in the right leg so it was decided that he was going to get surgery. Before the operation was going to occur, they had to run blood tests. That’s when it was found out that he had borderline type 1 diabetes. He found this out at about 13-14. His mother regulated that they only ate sugar-free cereals and consistently having fruits in the house, but to not completely torture them she also let them have things like ice cream night where everyone in the house got their favorite ice cream and ate it together.


 But even with these efforts from his mom he still found ways to eat sweet things due to his love for sweets. Like when he was in school he would get pop from the vending machines and while skipping school he used to go to the store and buy a 2 liter pop and drink it straight from the bottle while sitting on the train. Also due to him being so young he didn’t really care about not maintaining his diabetes (It also didn’t help that both sides of his family had diabetes, so it was bound to happen sooner or later that diabetes would appear). 


These habits were put to a halt around 18-19 when he changed his diet and was doing pretty well and was in a different environment so it would be harder for him to fall into those bad habits. But then around that time the passing of his grandmother took a toll on him which made him fall back into his bad eating habits. Also during this time he was working at a movie theatre so sweets were available to him so it directly supported his bad eating habits on top of not taking any medication which was very detrimental to his body. 


These behaviors caused his diabetes to develop and he started to develop kidney failure, the way he noticed this was because his legs were swollen to the point where if you stuck your finger on his leg the imprint would stay there, and he had to cut his ankle socks since they weren’t fitting anymore. So he went to the doctor and they took tests and found that he had protein in his urine and was told that his kidneys were failing. As this was happening, he recalls that “his vision was getting darker”. He recalls that the theatre was getting a bit darker “it got so dark to the point where I was driving out the parking lot to drive back home and I almost hit somebody”(Jonathan,1). Keep in mind that he still wasn’t taking any insulin so it only got worse from here. This behavior continued until a life changing effect happened to him that occurred about 15 years ago when he was driving home from his job at the movie theater. While he was driving he drove on a street with a viaduct. By the time he came from the other side of the viaduct he remembered that his vision was blurry. He then went to the doctor with his niece to figure out why his vision was blurry and the doctor told him that he was going blind due to advanced kidney failure from diabetes (Retinopathy). This changed his life drastically, so now he has to depend on his family and friends to accommodate his needs due to his loss of vision.


To combat the kidney failure he had to have a kidney transplant which resulted in him having to take anti rejection medicine (immunosuppressants) because the kidney isn’t originally his so to combat his body fighting against the transplanted organ (National Kidney Foundation) he had to take the medicine. He also began to take insulin for him to survive since his body wasn't producing enough insulin. 






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