'It is essential to make friends with diabetes'
"You have diabetes."Although 25 years have passed since that diagnosis, José Antonio Martínez Piña has not forgotten the void in his stomach that his doctor's words left him that day."I felt a lot of fear. I barely knew what it was, so the first thing I thought was that I was going to die," he recalls.
The feeling was put in his body for a few months."Before things were very different. No one gave you information, nobody explained to you," he says.Therefore, when someone arrives with that uncertainty in the eyes of the Association of Diabetics that presides in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), he does not hesitate to refer to an educator in diabetes.
"For me, it took me to meet him, was a before and after.
"The information is very important because with diabetes you have to know how to live. It is essential to learn to be his friend and not his slave," he remarks.
'Be your own doctor'
María Ángeles Álvarez knows a lot about this learning.In his 15 years working as an educator in the Pediatric Diabetes Unit of the Ramón y Cajal Hospital in Madrid, he has taught many children to live with the disease without problems."We try that the patient is almost his own doctor, to be demanding with the control of his disorder," says María Ángeles, who is delighted with a profession that he assumed almost by chance.
"I worked in the emergency department and, when I was transferred to this service I had to train. Now I don't change it for anything because it is very rewarding; you see what helps people," he says.
This nurse also underlines the importance of information."It would be necessary for more specialized units such as ours and that educators were more available," says this specialist who, despite working in Madrid, receives patients from Galicia, Asturias or Extremadura, among other communities.
'Understand diabetes and take control' is precisely the slogan chosen by the International Diabetes Federation and the World Health Organization for World Diabetes Day 2009, which is held this Saturday, November 14 on the entire planet.One of the objectives of this commemoration is to highlight the importance of education and call all governments to implement effective strategies and policies for the prevention and control of diabetes.