Jason's Second Chance

Like many diabetics before him, Jason Turner learned the hard way that he wasn’t indestructible. In his twenties, after leaving home, he gradually stopped properly managing his diabetes. “I had the fortune—or misfortune—of being young and male, so therefore I thought I knew everything,” he recalls.

Now, thanks to two life-transforming islet transplants, Turner has the luxury of looking back on his youthful indiscretions. He has been given a second chance in life, and feels profoundly grateful for the procedure that made it all possible. “Everything that has happened in my life since then, I owe to the transplant,” he states simply.

Turner was originally diagnosed with diabetes at the age of eleven, in 1983. “I had the typical diabetes childhood at that time,” he says. “I had a very regimented diet. Everything was scheduled, and weighed and measured and what not. Looking back now, it’s easy to see that I was able to adapt at that age—kids are pretty resilient—but it was much harder on my parents at the time. Of course, as a kid, you’re not really aware of that part of the story.”

When Turner moved out, of course, he no longer had his parents watching over his condition. Now that he was in charge of his own life, he decided the endless routine of finger pokes was more trouble than it was worth. “I stopped testing as often as I should have, trusting that I could feel when I was high and when I was low, and could make insulin adjustments accordingly.”

The system seemed to work, but it was an illusion. Over time, Turner lost the ability to sense his highs and lows—and, without regular blood tests, he had no way of knowing it.

His complacency made his bad habits even worse. “I can remember in my early 20s, going for up to two and a half years without testing my blood sugar,” he says, clearly mortified by the thought. “I was essentially giving myself a random amount of insulin.

“Every now and then I’d give my head a bit of a shake, and say, ‘What are you thinking?’ I’d start testing again, but of course everything was really out of control, so I’d give up really quickly. I’d put my head back in the sand.”

At around age 26, he finally began to pay the price. “When I was learning about diabetes, they said that if you don’t take care of your diabetes, in 15 or 20 years you’re going to see some complications. Sure enough, here I was, 15 years later, and I started to see them.”

It began with a symptom no young man could ignore. “The first thing that I noticed was erectile dysfunction,” says Turner. “That’s a big deal for any man, at whatever age, but especially at age 26, that’s a pretty good wake-up call.”

The complications continued to pile up, even though Turner had started to take better care of himself. “I have retinopathy, so I’ve had two laser surgeries on each eye. I have neuropathy, so I can’t feel hot and cold in my feet very well. And eventually I started developing some autonomic problems. I had trouble with my stomach, problems digesting and problems with diarrhea and constipation—going back and forth between the two.”

Finally, and crucially, Turner developed hypoglycemia unawareness—the complete inability to feel the effects of low blood sugar. No longer able to sense his own lows, he could slip without warning into life-threatening insulin shock.

After years of neglecting his diabetes, Turner had now become a candidate for an islet transplant. “Because I was living in Edmonton at the time, the Edmonton Protocol had always been on my radar a little bit. But, I never thought that I was that sick.”

On July 12, 2005, Turner found himself in a radiology suite, watching in grateful amazement as donor islet cells dripped through an IV and into his liver.

            
“I felt a little bit like, I can’t believe this is happening to me. I’m just a normal person. There’s nothing exceptional about me. I just happened to be living in the right place, my doctor was aware of the islet program, and the islet program happened to be in Edmonton. All those things fell into place.
“I distinctly remember thinking, ‘This could be the most important day of my life, right here and right now.’ And, really, it was.”

Right away, Turner saw his insulin dose cut by 90 percent, and within a few months he was completely insulin-independent. A second transplant, two years later, stabilized him further. More importantly, Turner no longer had to worry about his blood sugars.

This new reality took a while to set in, Turner says. “To be honest, it was a little disconcerting at first. You’re so used to monitoring your body and thinking, am I high, am I low? Then, all of a sudden, you don’t have to think about that at all anymore.”

                                  
Over time, Turner has gained an appreciation for his place in medical history, as one of the earliest islet recipients. “If you talk to an islet patient, they’ll always tell you their number,” he says. “We’re all fiercely proud of our number. I’m number 79, from 2005, so I’m obviously very grateful to anyone with a lower number than me. The doctors learned from them, and then applied that knowledge to the patients that came after them—including me.”

He’s also profoundly mindful of the people whose personal loss led to his own second chance in life. “Some family made a very difficult decision the day before, and I am eternally grateful to that family and to the family for my second transplant as well.”

Thanks to them, that reckless man in his twenties is now facing his forties—healthier and wiser than ever. “I don’t think I would have been able to get married. I wouldn’t have been able to own a house. The standard things that people take for granted in life, I had almost given up on at that time, because I was so ill before my transplant.”