Rose Brooks sat in a gray reclining chair and pulled a thin white blanket up to her neck. The blanket slid off her left arm, where two fat hoses full of blood hung from three-inch-long track marks. For the moment, the track marks–hard, puffy, and raised due to frequent needle jabs and operations on the veins underneath–were no longer the most prominent feature on the underside of Brooks’s forearm. The clear, long tubes coursing with blood were.
An alarm sounded on Brooks’s machine and a nurse appeared. She flipped a switch to stop the alarm buzz and then turned a dial on the machine, adjusting the pressure of the blood flowing back into Brooks’s arm. “I don’t feel so good,” Brooks said.
The nurse took her blood pressure again. Her face showed concern. “Audrey, give me some five-percent,” she commanded. She grabbed the huge syringe and injected it into the tube. “Bring me another one.” When the two syringes were empty, the nurse took Brooks’s blood pressure again. Another nurse came by with a cup of instant soup.
“One man passed out and passed away,” she continued. “He had a heart attack and they couldn’t get him back. But they haven’t had a death here in about two and a half years.”
A small number of diabetics across the country have received pancreas transplants before serious complications have set in. But pancreas transplants are still considered experimental, and the effects of such operations are being studied closely.
In 1963 Brooks got married. Three years later she was pregnant. During her sixth month of pregnancy she was hospitalized for high blood pressure, another common complication of diabetes. In her eighth month labor was induced, and Brooks had a healthy baby boy.
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But Brooks was tired of hospitals and wanted to go back to work. “There was a new program where you could do it yourself, so I decided to try that.” Instead of going through 12 bottles of fluid every other day, she used four bags every day. A tube approximately three and a half inches long hung from her side. She would hook a bag of solution to it, empty the liquid into her stomach, clamp the tube shut, roll the bag up, tape it to her side, and hold the solution in for four hours. Then she would unroll the bag, open the clamp, drain the fluid into the bag, dispose of it, and start all over again. She followed the procedure at home and at work.
