[originaltext]Interviewer: Richard, you’re one of Virginia’s patients.Richard:

Interviewer: Richard, you’re one of Virginia’s patients.
Richard: That’s right.
Interviewer: Erin... how did you first know that you had diabetes?
Richard: Erm ... I was on a camping holiday with my parents and my mother had recently read an article in a woman’s magazine which described the symptoms which are desperate thirst and also urinating a lot. And... er... because we were camping, my mother filled up the water buckets for the morning the night before and,., er... she realized one morning that she’d filled two 2-gallon buckets and found only half a bucket left in the morning, so I’d drunk 3 gallons of water during the night and of course urinated it all out as well. It was quite soggy round the tent!
Interviewer: Good heavens! And did you feel iii?
Richard: Yeah, you feel really iii, you feel like very thirsty, really thirsty and sweating a lot and just tired lethargic, you can’t do anything.
Interviewer: So she then took you off to the doctor, did she?
Richard: Yeah, where.., to a GP who did a urine test which was the standard way of testing for diabetes and of course I... my sugar content was sky high; and that’s an automatic sign really that you’re diabetic.
Interviewer: And how old were you when all this happened?
Richard: I was five and one half.
Interviewer: So are those symptoms common? Is that what everybody suffers from? This thirst?
Richard: Yes on the whole... I mean.., when.., erm.., well, put it this way, your body needs sugar.., erm to function,  just you know for sleeping, working, playing, all those sorts of things. And it’s insulin that.., erm... enables your body to use the sugar, and so if you haven’t got enough, the sugar builds up in tile blood and you actually get.., well, in fact you get dehydrated really and the only way your body can get rid of the sugar is to send it out through the kidneys, through the urine. So you send out loads and loads of urine and so you get this awful thirst and so that..., that’ s usually the first symptoms, especially with somebody young, you know, who’s going to actually need insulin.
Interviewer: So what’s the treatment now for diabetes?
Richard: Well it... I mean, it depends when and sort of how you get diabetes. If... on the whole, below the age of, erm about 30, you’re going to need to have insulin injections for the rest of your life because you’re, you’re not producing ..., you’re just not producing enough insulin and probably no insulin after a while. But .... erm.., there are lots.., it’s almost what 2% of the population, possibly more, now have diabetes anti in the sort of the later age range people develop it... um... and sometimes it can be controlled just by diet or with diet and tablets.
Interviewer: And the effect on people’s diet, does it vary for each individual, or are there basic rules that all diabetics follows?
Richard: What you advise for diabetes now is... um.., the diet that you recommend for everybody, you know, that you have.., urn.., plenty of fresh vegetables and fruit, and.., um.., enough carbohydrate to fill you up... um.., and preferably sort of high fire carbohydrate, and.., um... cut down on fats, which.., it’s actually the opposite almost that you were recommended 10 years ago.