[originaltext]W: Richard, you’re one of Virginia’s patients.M: That’s right.W

W: Richard, you’re one of Virginia’s patients.
M: That’s right.
W: Er... How did you first know that you had diabetes?
M: Er... 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 because we were camping, my mother filled up the water buckets for the morning the night before and... 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!
W: Good heavens! And did you feel ill?
M: Yeah, you feel really ill. You feel like very thirsty, really thirsty and sweating a lot and just tired. You can’t do anything.
W: So then she took you off to the doctor, did she?
M: 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.
W: And how old were you when all this happened?
M: I was five and one half.
W: So are those symptoms common? Is that what everybody suffers from? This thirst?
M: Yes on the whole, well, let me put it this way, your body needs sugar to function, just you know for sleeping, working, playing, all those sorts of things. And it’s insulin that enables your body to use the sugar, and so if you haven’t got enough insulin, the sugar builds up in your blood and you actually get dehydrated really and the only way your body can get rid of the sugar is to send it out through the urine. So you send out loads and loads of urine and so you get this awful thirst and that’s usually the first symptoms.
W: So what’s the treatment now for diabetes?
M: Well, it depends when and how you get diabetes. If below the age of 30, you’re going to need to have insulin injections for the rest of your life because you’re just not producing enough insulin and probably no insulin after a while. Almost 2% of the population, possibly more, now have diabetes. And in the sort that people develop in later age range, it sometimes can be controlled just by diet or with diet and tablets.
6. How did Richard first know he was ill?
7. What is the standard way of testing for diabetes?
8. How old was the man when he began to suffer from diabetes?
9. What enables the body to use sugar?
10. What is likely to be the treatment for Richard?