Advice on Serious Diabetic Patients - Avoid Artificial Lighting!


There is nothing as difficult as to keep ‘avoiding artificial lighting’ in modern people’s living.

If one looks at modern people’s living, they are as depending on lights as if it is right to say they are living in the life pattern of relying on lights. We cannot ignore the lights reflecting from all the things in everyday living. To diabetics whose eyes have been ruining due to diabetes, reflective lights might be a more fatal blow.
The more civilized societies we are, the harder environments we are in for for our eyes to be comfortable either day or night.

Morning break, washroom, TV or computer, living room, office room, store, street back from the office, street lamp, cars’ lights, street lighting within the apartment-house complex, light leaking from the front house’s window,... an place is related to light.

I have said that 26 years passed since the first being insulin-shot at the age of 17.

In random words, if a man has 26 years passed since first being insulin-shot at the age of 50~60, he might be worried less about his eyesight because he is already right before death.
Yet in the case of being under 20 years old like me, even if he has endured for about 30~40 years, he would be by now around 50 years old (representative Type-I diabetes or childhood diabetes).

Speaking of a young patient who suffers childhood diabetes, even if he should have been insulin-administered for 30 years, he would be only about 40 years old then. Such 30, 40 or 50-year-old is the age in which one should be the most passionate in the life.

If getting their eyes blind and other parts of their body ruined in the middle of young social ages, these people usually cannot help living as outsiders in the societies they belong to.

Emptiness, bewilderment, frustration, sense of being betrayed, resentment,...of the 30, 40, 50-year-old persons who have lost their some functions of the body, at least these lost emotions that patients themselves suffer are hard to be indemnified for with anything.

Most 30, 40, 50-year-old persons are family members, like husband or wife or parents for their children in the body of a family. If any one of family members starts to have a life ruined due to frustration, resentment, pent-up anger, feeling of despair,... the arrangement and wellbeing of their whole family will be swayed and impaired from then on.

Taking this into deep consideration, the patient must acknowledge that he is obliged to take care of himself in the sense that he is not only himself but also ‘one of the family members.’


I too have been living with the body and eyes that suffered from lights since 1977, while I have been steadily taking extreme care of my eyes since 1990. In the meantime, I can frankly say that I still feel ‘powerless’ with regard to the ‘eyesight that goes bad to worse.’

Like I mentioned, I can urinate myself without light when I go to restroom at dawn.
There are many lights around like indicators of household electric appliances at each corner of house, light from the neighboring house window, all kinds of reflective lights to be encountered from the morning, ceaseless reflective lights from the building windows around, intense headlights of cars coming and going on the road,...

If I don’t turn on any light urinating myself, this doesn’t mean I can prevent every light from coming in.For, at each turn of eyes, I cannot avoid the lights from all around.

Even though I engage in a strenuous struggle in the life, there are both the things that I can deal with and the things that I cannot. In most cases, this issue of ‘light’ cannot be solved alone.

There have been fewer and fewer things that can be solved alone, which makes me remain more and more frustrated.

What I now need to change is to keep away from my TV-watching habit. My watching TV is a kind of my habitual practice to which I have been accustomed along with my marriage, divorce and nearly 4 years of my distressful life. By virtue of living without TV before my marriage, watching TV had been no serious issue for me. But this my TV-watching habit I have been accustomed to in less than 4 years is causing any bad influence on my eyes.

I have been watching TV 5~6 hours a day right after divorce, 3~4 hours 2001, about 2 hours in the first half 2002 and 30~60 minutes a day in 2003.

If my eyes are hurt, I don’t watch TV at all. But whenever I find my hands reaching the TV remote control, I often feel disappointed at my lack of self-restraint.
Yet because of such conditions as computer illiteracy, no driving a car, no watching newspaper, wearing sunglasses, regular walk on the trail and going to bed by 8~9 o’clock or 10 at the latest, I still have my eyes protected. But I am not totally confident that I will be able to ‘continue to see the world until I die’ as I desire.

These conditions of mine wouldn’t be those that are shared by all diabetics.

The ways I chose are not the best ones.

I just wish other patients too do all their best they can to protect their eyes like I mobilized all the ways I could to manage my body and eyes. Diabetic patients who have to live for a few more decades should at least ready for these efforts to keep sight of ‘this beautiful world’ until the end.

Particularly for young patients with 40~50-years-or-more struggle against disease or very young childhood diabetics, they must keep in mind that they absolutely need the manners of living different than others so that they can completely reach their life destination where they themselves decided upon.

I wish every diabetic continues to say the saying over and over again until he dies, “If my body is ten, my eyes are nine of all.”


God Bless you!!

Bible says, there is nothing new under the sun. But I pray you ever keep sight of this beautiful world ‘under the sun.’

Though it was from chapter one in the book of Ecclesiastes, this is a prayer by ‘minister Wailing Freeman Youm Sangmyoung.’


If there needs to be any more information about Self-management of Diabetes or Diabetic Patients, http://www.mryoum.com/skin_youm_html/emenu04.htm