William Henry
Exercising through his pain and eating right, he went from using insulin to needing no blood-sugar meds.

In a situation that would seem to call for a piling-on penalty, 73-year-old Henry was diagnosed two years ago with Type 2 diabetes - on top of having severe arthritis and serious heart trouble.

Initially, his doctor prescribed insulin. Now, after dropping 40 pounds, Henry keeps his blood glucose under control without any medicine, thanks to an inspiring commitment to walking and a healthy diet.

"I walk a lot, which is difficult when you have bad legs and knees," he says of his regular jaunts to Society Hill and his favorite spot, the Starbucks at 4th and South. "I get tired. I sit down. I get a cup of coffee and start off again."

Besides the arthritis throughout his body (for which he gets shots in his knees and occasionally takes medication that raises his blood-sugar levels), Henry has undergone a quintuple bypass, a mitral-valve repair, insertion of a pacemaker and an operation to remove scar tissue from one of the other surgeries.

Yet for the last two years, he has been making the trip every Tuesday from his home in Queen Village to a weekly diabetes self-management class taught by the Diabetes Education Center at Pennsylvania Hospital in Center City.

"You can always learn something," he says. "Before I had diabetes I was eating anything. Now I read every label that I buy.

"You hear from others and they hear from you, and it helps them to hear what you went through, how you're doing and where you stand," he says. "It's not just the medical part of going there. You feel after a while that you belong to them. It's like a family. It's wonderful."

Although he says he's in constant pain from arthritis, Henry hopes to live to be more than 100. "You know, regardless of what pain you have, it's wonderful to get up and still see the sunshine," he says. "I have pain, but I can open my eyes and see the beauty."

- Darla Synnestvedt

Sarah and Elizabeth Nicell
Identical twins and perpetual-motion machines, they don't let diabetes stop them.

The Nicell girls celebrated their birthday last week. Although being 8 years old is new to them, they're old pros at diabetes management.

Diagnosed with Type 1 three weeks apart from each other when they were toddlers, they can't remember a time when they didn't count carbs and calculate insulin doses.

Their fingers are as nimble on the controls of their insulin pumps as any 14-year-old is with her cell phone. Indeed, kids who don't know them usually assume that they're either texting or thumbing through a playlist.

The insulin pumps clip to their waistbands and feed insulin through a skinny tube - it looks like an earbud wire - into a tiny catheter taped in place under their clothes. "People that I don't know say, 'Is that a phone or an iPod?'" Sarah says, giggling.

When the twins were first fitted with the pumps just over a year ago at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, they were frustrated because the tape holding their catheters in place was no match for their activity level and the devices would slip out. The girls play soccer on weekends. On weekdays after school, they practically live on an 8-foot-high jungle gym in their back yard in rural Glassboro, N.J.

Rather than ask Elizabeth and Sarah to take it easy, the doctors found stronger tape. "They told us, 'Don't make them adjust. We'll adjust to them,'" says their mother, Amy.

That's pretty much the family motto. Although Amy is vigilant to the point of hanging out in the hallway instead of going home while the girls are at CCD, "we don't like to make them stop doing things," she says.

A catheter will fall out "every once in a while if they're at a gymnastics party," she says, "But we bring an extra."

- Becky Batcha

Scott Soleimanpour
He has looked at diabetes from three sides now.

Even though he was just 5 years old, Soleimanpour, now 29, knew something was wrong.

"I had the most unquenchable thirst you could ever imagine," he says. "Imagine that you were in the desert for weeks without anything to drink and then multiply that by 10. That's how thirsty I was."

This harrowing episode landed him a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes complete with a two-week stay in the hospital.

As an inpatient, he was "the kid that ran around the wards talking to the nurses and checking on the other kids and making friends and saying 'Can I help?'" says Soleimanpour. The seed was planted, and he now divides his time as a diabetes researcher on the cutting edge of science at the University of Pennsylvania and a diabetes doctor for Penn Medicine.