Category: Lifeliner

Some change is not good. Judy’s doctor, the man who saved her life and kept her alive for almost two decades, has moved to a new hospital. Worse, the TPN program did not move with him because Toronto General Hospital fought for and won the battle to keep it. While Jeej works to train people…

“It was like travelling with a celebrity,” Marlene told me when I was interviewing her about Judy Taylor. Nowhere was that more true than on their road trips down to New York state for the annual Oley conferences. Judy loved those conferences, meeting fellow patients, being able to travel with her friends from Toronto General…

Judy cannot believe it. For the first time in her life, she’s travelling in a plane over the clouds and over the seas. To Sweden. To be a star guest of Prof Arvid Wretlind at an international medical conference. She’s so thrilled, she’s not going to let a little thing like a skin abscess stop…

Judy fears bugs, the viral or bacterial kind, even a cold. For bugs can kill her. She takes pains to avoid them. Somehow though, she catches one. She quickly spirals down, and Cliff races her down the highways to Toronto General Hospital and Jeej. It’s touch and go. The entire hospital hears about it and…

The fall out from Judy being absent for so long and then her life being one where death was ever present, continues. First Miriam leaves home, then Julie springs a surprise on her parents. Judy goes through a raft of emotions, but she never loses contact with her girls. Chapter Twenty-Two: More Family Trouble

Sometimes the price people pay for being the first, being a pioneer, appears in their children. And so it was for Judy. It began in her eldest, first with minor rebellion then with running away and finally with an arrest. Judy didn’t know what to do. In the end, she had to send her daughter…

This chapter is a story about diabetes, about how a remarkable discovery was made because of Judy, because of Jeej’s work with her. They discovered that chromium plays a vital role in diabetes. It was decades before the wider scientific and research audience started to understand the full ramifications of this discovery, but at the…

Judy becomes famous. A reporter for Weekend Magazine in The Globe & Mail drives up to spend a day following her, talking to her, learning her remarkable story. Meanwhile, she complains about fuzzy feet to Jeej. He scratches his head over this unexpected development and after a few tests, discovers that she has diabetes. But…