Young tattoo artist with diabetes encourages healthier lifestyles
TWO years ago, Ryan Dasilva, a 31-year-old tattoo artist and airbrush designer from the mining town of Linden would spend most of his days drinking alcohol, eating fast food, working around the clock while engaging in reckless activities with friends who didn’t know better. His life, according to him, was a wild routine and while it often bothered his conscience, he prayed to God to help him change.

Soon, Ryan’s lifestyle caught up with him and he began to feel tired.  What was causing this overwhelmingly tired feeling in his system was an answer that changed his life forever. “I realised that at the end of the day, I started feeling drowsy and tired, then I realised that this is something that my mother spoke about when she started with diabetes. So when I start get my own, I remember and I went to her and I said, I feel the same way you feel and she telling me ‘Don’t say that! Don’t say that!’ And she did the test on me,” Ryan related. His blood sugar level was an alarming 575 mg/dl (while the average person’s blood sugar should range between about 70-140).  His mother encouraged him to seek medical attention immediately but he was in denial and did so three days after.

When he visited the Linden Hospital Complex, his blood sugar had gone down since his mother gave him a shot of her insulin and medication. He was, however, immediately diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.  This type of diabetes is deemed the worse kind, since your body does not produce any insulin; a hormone needed to get glucose from the bloodstream into the cells of the body. It is often diagnosed in young children and young adults and unfortunately for these, living on injectable insulin which has become a part of their everyday routine.

Out of his eight siblings, he is the only one suffering from diabetes and while he prepared his mind for the drastic changes that follow, he was determined to fight the disease. “The speed that I was going at, I asked God to take my habits in any way, I use to drink a lot, come to work and work from 06:00hrs to midnight, drinking all the time while working and harassing my body and I use to pray for it to go away and now the habits are gone,” Ryan confessed, and added that it is unfortunate that he had to be diagnosed with diabetes before learning his lesson.

FACING THE CHALLENGES
As a young man and father to three, Ryan started to fight the battles that came his way. One of these was rapid weight loss, which resulted in many persons, even some of his own former associates, rumouring that he has HIV/AIDS. The weight loss came as a surprise to Ryan since he was trying everything everyone was telling him to, to remain healthy. “It keep getting worse and I didn’t know, I keep getting slim and slim…I went to one of my aunts who is diabetic too and she asked me why I getting so fine and I tell she I eating everything that I should eat, all the whole wheat stuff, provision and so forth and steam food and she said no you can’t do that, you can eat anything but in moderation, and I got own way and said I don’t want anybody tell me anything, I will learn this on my own,” Ryan related.

He then started doing his own research and though the weight kept coming off, he completely changed his diet and commenced a daily exercise routine. “From then, it started to get better, but my blood count started dropping and I realise that I was still stressing about other things,” he said, one of which was the separation from his wife.

Ryan decided to take a sabbatical from Linden for three months to recover from all that he was experiencing. But, knowing that he has three children to maintain, he had to return to work, where he continued to face the stigma and to fight off bad influences. Maintaining a healthy diet also proved to be a challenge, since most cook shops in Linden do not cater for diabetics and burdening someone to cook for him every day has not been working out. He, however, continues to operate his shop in the Mackenzie arcade where he trades his various artistic skills to earn an honest dollar. “I am a tattoo artist, an airbrush artist, a barber, a costume and fashion designer and so I have to be creative and being creative means I cannot be stressing on other things.”

STOP LIVING RECKLESS
Ryan said that he is now an advocate of a healthy lifestyle among his peers and siblings since he does not want them to experience what he has been going through. “I does tell them, be very sceptical especially when it comes to alcohol and eating fatty food because when you drink, you tend to eat a lot of meat and then you go and sleep with all that meat on your stomach. Then you mixing your rum with coke, the rum is sugar and the coke is sugar, then when you go home, you eating a lot of rice and rice is one of the major causes of diabetes. So I encourage them to be very careful with their diet especially the liquid, when it comes to alcohol, the brown rum is very sweet. Young people don’t like greens and I would be happy if they can educate themselves more, because I don’t think they want to get feelings like me and I don’t want that for them,” Ryan advised.

Diabetes has been cited as one of the leading cause of deaths in Guyana. In 2015 there were 49,800 cases of diabetes in the country. According to statistics, from the International Diabetics Federation (IDF) Guyana is one of the 24 countries of the IDF NAC region.
According to the IDF, 415 million people have diabetes in the world and more than 44.3 million people in the NAC Region. By 2040 this figure is expected to rise to some 60.5 million the IDF predicts.