"Putting A Foot Down Against Diabetes" by Faye Hollins-Moore

Imagine, if you can, walking around day after day continuously wearing a hole into the flesh of your foot and not knowing it. Imagine also going year after year being subjected to dialysis and its inherent demands of sixteen hours each week and fifty plus pills each day. And hoping against hope that, one day, you will receive a transplant to alleviate the need for these life strangling treatments. To round out this scenario, assume that you will never get the kidney/pancreas duo transplant until that foot wound finally goes away. You've tried every method offered up by the conventional medical community and nothing has worked, until now.

Ken's journey with Diabetes lasted for some twenty-eight years. And, today, he can honestly say he is no longer a Diabetic. He was on the waiting list for these transplants for too many years. And, while he waited for the approval to surface, his Diabetes relented, and all the years since he was fifteen and first learned about his illness took their toll. In his teens, he had to give up the sweets he'd always loved. In his 20's, he gave up the smoking. And, in his early 30's, the disease began to overtake his life and lifestyle in the form of renal kidney failure and a subsequent heart attack and bypass surgery that followed. In other words, Ken dealt with his illness straddled upon the 20th century methods that didn't work and being introduced to the 21st century ones that do.

Which leads us to IYIA and their foot wound treatment device named O₂Misly™. To the layman eye, she would probably look just like a floor cleaning apparatus; but, to a Diabetic with a foot wound, she can work small miracles. When Ken first placed his foot into her basin in October, 2005, his foot ulcer was threatening to dismantle his chances for his long awaited transplants. At 43, he came to realize that probably this is it. This is how his life is going to be. All the years of home dialysis that no longer worked calling for outside treatments which took away the time that would have been spent on his chosen livelihood were about to be accepted as his plight. And there were the so called tried and true methods; namely, special shoes prescribed by podiatrists to "offload" the pressure on a foot wound. And the homecare nurse who would wrap the wound twice a week for over three years and who was frustrated in the process because it never quite did any good. And, even in the early days, when Ken was implanted with an insulin device, it still offered no future to this young man. But then he received 12 O₂Misly™ treatments in just over two months and, four months after that, he was receiving the organs transplant and making the life plans of a non-Diabetic.

Which, once again, brings us to IYIA. An early stage biomedical device company located just north of San Diego, has perfected the prototype for this life changing device. It incorporates some of the principles of accepted approach and adds to the mixture a new process. And this new process makes all the difference in the world. It blends together the best of three elements: oxygen, moisture and antibiotics. And, unlike the customary hyperbaric methods, for instance, which offered conventional hope but came at a price: a high price, both in dollars (averaging upwards of $6,000 per week) and risk (given that the pressure being administered was dangerous to both the patient's eyes and ears), this methodology has no significant price to pay. Not for Ken nor over a dozen others who would have otherwise been likely amputees who are benefiting from O₂Misly™, nor countless others still to come.

Before "the transplant," as he terms it, he could only look at photographs from a friend of the view he would see if he were able to visit their home on the island of Maui. Because there was only one dialysis unit on the entire island and it was continually reserved, he could not take his chances and visit. Ken considers himself very lucky that, regardless of the fact that the first half of his life was spent in the 20th century rendering him defenseless against Diabetes, the second half will be spent just like, what he calls, everybody else. When asked what his plans were for the future, he indicated that following a visit to Maui he would be starting the career he has wanted all his life, as a chef.

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