How the notorious ‘stabilisation’ regime of the sixties inspired me to draw.

Garry Cobb

I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 1966. At the time, people who lived with diabetes were often interned in hospital for weeks at a time for ‘stabilisation’. I was one of those victims at the age of eleven; confined to a bed on a children’s ward.

After you were issued a diet sheet of measured carbohydrates, doctors tried to work out the amount of insulin you needed to inject each day to keep your blood sugars normal and avoid later complications. I was taught how to measure the insulin dose through markings on a glass syringe and to inject deep into the flesh with a large metal ‘luer-lok’ needle. I think vets use them now. I kept the syringe in a tub of surgical spirit and reused it daily. Unsurprisingly; it stung!

Having a fear of needles didn’t help. Neither did locking me in my bedroom until I injected or being asked to visit the headmaster’s office for being late for school. For a very brief period I was given a large metal canister with a spray attached to numb the skin but was only allowed to use it a few times. I still have a phobia of needles but remain forever thankful to the person who discovered insulin could be delivered with tiny 4mm needles.

As soon as I left hospital, I endured frequent low glucose ‘hypos’ as I was, of course, active and no longer languishing in bed.

Teaching teenagers to control their diabetes has defeated many a diabetes specialist. In those days, 10 drops of water and 5 drops of urine into a test tube with a Clinitest tablet bubbling away indicated high amounts of sugar in your urine (orange) or very low amounts (blue). The revolution came when you could just hold a Dextrostix under your stream of urine to watch the colours change. But this also only indicated the effects of what you ate hours earlier which was as much use as a chocolate mantlepiece. It was small wonder two other diabetic children in the same ward as me succumbed to diabetic complications. One went on to have his leg amputated and the other to carry out her teaching job with a white stick and a guide dog.

Today you can wear a sensor and hear alarms on your phone when sugar levels go too high or low. A big shout out to those inventors!

There were several occasions I was brought in for stabilisation. Being only a small mining hospital in Cornwall the diabetic specialist didn’t make frequent visits, so you were left waiting for a Tuesday when he did his hospital round. Normal stay was a month. Just my luck if I was nursing a stye or boil, a good sign blood sugars were not under control.

Fortunately, plenty of comics found their way into the ward. My favourite comic was Beano. But there were also comics like Dandy, TV 21 and Eagle. With a plentiful supply of paper and coloured pencils, I was inspired to draw my own. My younger brother was my only real audience, so I drew them for him. Once back in school, I continued to do well in art which led to greater things.

During the seventies, eighties and nineties girl’s magazines and comics mushroomed. Love stories featured regularly and during that time I was fortunate enough to sell hundreds of illustrations to satisfy this insatiable demand across the UK and other countries across the world. I don’t know why as I never regarded myself as a particularly good artist. I guess I was just lucky. Now, of course, there is social media and magazine names that would have tripped off the tongue of any young person in Britain at the time have all disappeared. ‘Jackie’, ‘Oh Boy!’ ‘Mates’, ‘Fab 208’, ‘Pink’, ‘Photo-Love’, ‘Patches’, ‘OK!’ ‘Blue Jeans’ and many, many more.

In the eighties, the newspaper of the British Diabetic Association, ‘Balance’ – selling for 20p – opened a section called ‘Young Balance’ and a door opened for me to write and draw for my fellow diabetics.

Here are a few of my submissions that were published at the time…

Would you like to be drawn? Check out my commission pricings here!