Diabetes gets her best shot

But in the summer before her junior year, that's exactly how Angie described herself. She just wanted to go home and sleep.

Eva Jimenez, who keeps tabs on her granddaughter and grandson when their parents are at work, noticed Angie's lethargy but it didn't concern her. Young people these days just seem to lie around and watch television, right?

In hindsight, there were other hints of trouble. Angie was always thirsty, and a shadowy ring on the skin around her neck wouldn't come off no matter how many times her mother told her to scrub.

But the clues were too subtle to alarm the 16-year-old and her family.

It wasn't until her annual physical last September that the mystery was solved.

After Angie and her brother, Gabriel, who is 11 months younger, had been poked and measured at the neighborhood clinic, the doctor made a matter-of-fact pronouncement. It was so unexpected that it brought Angie to tears.

Jimenez asked Angie in Spanish to translate. Whatever it was, Jimenez fumed to herself, the doctor should have made an effort to tell the responsible adult first.

"She said I have diabetes," Angie said.

"No es verdad!" Jimenez said. It's not true!

Jimenez has diabetes, as did her mother. So do Angie's paternal grandmother and her father's older brother.

But a teenager? Angie?

The doctor referred the girl to Childrens Hospital Los Angeles the following day for additional blood tests to confirm the diagnosis, but Angie didn't need another test to confirm her dismay. Even her brother was crying; in the Ramos family, tears are contagious.

Back at her family's stucco home in East Los Angeles, Angie took out a journal that she had been keeping since breaking up with her boyfriend. She wrote a single sentence in letters so large that three words took up the entire page: I HAVE DIABETES.

"I felt so sad and angry at myself," she recalled several months later. "It hurt me to know I'm not perfect."

ANGIE and her family were stunned for good reason. Her diagnosis, Type 2 diabetes, is the most common form of the disease, but until 1997, it had been so unusual in someone under the age of 40 that doctors called it adult-onset diabetes. Diabetic children were few in number and almost certain to have the much rarer Type 1 form.