Reader's Digest

family secret

WHEN I WAS in my 40s, I got a tantalizing call from my father. He’d been browsing through an old footlocker and discovered letters from a great-great-uncle, Charles Kelley. They dated to 1922, when Charles had just been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. At the time, the diagnosis was a death sentence. Somehow this insurance man from Huron, South Dakota, made his way to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where doctors were testing a new drug. Charles was accepted as one of the guinea pigs. He noted that each day’s injection cost him a small fortune, though luckily he could afford it. By the time the University of Toronto team of doctors that had invented insulin won a Nobel Prize, in 1923, Uncle Charles was back in Huron. The drug gave him…

letters

Unsolved! I really enjoyed reading about these mysteries. Life is always a lot more exciting when you are presented with challenging puzzles—including some we might never solve! —KATHY PENDRACKY Avella, Pennsylvania A Lifeline in the Heartland The article about farmers dying by suicide at nearly twice the rate of the general population could not have been more timely this spring, with the record flooding of farmlands in the Midwest that will have a devastating effect on the farming community. I pray that farmers will be able to get mental health resources to assist them and prevent further losses. Thank you for printing the Farm Aid Hotline and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline phone numbers. —RONALD L. BELL St. Joseph, Missouri I remember the 1980s vividly. We had to sell our home before we lost it because…

forgiveness is job one

JERAMIE MILLER IS the last guy you’d expect George Vorel to hire. After all, Vorel’s company, Envirosafe, is an industrial steel processor outside Pittsburgh where employees operate heavy equipment as they sandblast and paint steel used in bridges and buildings around the country. And Miller is a former drug user and dealer. What’s more, he introduced Vorel’s own daughter to heroin soon after she graduated from high school, in 1998. It took Vorel’s daughter until 2005 to get clean. Once she was, she became a drug and alcohol counselor. Among her goals was to get her friend Jeramie clean too. He’d ended up in jail for selling and possessing drugs and aggravated assault, and she thought a job would help him get his life on track. “I remember her saying, ‘I’ll…

medal of fellowship

IN 2012, KIM STEMPLE, a special-education teacher, found herself tethered to an IV in a Boston hospital being treated for one of several diseases she had been diagnosed with, including lupus and lymphoma. The normally ebullient Stemple was naturally getting very depressed. And then a friend gave her a medal. Before she got too sick to exercise, Stemple had been a marathon runner. The medal came from a racing partner who had just finished a half marathon in Las Vegas and hoped the keepsake would act as a kind of vicarious pickmeup. It worked like a charm—and then some. After Stemple hung the medal from her hospital IV pole, other patients said they wanted medals too. That got Stemple thinking. “A medal is a simple way to give a positive message,” she…

the flycasting world championship

MAXINE MCCORMICK, age 15, Portland, Oregon What’s your longest cast? It’s 189 feet in salmon fly distance. How did you get so good at such a young age? When I was eight, my dad brought me on a few fishing trips, but it was frustrating because my line would get tangled and I wouldn’t catch anything. So I didn’t start liking fishing till I was nine and I learned how to cast. Now I do fly-fishing without the fish. So you’re not actually trying to catch anything? Nope. You’re trying to hit targets or throw the fly as far as you can. You’re competing against much older people. What’s that like? It’s definitely nerve-racking because they are stronger than me. But I’m also pretty confident. What do your classmates think? For the Estonia World Championships in 2016, I had to…

use supplements like a doctor does

THERE’S HEARTBURN, and then there’s heartburn. Three years ago, Elroy Vojdani, MD, experienced a debilitating and chronic version of it. “It was a ten-out-of-ten pain, and I would literally keel over at my desk, not able to do anything else,” says Dr. Vojdani, the founder of Regenera Medical in Los Angeles. “This would happen every day for a week, every one to two months.” Serious problems such as gastric ulcers and pancreatitis had been ruled out, so his doctors just kept recommending higher doses of the same drugs. But Dr. Vojdani worried about taking Prilosec because long-term use has been linked to osteoporosis and possibly irritable bowel syndrome. Tums and Zantac helped but didn’t fix the underlying issue. He needed a better solution, but he was stumped. That’s when Dr. Vojdani turned…