Center of Attention to Diabetics (Photo: Gleicys Moreno/Radio Rebelde)

A few of those walking around that zone of Vedado, in Havana, take notice of the house, yellow and white, located just on the corner of 17 and D Streets, where hundreds of persons meet daily.

It is the Center of Attention to Diabetics, health institution, ascribed to the National Institute of Endocrinology that for almost four decades accompanies those suffering and living with diabetes mellitus.

Although for many it might be a misfortune to get to this place, after you have been diagnosed, the dwelling represents a light on the way.

Only in a week of ambulatory care, you feel the careful medical attention, something that brings encouragement and the desire to go on in the struggle for new life styles, seeking for it to be long lasting.

From Friday to Friday, endocrinologists, dieticians, chiropodists, psychologists, social workers, eye doctors, and other specialists, integrated in a big multidisciplinary health care team, for each patient it means that necessary and indispensable person, who takes you by the hand until you learn that you are a diabetic, and that it depends on you and your consciousness, the life quality you will go along with from now on.

The wakefulness for helping each patient to know himself better, to get control of his sickness, and to have an adequate feeding model, set the mark of that personnel who without asking for anything in return, help the individual to struggle for the most valuable, human beings have: life.

Without distinction of race, sex, profession or another added quality, those arriving at the medical center, are attended to with the same love, dedication, abnegation and equal fulfillment of its workers

Translated by Reinaldo Fernández