Max may have not been a believer, but Freida Sima’s prayers and tears upon hearing her husband’s diagnosis must have made some kind of impression above. Sent from one specialist to another, the couple ended up at a hospital where they met a knowledgeable doctor who had been part of an insulin trial and gave them the guidance they needed (which was vital because prior to the introduction in 1936 of a slow-acting insulin, diabetics walked an hourly tightrope in terms of insulin dosage).
Max began a lifetime regimen of checking his urine sugar several times a day and injecting himself with insulin, adjusting the dose to meals and physical activity and always carrying a piece of candy in his pocket in case of diabetic shock.
Freida Sima removed all sugar from the house, eschewed baked goods, and watched her husband’s diet like a hawk from that day onward, checking his feet on a daily basis for the sores to which diabetics were prone. Having finally found the love of her life at age thirty-two, she was not about to lose him a year and half later.
(Forty years afterward, on his eightieth birthday, Max announced to all that it was mainly his wife’s care that had kept him alive and healthy so long, augmented perhaps by their daily arguments over politics and religion that had kept his wits and nerves sharpened, sometimes more than he would have liked.)
Freida Sima and Max settled into a new routine of work, family, food, sugar-dipsticks and insulin injections, hoping they might even be able to one day expand their family and have another baby. The news from the family in Europe was hopeful. Marium had sent a beautiful wedding picture inscribed in German, the language in which she and Freida Sima had studied in cheder. Benny had met the love of his life on a trip to Europe and was about to return there and bring her to America. Abie and Minnie were about to become parents in another month.
How could anyone have known that days later everyone’s world would turn upside down when the Great Depression would commence on what would come to be known as Black Tuesday? But that, again, is a story of its own.
(This installment of the Frieda Sima series is dedicated to the memory of Shirley Kraus Tydor, Freida Sima’s daughter and the author’s mother, whose yahrzeit is 23 Shevat, which this year coincided with Feb. 2).
