KEY POINTS:
Thomas Ngere says sugary fizzy drinks stole his sight. He can hear, touch and talk to his children. But he would give anything to see them again.
He never will. Mr Ngere is blind - a complication of his type 2 diabetes.
He is also without kidneys, and spends five hours a day, three days a week, hooked up to a dialysis machine.
His diabetes was diagnosed 15 years ago. Now, at 41, his life is utterly changed.
"The biggest thing is I miss seeing my kids. I know they're there, but it's the visual thing. I just miss seeing them. I'd give anything to see them again.
"I've just got this image from a few years ago. And people tell me, oh they're this tall, but I just have to imagine it."
That reality was nowhere in his mind when, as a new worker excited by his first taste of spending money, he became addicted to fizzy drinks.
He would drink them morning, noon and night, he told the Herald this week.
"I just had to have it all the time. Water just wasn't cutting it for me back then. But then, I didn't know much about diabetes."
When his doctor told Mr Ngere he had diabetes, it meant little to him.
"He was explaining the ramifications, if I didn't start looking after myself. But all I wanted at the time was a doctor's certificate. He was talking away and I was just looking around the room."
The reality of his disease didn't sink in until he "woke up in a ward one morning, with renal failure".
"I thought the world had come to an end. My whole world just came crashing down."
Exposure to fellow diabetes patients quickly changed his behaviour, he said.
"I saw fellow patients losing limbs. Starting from a little blister on the toe, and next thing the foot went. Then the whole leg went."
He left the fizzy drink alone and switched to water. He wants others who still have a chance to keep their sight and kidneys to make the same switch, before it's too late. And he's happy to use himself as a tool to achieve that.
"Because I'm blind, I use that. I say, look, see me now. Close your eyes and try to get from one side of your house to the other. And that's the life if you don't want to change."
SOUR TALE OF THE SUGAR RUSH
Thomas Ngere's story follows information published in Counties Manukau District Health Board's "Let's Beat Diabetes" benchmark survey, released this month.
It found half the 2520 surveyed people drank fizzy drinks at least once a week, while 14 per cent drank them five or more times a week. The most frequent fizzy drinkers were found to be young men.
The survey also showed more than 60 per cent of the health board's area population either had, or was at risk of having, diabetes.
Dr Brandon Orr-Walker, medical director of the health board's Let's Beat Diabetes programme, said about 23,000 people in Counties Manukau had diabetes, and sugary fizzy drinks were one of the lead culprits.
They enabled people to consume large amounts of sugar in a short space of time - but offered "zilch" nutritional benefits.
Consuming so much sugar meant any fats in a person's body would be stored, and the sugar used in its place, he said.
Dr Orr-Walker said many approaches could be used to lower sugar consumption, and education from people like Mr Ngere was an essential tool. Keeping chilled water readily available would also help people have an appealing alternative to fizzy drinks, he said. But if people insisted on buying the sweet drinks, they should choose those with artificial sweeteners.
