Perseus Prospere, a part time deejay is optimistic about the future despite his health troubles.

He lived what many considered a normal life until he was about 23.  Perseus Prospere, known as Pert to those close to him and Small Boy to everyone else, graduated from the Leon Hess Comprehensive School in 2001 where he played point guard for four out of his five years there. He went onto Sir Arthur Lewis and studied Business Administration at DTEMS.  He worked for three months with NIS after his graduation and then moved into hospitality.  He was a storekeeper for Club St Lucia for three and a half years.  Pert loves sports cars, basketball, music and animals. He partied like a rock star from the age of 20.  His first car was a Toyota Corolla then a Toyota Levin and then a Honda Civic. He drag raced, limed with his friends, smoked and drank.  What many did not know is that this fun loving guy had been diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at the age of seven.
Now at 26, Pert’s life has changed drastically. He sat with the STAR and told us his story.
“I guess when I reached 20, and I was working, I didn’t take care of myself as I should.  Being a young man, I didn’t want to listen to my mom anymore. I wanted to do my own thing.  I was eating and drinking all sorts of things I was not supposed to. Then it really started affecting me.”
Then came a day that would be the turning point in his life. “My eyes started giving me trouble on September 4, 2006.  It was a normal day. I was coming home from work after a long weekend of partying. It was in the afternoon and my eye started itching. My mom is a nurse so when I got home I told her about it. She said it was probably some dust or something in my eye so I should put a cold compress on it and it would be fine.  That was that. I went to bed.  The next day was a Tuesday.  It was my day off. I woke up and I just couldn’t see at all in my left eye. That was the scariest moment of my life. I just broke down. I didn’t know what was going on. No one was home.  My mom was at work. I called her and said “Mom, I can’t see in my eye!”  She said “How you mean you can’t see in your eye?”  I explained to her what happened.”
Pert’s mom instructed him to get to the hospital.  Upon arrival, about 10am, he headed straight for the eye care unit where he was diagnosed with Diabetic Retinopathy, that is, the blood vessels behind his eye ruptured and his entire eye was blanketed in blood.  Emergency surgery was the only option.
Pert was back and forth between Caribbean islands getting laser surgery. The doctor in Barbados recommended a retina specialist in Trinidad because Pert’s condition was worsening.  Due to the amount of laser surgery he was undergoing, his optical nerve was being damaged.  Pert’s mom arranged for him to go to Cuba for his eye care and he stayed for three and a half weeks not making any progress. He returned home but he took a turn for the worst and had to head to Trinidad for an emergency open eye surgery on the left eye. Two months later he repeated the same procedure on the right one. His vision slowly decreased after that.
In 2008, Pert went for a general medical checkup and was diagnosed with Stage One of five kidney disease and was given medication.  His depression worsened. He heard of a natural diet for diabetics and decided to give it a try but it only made the situation worse.
“My kidney failure jumped from Stage One to Stage Four. At that moment, the only option I had was dialysis.  Being told that you need to be on dialysis for the rest of your life, I don’t think any young person wants to hear that.  I went through a stage of denial, so did my parents.  We repeated the blood tests several times at several different places but each time the results were worse than the previous.”
Pert began dialysis and the side effects were horrible.  “I dealt with continuous vomiting, not eating for weeks because I could not hold anything down, really low blood pressure, difficulty breathing. Within two months, I lost 25 pounds. I contemplated and came close to taking my life. It was by chance a friend who I hadn’t seen in a while caught me just in time and helped me through.”
Through it all, Pert’s family has been his support.  Seeing his condition deteriorating, the family decided to take him to New York.
Suddenly things started looking up.
“The day after I landed I got really sick and was admitted to the ICU at Belle Vue Hospital in Manhattan for a week and a half.  I was in a state called DKA-Diabetic Ketoacidosis. The doctor changed all my medication.  After ICU they put me onto a ward. It was nothing short of a miracle. I woke up the next day, I felt like a totally different person.  The doctor was baffled.  I discharged myself shortly after on a Monday. By Tuesday afternoon I was on a plane home.  Two days later, I was on the beach jet skiing.
“My eye condition is  more or less the same but my attitude has changed completely.  Looking back, I can say that this has been the best three and a half years of my life. It has changed my view on life, my attitude, and it has made me appreciate the simple things in life we take for granted. When you hit rock bottom you appreciate what you had and then you know who your true friends are.  A lot of people I thought would have been there for me left from the day I first fell sick.”
There has been an emotional and financial strain on the family but it has brought us all closer together.
“I’m coping really well now,” he told me. “Thinking positive and not dwelling too much on the negative has really helped me to get through this.  I have my laptop and I have a couple of programs where it makes it easy for me; there’s a magnifier and an onscreen keyboard.  I have my Ipod which is voice activated and it reads out my emails and text messages.  I also DJ part-time. I used to play before but now that I am home and I’m not working I need something to occupy my time. If someone sees me, they would never believe I’m partially blind.  I can only see through my right eye.”
It’s hard waking up and not being able to see.  Just knowing the life you used to live before, and knowing you are missing out, is not easy.
Pert said, “It’s just a matter of time.  I know I’ll get better.”