Cogdell diabetes class continues to educate Scurry County residents

A free educational series on diabetes offered by Cogdell Memorial Hospital is approaching its one-year anniversary, and response to the classes has been phenomenal, according to Marketing Director Tara Camp.
“February, I believe, will be our first year. A full year. We’re really excited that it’s been going on a full year. It’s grown a lot. In the very beginning, I think we had 12 or 13 show up, and now we’ve got over 80 people that are on our contact list for future presentations.”
At the Diabetes Matters January class, held Wednesday afternoon in the Cogdell Cafe, optometrist Dr. Jason Cave spoke about diabetes’ effect on the eyes. 
Cave spoke about the key issues of early detection and maintaining a healthy blood sugar level to head off diabetes-related eye problems.
“Probably the most important, kind of like you hear all the time, with diabetes and diabetic eye care, early detection is always key,” he said. “Preventative type things, you know. Coming in for your routine care, and not just coming in once there’s a problem. With diabetes causing so much blindness, an unfortunate part of that is that it’s preventable in most cases if it’s just caught early. So getting your routine eye care, having those tests run, making sure that, if there’s a problem, they’re addressed at the early stages rather than the latter.”
Cave also advised those who attended the class to form a good relationship with their primary care doctors and follow their instructions when it comes to diabetes.
“I always point people back to their medical doctors. That’s where it all starts,” he said. “If you can maintain that blood sugar level, get an A1c level (a blood glucose test performed by a doctor) and kind of maintain that, you really raise your chances of just maintaining your vision your whole life, and your health your whole life, and not having the significant problems that come along with that disease.”
In addition to the diabetes educational series, Camp said Cogdell offers other medical education classes as well.
“We have our diabetes series, and then we do a weight-loss lunch-and-learn. SWAT from Lubbock comes out and does that monthly as well. It’s bariatric surgery. They go over the weight loss procedure and everything,” she said. “And then also, this month, we have Dr. (Chinwe) Okafor. He’s our new orthopedic surgeon. He does total replacements on hips and knees. He’s actually doing a lunch-and-learn next Thursday.”
Okafor’s class will be Jan. 23 from noon to 1 p.m. at Cogdell Memorial Hospital. 
The next Diabetes Matters class will be Feb. 12 from 4 to 5 p.m. That class will feature Dr. Oscar Martinez, and will cover “Understanding the Diabetes Process.”