![]() The tips of Christensen's very large fingers are covered in black speckles from the pricks he gives them to test his glucose levels. I figure if I live a normal life I will take about 90,000 shots. And sometimes I am so desperate for a Snickers bar I give myself insulin so I can have one. The reason is that I test my blood sugar seven times a day. I've only lost consciousness four times in all of those years. If you have too much insulin your blood sugar drops and your brain shuts down. I thought I was going to die of cancer."ĭiabetes is a great example whereby giving the patient the tools you can manage yourself very well. I called a friend who was a doctor in Boston, and he immediately diagnosed it: "Oh, you have diabetes." I called my wife and said, "Oh, Christine, I am so relieved I have diabetes. ![]() My dad drank a full 2 liters of Seven Up at dinner. My mom is the oldest of 12 children, 9 boys. One time we visited my mom's sister in Charlottesville. It hit me in 1982 when I was a White House Fellow in Washington. When my dad was at the Boston Consulting Group, he would go in superearly and come home early. They leave before their kids wake up and come back after they go to sleep. But if you look at how they spend any given week, they spend 90 hours at work. Too many of his former students who come back, too many people period, say family is important or my religious beliefs are important. He'd say, "You'll never believe what I learned today." It turned into dinner table conversation. He'd come home from work every day excited about some comment a student had made or a paper they had written. "Now I can see your dad again," she told me. She was so excited when her doctor said that she had pancreatic cancer and likely would only live six or seven weeks. She didn't want to live too long that she couldn't take care of herself. I've known people who wanted to die, but most of them were so miserable they wanted to escape it. As Mom was getting older she was excited, truly excited, that within a few years she'd be with Dad again. In the Mormon Church we believe we can be married for all eternity, not till death do you part. As my kids grew up, on Sunday morning I'd say, "Okay, guys, read pages 20 to 30 in Grandpa's biography, and let's talk about what it means for us." That kept us on the same salary and insurance. As we were growing up he took us to work on Saturday to help him put the food on the shelves. He worked for a department store in Salt Lake, ZCMI. ![]() It was the most wonderful, happiest experience of my life to take care of my dad. You can come back next week, next month, next year, ten years from now." I was with my dad for the last two months before he died. I went to talk to the warden Sir Edgar Williams and after two minutes he said, "We'll send you home. Once I was there for six weeks it was clear that he was in trouble. Even back then in 1975 the probability that it would go into remission was about 80%. My dad died at age 49 from Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Here it is in his words, along with those of his family, friends and close colleagues. But he graciously agreed to tell his inspiring story in January, the same month he went back to teaching. He was in intensive speech therapy, eight hours a day at the beginning. Because of his July stroke it took a long time for Christensen to be ready to sit down with FORBES. It was another opportunity, in a lifetime full of them, to gain insight into how to make the world work better. For Christensen it was not a reason to get too upset. It exposed the many ways health care was broken and recommended numerous ways it can be systematized and disrupted the same way mainframes gave way to PCs and now iPhones.Ĭhristensen's work took on new urgency the past few years as he suffered a heart attack followed by cancer followed by a stroke. His investigation culminated in his 2009 book, The Innovator's Prescription, written with two doctors. Caregivers and insurers told him his theories didn't apply to their complex industry. One industry that always eluded Christensen's influence was health care.
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