Resilience with Health Challenges

By Bella Martinez

Bella shares her father’s story dealing with several health issues in a short audio story.

Today I’ll be talking about somebody who is extremely important to me, my Dad. And, some of the health problems he’s had to deal with in the past couple years of his life.

Roberto Martinez is a 76 year-old husband and father who’s been diagnosed with multiple health deficiencies, such as prostate cancer, diabetes, and extreme high blood pressure. Apart from that, he also deals with back and leg pain, along with swollen calves.

As a man who continues to work six days a week, some days even up to 10 hours, it’s hard for him to get the amount of rest he’s supposed to get, or at least as much as a 76 year-old normally does.

This is why he makes sure to keep a good diet, do some small workouts, and also manage his feelings, such as by making sure he doesn’t get too stressed out.

Roberto tells me, as his younger self, he was very athletic, and would workout often, from running, to playing basketball, to even being a dancer. The man did it all. As he got older, he didn’t really have any serious health problems.

That was until he was diagnosed with Type I diabetes at the age of 68, in 2012. And, unfortunately later that year, he also found out he had prostate cancer.

From then on out, his normal day-to-day life came with some changes. He now had to watch over what he ate, as in by maintaining his sugar, and eating a little bit more veggies, started doing some small workouts, and because of his prostate cancer, in 2017, he had to go through 42 radiation sessions.

Roberto told me, “It’s not easy going from something you’re used to, as in by eating pretty much whatever I wanted, to then making sure what I did eat and how much I ate of it was OK.”

He also tells me how taking eight medications a day became part of his norm: Two being for his diabetes, three for his high blood pressure, one for the prevention of heart attacks, one for uric acid, and the last one for his cholesterol.

Although he deals with those health problems, Roberto tells me he’s still a happy man who feels like he’s been taking care of himself in the best way possible.