More than 100,000 Americans with diabetes have limbs amputated each year. This is a crisis

Black Americans with diabetes are four times more likely to suffer amputations than white Americans

After her right foot became infected and riddled with gangrene last summer, Jemia Keshwani, 40, was terrified that it would need to be amputated.

Keshwani is a former warehouse security guard from LaGrange, Georgia, and she had spent quite a lot of her career on her feet. She was first diagnosed with type 2 diabetes 25 years ago, just after her father died while in a diabetic coma. Like many people with the “silent disease”, the condition marked by dangerously high sugar in the blood, her father did not realize he had diabetes until he was hospitalized. Several years ago, a friend of Keshwani’s with diabetes underwent a below-the-knee amputation. This was both a disease and a procedure with which she was dreadfully familiar.