Keep true to your dreams, says country star

When Juno-award winning country music star George Canyon was a kid, all he dreamed about was becoming a pilot. He strongly felt, he said, that he needed to serve the country and be in the Air Force.

At age 12 he enlisted in the Air Cadets.

The singer, who hails from the country’s East Coast, described his first flight. It was in a glider and he loved it, he said. He was soon in a helicopter, and described the look on his face as a “perma-grin.” Canyon was speaking to a crowd at the Canadian Diabetes Association Conference held Oct. 10 to 13 in Vancouver.
It was in 1984, a month before Christmas, when he started to exhibit symptoms of onset juvenile diabetes, and on Boxing Day was taken to the hospital where they found he had a 44 blood sugar count.

After some time spent in the hospital and the family’s efforts to get his diabetes in check, he finally went back to Cadets where his captain told him “You will never be a pilot and you will never be in the Air Force.”

Canyon left the cadets and tucked his dreams away.

At that point Canyon could have rebelled against the disease over his teen years. Diabetes tends to isolate and make kids feel different. But he decided at that young age that diabetes was not going to take his dreams away.

Still, he took a detour.

Even though he had been playing music since the age of four years old, he had never thought it could be a career. In Grade 5 he had even formed a band and performed a two-song concert that featured “A Hard Day’s Night” and “The Rose,” he joked. Canyon, instead, went off to university with the idea he would become a doctor, and he finished pre-med with honors.

Then he went on the road with a country band and never went back to medicine.

The life of a performer presents a diabetic with a number of challenges, but after 28 years of living with the disease he has concluded that eighty to ninety per cent of living with the diabetes, and living well, comes from the mind.

Diabetics can control the disease, or it can control them, he said.
The purpose of the speech to the professionals who work with people who have diabetes was to provide tools of encouragement.

What drove Canyon was a simple goal—He still wanted to be a pilot in the Air Force.

“GDDC,” he said. “Goal-Driven Diabetes Control.”

“I had a goal that drove me to take control of my diabetes.”
Health care professionals were encouraged to speak with their clients to determine the goals that would lead them to their own success in managing the disease.

Canyon works primarily with children with diabetes through the George Canyon & Friends Diabetes Heroes Tour which promotes living life without limits despite Type 1 diabetes; a message that should resonate with those with Type 2 diabetes as well.
|
Four years ago Canyon got his pilot’s license, and then he was made an honorary colonel of the Canadian Air Force. And in the next Superman movie, Canyon will play an Air Force pilot.

Looks like Canyon’s dream are coming true.

Two dreams that he had stored away since his diagnosis have been realized, and that would not have happened had he not had his diabetes under control, he said.

“Never, never, never, never… never give up on your dreams. You can accomplish anything,” Canyon said. “Believe and you can live your dreams.

“I’m a Type 1 diabetic and I am living my dreams.”