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Waterville residents advocate for emergency insulin program
A 14-year-old boy, his mother and a woman who lost her son to Type 1 diabetes and the high cost of insulin testified before a legislative panel last week at a public hearing in support of LD 673, An Act to Create the Insulin Safety Net Program.
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Leo Koch, 14, works on his basketball skills Monday in the driveway of his Waterville home. Koch, who has Type 1 diabetes and must take insulin, testified before a legislative panel in favor of a bill that would provide emergency insulin at an affordable price for Mainers who need it. Rich Abrahamson/Morning Sentinel
No one anticipated that Cleo Koch wouldn t pull through. Even though he was 102, he was in very good shape and COVID didn t seem to be making him that sick.
TREMONT At 102, Cleo Koch had survived a lot of things.
Koch was the subject of a Journal Star article which ran Nov. 24 on his 102nd birthday. The lifelong central Illinois resident was still exceedingly sharp, and he related memories of the area that few are left to recall.
Koch was born in 1918 on a farm in rural Tremont at a time when the fields were still plowed by horses. The Spanish Flu was raging around the world, and both he and his mother got sick.
“My mother caught it, and I wasn’t quite 2 weeks old,” Koch said. “She got it and she was nursing me, and her milk went bad. I wasn’t getting any nourishment, and the doctor said I wouldn’t make it. He didn’t tell her outright I wouldn’t live, but he said, ‘I wouldn’t give 25 cents for his chances.’ That’s pretty close to not worth much.”