DATE: Sunday, April 6, 1997                 TAG: 9704050044

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E6   EDITION: FINAL 

COLUMN: IMPERFECT NAVIGATOR

SOURCE: ALEXANDRIA BERGER

                                            LENGTH:   70 lines

TRANSPLANTS ARE A SWEET ``MIRACLE'' FOR PASTRY CHEF

MOSES BROWN was everyone's ``sugar daddy.''

After years of battling to get to the top, the New Yorker had made it as one of this country's master pastry chefs.

But he faced a more profound battle. A master at working with confections, he was almost killed - by sugar.

Brown, who now lives in Hampton Roads, recalls the earlier struggle, when as a black man he was a pioneer in his field.

``Training in New York, they'd rig my ovens so they'd blow up,'' Brown says of his co-workers. ``They'd turn out the lights when I was carrying pastry trays.''

Drafted during the Vietnam War, his dream interrupted, Brown already knew well that life was going to be a challenge. Within six months of his honorable discharge from the Marine Corps, his life-and-death struggle began.

Brown was diagnosed with Type I diabetes (juvenile diabetes or insulin-dependent diabetes). An autoimmune disease in which the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas are destroyed, this form of diabetes requires constant insulin replacement.

Eating sugar is out.

Brown was 22 years old with custody of his 18-month-old daughter, Drucilla.

As he battled fatigue, a 25-pound weight loss in 30 days and dangerously elevated blood sugar, his dream of being a master baker seemed to be slipping away.

I've written about the will to survive that makes people with chronic illness forge ahead no matter what the obstacles. Brown exemplifies all of this.

At 33, Brown suffered a heart attack. For the next two years, he underwent cardiovascular therapy to learn how to walk and breathe.

Then, at 45, he had a stroke. Paralyzed on his right side, Brown dragged his right leg.

His doctor told him he'd never use his right hand again. Taking a clothespin, Brown turned it into an exercise machine for his fingers. He lifted weights and rode a bike.

He healed himself. Only now he was going blind.

Diabetic retinopathy was stealing his sight. Blood vessels constantly ruptured. During surgery to correct his vision, the surgeon discovered Brown was in kidney failure. With his depth perception gone and his kidneys shot, Brown kept practicing making intricate designs on pastries.

Dialysis came next, making him sick. ``I went into diabetic comas. They couldn't adjust my insulin,'' he says. ``I'd been injecting myself for 27 years. Finally, Drucilla came and got me and took me to the transplant unit at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church.

``It took 11 months to find a match, after getting on the transplant list. I look back and wonder how I ever survived.''

Dr. Johann Johnson, director for the Kidney and Pancreas Program at the Inova Center, calls Brown a ``miracle patient.'' After his kidney and pancreas transplant, Brown is symptom-free, no longer a diabetic.

Raising his daughter brought an unexpected reward, as well. As a registered dialysis nurse, Drucilla saved her father's life.

Today, tucked in Portsmouth's historic Port Norfolk is a bakery called Sweet Temptations, owned by Moses Brown and Bonnie Skillman. The smell of French, Italian, Jewish, German and all-American pastries permeate the air.

It isn't a major hotel, where Brown made exquisitely carved flowers and rolled dough as thin as gossamer. Still, the word is out. Moses Brown is still everyone's ``sugar daddy.'' And now he can taste the sweetness of his own confections. MEMO: Sweet Temptations is at 2723 Detroit St. in Portsmouth, phone

393-0772. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Moses Brown

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