Help find Type 1 diabetes cure (Holly Davies)

It’s World Diabetes Day on Tuesday 14th November, and for anyone – or their child – who has just been diagnosed, I wanted to let them know that having Type 1 diabetes doesn’t mean you should wrap up in cotton wool.

I was diagnosed 20 years ago and throughout my teens I would inject insulin four or five times a day and test my blood glucose with finger pricks another four times a day.

I wake in the night when my blood glucose level needs attention, monitor my glucose levels as many as 13 times a day and weigh nearly everything I eat to work out the carbohydrate content so that I can inject insulin accordingly. Yet, oddly enough, I consider myself lucky.

You might think that having this condition may seem a burden, but it hasn’t ever held me back.

I’ve held down jobs, travelled the world and due to technological advancements, managing my Type 1 diabetes with a flash glucose sensor and an insulin pump – technology only available because of medical research – has enabled me to become a healthy mum of two children.

I believe that a cure is within reach, which I why I work as a fundraiser.

I don’t fundraise for myself, but for children who have been diagnosed. I want them to have a “normal” childhood where they can go to birthday parties and eat cake, or have sleepovers at friends’ houses with midnight feasts, without the fears of high blood glucose levels and the necessity of carb counting.

Constant thinking, adjusting, calculating, measuring, worrying and stress is a part of life for many people with Type 1 diabetes, but with a cure, it will be all be gone.

Holly Davies
Fundraiser,
Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation
c/o Subsea 7,
Greenwell Base,
Greenwell Rd,
East Tullos Industrial Estate,
Aberdeen,
AB12 3AX.