Type 1 diabetes - Debbie Young's Writing Life

Fourth Anniversary of My Daughter’s Type 1 Diabetes

Posted on May 9, 2011July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

Laura Young at Puxton Park — My little bunny

Tomorrow my daughter’s diabetes will be four years old.

13 days before Laura’s fourth birthday, on 10th May 2007, I took her to the doctor’s, thinking she had a minor infection. My worst fear was that we’d come away with a course of antibiotics. I wasn’t looking forward to having to make her take a course of tablets. If only we’d got off that lightly!

Instead, we were immediately admitted to hospital as an emergency. The diagnosis: Type 1 diabetes.

“Are you in a fit state to drive?” said the GP as I sobbed silently behind Laura’s back. “If not, I’ll call an ambulance and we’ll blue-light you there.”

Neither of us was being over-dramatic. Without treatment, Laura could have become critically ill within hours – and dead before she could turn 5.

Type 1 or Juvenile Diabetes can strike at any age. My husband Gordon was diagnosed in his 40s. It strikes at random and without cause. It’s not lifestyle related. It’s no-one’s fault.

It’s a death sentence if you don’t take your insulin. And even if you do, it’s a life sentence, because you have to keep taking insulin, every day, for the rest of your life.

Unfortunately, you can’t take insulin as a tablet – it gets broken down by the digestive system before it can get into your blood. So you have to have it administered by injection (typically 4 jabs a day) or via a pump that is permanently attached to you via a canula, 24/7. And you need many blood tests every day, pricking your finger to get a sample, to check that your blood sugar doesn’t go too low (causing horrible short-term hypos) or too high (risking nastly long-term complications). It’s no fun at any age.

We’re lucky: we live in a country with a National Health Service and so Laura and Gordon are kept alive. In many developing countries, diabetes is still be a death sentence.

But there is hope: active research programmes run by the JDRF and other international organisations are on the verge of finding better ways of managing diabetes. They seek easier means of delivering insulin, less invasive ways of monitoring blood sugar, therapies to reduce the long-term health risks. One day, with enough funding, they may be able to prevent and even cure it.

On Sunday 15th May, 8 days before my daughter turns 8, I will be running the Bristol 10K race, raising money for research into a cure. £60 will pay for one hour’s laboratory research by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. I’m hoping to raise enough to pay for a whole day’s research: £480.

With enough funds, the day will eventually dawn when Juvenile Diabetes is cured. Please help me hasten the advent of that day. Click here to donate whatever you can spare. No amount is too small. Thank you.

Family, Type 1 diabetes

Run, Rabbit, Run

Posted on January 24, 2011July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

Year of the Metal Rabbit — Image by OnTask via Flickr

January 1^st was a rotten time to make New Year Resolutions. The excitement of Christmas was over, the decorations were losing their charm, and the mornings and evenings seemed darker than ever. Relentless advertising for the post-Christmas sales rubbed in the fact that it was an awfully long time till payday. It’s no wonder that January 24^th was officially designated the most depressing day of the year. This January had only two highlights for me: the opportunity to write cheques dated 1/1/11 or 11/1/11 and, a week later, my birthday – though, goodness knows, the novelty of birthdays wore off for me a very long time ago. So this year I decided to be realistic about New Year’s Resolutions: I resolved not to make any.

But then, a few weeks into the New Year, something wonderful happened: I looked up into the sky at 5pm and realised it was not entirely dark. A tiny tinge of blue was still hovering behind the impending night sky, a promise of the spring to come. It was enough to make my personal sap begin to rise. Then I spotted in my diary the fact that we’re on the brink of Chinese New Year. We’re entering the Year of the Rabbit. It wasn’t too late to make those New Year Resolutions after all! Before I knew it, I found myself signing up to run the Bristol 10K. A leaner, faster, fitter new me is just around the corner of 2011…

But it won’t only be me that benefits. I’ll be fundraising for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Every £60 I raise will pay for an hour of research to find a cure for Type 1 Diabetes. This horrible disease has blighted the life of my husband and my small daughter, through no fault of their own. (Type 1 diabetes is not related to lifestyle choices). 100 years ago, their diagnosis would have been shortly followed by their death. Decades of research has made it possible to live with diabetes, provided you submit to constant and costly medical intervention, including multiple daily injections or the use of an infusion pump 24/7, plus half a dozen or more blood tests every single day. The next ambition of researchers is to make it possible for Gordon and Laura and millions like them to live without it. At present, there is no cure.

So, with my resolve strengthening as the daylight hours are lengthening, I’ve signed on the dotted line for the 10K charity run. I just wish I had a Chinese bank account. Because then, when I write the deposit cheque, I could take enormous pleasure in dating it for the first day of the Chinese New Year: Rabbits Rabbits Rabbits / Rabbit.

(This post was originally written for the February edition of the Hawkesbury Parish News.)

Family, Type 1 diabetes

Father’s Day to Follow

Posted on March 14, 2010July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

Enjoying my Mother’s Day cup of tea in bed with my small daughter this morning, we discuss the nature of this event, once I have finished opening all my cards. I have just the one daughter, but she’s made enough Mother’s Day tributes tto serve a set of quins.

Never one to travel light, she has also brought into my bed three large teddy bears. These go by unusual names. Diabetic Bear was a helpful free gift from drug manufacturer Bayer to all newly diagnosed diabetic children, complete with colourful felt patches to indicate insulin injection sites. Romantic Bear sports a smart oriental karate outfit. Glowy lights up in the dark. Being slightly smaller than the other two, Glowy is introduced as the daughter of Diabetic Bear, who, because she is a wearing a dress, must be the mummy. I query whether Romantic Bear is therefore Glowy’s daddy.

“No, not yet,” replies Laura, introducing a whole new notion of the family dynamic. “But he might get married to Diabetic Bear this afternoon.”

How many marriages would be saved if the mummies had the babies first and then recruited the daddies, appointing only the most compatible candidate for the post? I think she could be on to something.

“When’s Father’s Day?” she asks. “How many more days?”

Though Mother’s Day is an ancient tradition, I have a feeling that Father’s Day was a twentieth century invention by Hallmark, always keen to create a new card marketing opportunity. Pleasingly, it was designated to fall precisely nine months before Mother’s Day.

“It’s in June,” is all I choose to tell her.

I look down at the little collection of treasures spread over the duvet: red handprints made at Rainbows, a card full of hearts and hugs and kisses created at school, a colouring sheet completed in the changing room at Gym Club, smuggled into her kit bag so that I wouldn’t see it before the big day. She cuddles up closer and gives me a long hug.

Hallmark really ought to start up a Daughters’ Day, too. Well, I’d be the first in the queue to buy a card.

Family, Type 1 diabetes

Laurel & Laura

Posted on March 8, 2010July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

Tonight I have the pleasure of introducing my six year old daughter Laura to Laurel and Hardy, as together we watch a DVD of their short classic film ‘The Music Box’. This endearingly silly tale of their attempt to deliver a pianola to a house at the top of a long flight of steps demonstrates their perfect comic timing and chemistry. It also contains ample reminders that the silent film era had only just ended, with some of the other characters clearly trained before the spoken word was at their disposal.

At first Laura is bemused by the monochrome footage.

“I wish it was in colours,” she says, used to bright Disney Pixar animations.

I explain that when the film was made, nearly 80 years ago, they only had the technology to make films in black and white.

“No, Mummy, there’s grey in there too.”

I have a vivid memory of my grandfather watching the same film on television about 40 years ago, when black and white television was all we had. He was in rosy paroxysms of laughter, as he must have been when he’d first watched it in his youth. Tonight his great-granddaughter is in much the same state, totally immersed in the pair’s misadventure as she shrieks in delight at their mistakes.

“You don’t need to do that!” she shouts, as they lug the piano back down the steps, following the postman’s advice that they could have brought it up more easily by the sloping approach road. She leaps to her feet to join in their tapdance, executed as they unpack the pianola from its wooden case.

At the end of the filmshe is clamouring for more, but bedtime intervenes, and she has to make do with the promise of another Laurel and Hardy film tomorrow. I will look out my ancient video of ‘Way Out West’, featuring that sublime dance routine on their way into the saloon. I must have seen it hundreds of times but it still transfixes me every time.

Will my great grandchildren watch the comedy favourites of my youth? Morecambe and Wise, The Goodies’ giant kitten, Monty Python’s dead parrot, Tommy Cooper, Mr Bean, Fawlty Towers? I’d rather put my money on the timeless Laurel and Hardy than on any of them. Matching their achievement is still the ultimate comic Holy Grail. But the best double acts aren’t only about comedy: for me, my daughter and I are up there with the greats.

Family, Type 1 diabetes

Birthday Thoughts & Diabetes

Posted on January 18, 2010July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

I’ve got a big birthday with a 0 on the end of it today, and happy it certainly is.

Working on the embryonic links page of this website, I realise that if I add all those that are currently floating around in my head, I will soon give the game away that I have a complete butterfly mind. So I think I had better prioritise.

At the top of this list of priorities will be the JDRF website. (Note to self: don’t forget to let them know, just in case they want to add a hotlink to mine – inbound links are so good for raising your profile on search engines.)

What’s JDRF? It’s a fabulous charity with a global network raising money to find a cure for juvenile diabetes. This lifelong illness is becoming an epidemic among children, requiring invasive, daily administration of the hormone insulin by multiple injections or a permanently connected pump infusion. Every Type 1 diabetic child must also draw blood umpteen times a day to check that they have not overdosed or underdosed and to help them hit the right balance of blood sugar so that they neither pass out (or worse) or fur up their blood vessels, causing long-time serious organ damage. This balance is particularly hard to strike in babies diagnosed (and there are plenty of diabetics whose age is represented only by a 0 at the end) and in children going through growth spurts and adolescents.

My small and otherwise perfect daughter acquired this incurable disease a few days before her fourth birthday, and so began our 24/7 battle with this unpredictable and unruly condition. Why did she get it? No-one knows. It’s not to be confused with Type 2 diabetes, generally associated (rather unfairly) with poor lifestyle choice, to which some people and certain media have taken a “serve you right” stance. Type 1 diabetes is just one of life’s many lotteries, the prize being the kind that no-one wants to win.

Asked to describe herself in a single word, my daughter would say “diabetic” – and no child should have to give that answer.

Ever since I was her age, my reply for myself would be “writer”, and I am grateful for that. I’m grateful for the talents I have been given, but I’d trade them all in tomorrow for a cure for diabetes. That will be my wish when I blow out the candles on my cake today, but that alone is not going to make it happen. In the meantime, I vow to do something that absolutely is in my power to help the cause: I will offer the JDRF my writing services free of charge and I will also tithe all commissions I get from here on it to benefit their invaluable work.

So – no presents, please – but if you want to make a donation to JDRF, please click on the link.