Thank you for taking time to visit my JustGiving page. On the 25th January 2022, our lives changed forever when our eldest son, Jacob, was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) at the age of 10.

What started as a parents intuition booked doctors appointment post COVID, quickly escalated into a dash to the hospital with sky high blood sugar levels and ultimately a Type 1 Diabetes diagnosis and a 3 day stay in hospital. 

Type 1 Diabetes is a very misunderstood condition. It is life threatening in the short-term and the effects in the long-term from poor management of glucose levels are harrowing.

Type 1 Diabetes is an auto-immune condition: For reasons only known to itself, your immune system attacks and destroys the insulin-producing cells in your pancreas. Insulin is crucial to life. When you eat, insulin moves the energy from your food, called glucose, from your blood into the cells of your body. When your pancreas fails to produce insulin, glucose levels in your blood start to rise and your body can’t function properly. When your body cannot access glucose from energy, it starts to burn fats. When your body burns fats, a side product called ketones is produced. Ketones are acidic and large amounts of ketones can develop over a short period of time. Large levels of ketones in your blood stream can cause diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA). DKA can be fatal and reports have shown that 24,000 die from DKA annually in the UK. In the long-term, high levels of glucose in the blood may damage nerves and blood vessels and the organs they supply, leading to complications such as permanent sight loss and limb amputation. 

The pancreas is a really smart organ that produces just the right amount of insulin to regulate blood sugar levels. A person without a working pancreas has to do all of that work manually. It's incredibly tricky to work out how much insulin to administer when taking into account all the variables that impact on the amount that is required. And whilst insulin is an absolute life-saver for people living with T1D, it is equally as capable of killing that person if too much insulin is administered. 

Type 1 Diabetes currently affects 400,000 people in the UK, with over 29,000 of them children.

The past 12 months have been a whirlwind of new learnings and routines as T1D touches on every aspect of Jacobs life...from carb counting of every bit of food in order to calculate how much insulin is required, to trying to anticipate the impact of activity on his blood sugar levels and any pull back of insulin or additional snacking that would be required, to nightly 3am alarms to check his overnight blood sugar level is ok.

Throughout all of this Jacob has demonstrated incredible courage, resilience and maturity, dealing with a life-changing condition on top of all the drama and life experiences that come with being an active 11 year old boy and having now started High School in September. Despite having given himself c.1,000 manual needle injections, hundreds of finger-pricks and had countless "boring" conversations with his parents about blood sugar levels, 99.9% of the time Jacob has a beaming smile on his face. He just wants to get on with living his life to the full and doing all the things he loves...and thats exactly as it should be and our job to make sure that happens.

The Challenge

To help raise T1D awareness and support a tremendous charity I am running the 2023 London Marathon. So 26.2 miles through the streets and sites of London at the conclusion of over 600 training miles across a 16 week training plan (thats a lot of running shoes to go through!).

The Charity

I am running and raising funds for JDRF (Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation).

JDRF fund Type 1 Diabetes research to improve lives and hopefully one day secure a solution to eradicate diabetes for good. They provide a great deal of information and support for people like me and Jo, who were both overwhelmed at Jacob's diagnosis but also determined to quickly learn and understand as much as we could to be able to offer Jacob the best supported way forward.

https://jdrf.org.uk/

Thank you so much for reading this and any donation is very gratefully received.

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