My sister Laura, a beautiful soul and someone I loved very much passed away at the very end of May 2021 last year, aged 41.

She was such a talented young girl, but her life from a young age was made impossibly difficult by a rare form of diabetes called Brittle Diabetes. Her dreams of being a dancer (she was at the Royal Ballet School at the time) were brutally taken away from her when she was just around 12 years old, as she became very very ill for a period of time, and was unable to cope with the intense daily exercise that went with her dancing. She had worked so hard to get to this point, and it took some time for her to finally get a diagnosis, but from that moment onwards, despite her best efforts her body simply wouldnt allow her to train enough to be the ballet dancer she always wanted to be.

Brittle diabetes, in short, makes your blood sugar levels go all kinds of crazy, with massive and quick fluctuations and theres not an awful lot you can do about it. Your body doesnt respond to insulin like a normal diabetics does, and it's very hard to control and maintain any kind of safe, normal level. You may know that blood sugar fluctuations over a period of time are bad news, and can cause damage to pretty much everything in the body. By the the time Laura passed she was already suffering from loss of feeling in her hands and feet from nerve damage, and loss of clear vision. Not to mention the tiredness, sickness, and blimey too many other things to mention, that Laura dealt with on a daily basis for most of her life. In the end her official cause of death was Ketoacidosis.

Still she went through life bubbly and lively and caring as a person could ever be. She loved to teach dance, and she loved to let loose, she was so much fun, but I think the thing she loved the most was being a mother, a sister and part of our family, and I really want to do something to honour her.

So lets have this years fest in her memory, and raise a bit of money for the Diabetes Research and Wellness Foundation, if you can .

Thankyou x

Jimmy

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