My beautiful daughter Lily was a gentle, caring, loving soul who was taken from us at just 27 years old. She was dealt a raw deal in life with health challenges including Type 1 Diabetes, deafness and autism. Life was far from easy but she was brave, courageous and never complained. Diagnosed as diabetic at 6 years old, she would have loved a Diabetic alert dog and it would have given her the confidence to feel safe, particularly at night and to grow up with a canine pal at her side watching over her. We had many scary occasions with low blood sugars and emergency dashes to hospital. One particular episode which had a lasting and damaging effect on Lily was when she had a seizure and collapsed in the middle of the road when she was a teenager out on her own. A Hypo dog not only serves a valuable life-saving medical purpose but can give immense psychological support for the child and the whole family. This is a small, quite new charity funded purely through donations making massive live changing improvements to young diabetics across the UK. I would love to think that money raised in Lily's name could help another child/family struggling with the enormity of a life-long disease for which, as yet, there is no cure. Hypo dogs can detect dangerously low or high blood sugars faster than any monitor and fill the void for patients who cannot use a continuous glucose monitor including those children under the age of 5. So far they have trained 50 dogs and none of those diabetics with these dogs have had any diabetic related hospital admissions - an extremely impressive record.

Thank you for reading Lily's story - together we can hopefully help the charity train more puppies and support more families to cope with managing this chronic disease

Caroline - Mum