Welcome to my Diabetes UK Skydive Fundraiser. Did you know someone is diagnosed with diabetes every two minutes? As many as 4.8 million people are living with diabetes in the UK right now.

I’m petrified of heights but do at least 1 thing a year for charity and this year it’s this event.

My personal story starts when I was diagnosed in December 2017 (a week before Christmas). Before I was diagnosed, I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was just sugar in the blood, but it’s so much more than that. It’s sleepless nights for no reason. It was a minimum of 4 injections a day. It’s carb counting everything you eat and drink to the gram. It’s unexplained high and low glucose levels. It’s constant worries that you’ve given yourself too much insulin and you’re going to have a hypo and become a burden to others for 20 or so mins while you recover. Mood swings, etc. There are 42 things that affect your glucose levels and trying to master that while sicking needles into yourself to make sure you give yourself enough insulin is mind boggling to say the least. After all that it can lead to further health issues later in life if not managed sufficiently. Worst of all type 1 is genetic, and there is nothing I or anyone with type 1 can do to prevent it. It comes with a stigmatism that it only affects ‘fat’ people, which simply isn’t true. Luckily, and so far I have been able to carry on with a ‘normalish’ life, but not a day goes by where I wish I didn’t have it. There is a 1 in 17 chance my daughter will have diabetes. I hope she doesn’t have it and I hope technology has improved to transplant levels of she ever is.

Since I was diagnosed, the technology available to manage Diabetes has improved significantly as well as becoming affordable to supply by our amazing NHS. I am now on a closed loop diabetes management system, this is practically a prosthetic pancreas. This has only recently become possible on the NHS. This is all due to your donations, and I cannot thank you enough for any donation you are able to give.

Thanks

Chris

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