Keira's Story

My son Connor is 9 years old and has been type 1 since March 2020. Our first ever lockdown, schools had been closed down for a week, for a couple of weeks I genuinely believed my 6 year old was depressed. My Nurse Mum done a urine dip test just to check he had no infections etc contributing to his mood and the recent bed wetting, and I will never forget the dark brown tab on the urine strip for Glucose (it should be light blue), and the look on my Mums face. And regretfully my first words were "I can't take him into a hospital, we'll get covid and die". From there we were quite literally locked on a ward for 6 days then locked in our home for Connor to do 12 weeks of shielding. The fear of covid overshadowed my very little knowledge of Type 1. No face to faces with any nurse, but they done their best and were on call 24 hours a day for us for the first 3 months. When I look back now I am kind of grateful for lockdowns. My son wanted to know everything and his teacher guided us through home schooling based on diabetes, carb counting and healthy eating. It also gave us time to find our rhythm and our need to knows, before venturing back into school and real life. Then it came time for us to actually be in real life again and I was diagnosed with depression because I couldn't cope with my son and his diabetes being in the hands of someone else. 3 years on my son is on a pump, he is super independent and every year he raises money for different diabetes charities. There are really awful days and some amazing days. An amazing day to us is not having a spike after breakfast, which no one else gets other than the diabetes community. I thrive off real stories. I show my son the online diabetes community in times where he needs to see that its not just him. Social media gets a bad name, but for someone like me and my son it's everything, it's a family.