Hypo

Diabetics need sweets. After a week by my child’s hospital bedside unwashed, unchanged, we were finally going home. But before we even crossed our own threshold, the hospital gave me one urgent task: go buy sweets. High-sugar drinks, Haribo, juice boxes, anything fast-acting. Because when your child has diabetes, those sweets aren’t treats - they’re medicine. So I left the hospital and headed straight to the shops, grabbing multipacks of juice, gummy bears, and containers to send to school, to keep by the bed, to stash in every bag. He wouldn’t be able to return to school until they held an emergency supply of sweets. Because next time his sugar crashes, those sweets might just save his life.

Hypoglycaemia is a known risk factor for death in diabetics. Now engineers have invented an Implantable device that could save diabetes patients from that dangerously low blood sugar. (https://ee.stanford.edu/siddharth-krishnans-implantable-device)

The device uses a shape-memory alloy and delivers a stable glucagon powder when low blood sugars are detected. The glucagon triggers Glucose production by the body.

I don’t doubt that there is much more research needed before Diabetics can start to use such a device. And that is one of the reasons funding for research is so vital.

This summer, I have taken Up the stepping challenge for diabetes UK.  My target is half a million steps. So far, I have stepped a quarter of a million and I have two months to go. 

100 years since the discovery of insulin saved the first diabetics life we now have synthetic insulin, glucose monitors, insulin pumps and the recent discovery of a drug that could delay the onset of type 1 diabetes.

 Diabetes Research is active and actively saving lives. Please donate or share. I will be walking until October. Thank you.