Friends For Life 2010

Well, from sod all blog related antics over the past few months to quite an explosion now.

Where to begin? Well, Friends For Life is a gathering of diabetic kids and their families. All type one kids. For the kids there was a series of activities depending on their age. For the old and boring adults like me there was a series of lectures/talks about the best ways to deal with diabetes from many folks.

The talks, well, I would have attended Gary Scheiner's "Strike The Spike" talk. Note the would have. I missed out as both my other half and I had failed cannulas. Then Siobhan went two up on me as she had three failed cannulas in one morning. We were looked after by the wonderful Jo Soloweicyzk, a fellow type one who's been type one for forty nine years and is still relatively sane despite that! His talks that we went to were quite something, I even won a quid off him for being able to tell him who discovered insulin.
There was Fiona Campbell who as the Paediatric consultant at Leeds, gave a fascinating talk on hypos.
Gary Scheiner gave several great talks, only one of which I could attend owing to cannula fails and a lack of space in the other.

What was the best thing was being around so many kids and being able to help their parents with the questions that only a yound adult (I hate that term!) with type one could answer.

That and the amounts of free stuff I got my hands on was quite something. The rep from Medtronic who set me up on my pump was there. Despite her being a bit rude it was nice to catch up with her. The Animas folk were brilliant. I got hold of a couple of reservoirs and sets from them that are compatible with my Medtronic Veo. From the Roche folks I got a belt and a pump case usually meant for their Spirit pump but seems to accomodate my pump rather nicely. Then there is the amounts of hypo treatment I've got my hands on. Seriously, I won't need to buy glucose tablets for a long, long time. I warn ye, should you get the option of buying Hypo Fit stuff made by Arctic Medical I wouldn't touch it as it had the habit of attempting to summon the chunks with me last night. I'd also avoid the glucoshots that the folks who organised it had left out for us to help ourselves to. I still have many of them. Pens too. Many, many free pens.

Tom