Why CureSam.com?

This website will be a lot of different things over the next few years but it will always be with the aim of shutting down. As soon as we get a cure for diabetes!

My 10 year old son Samuel was diagnosed as Type 1 Diabetic on July 7th 2010 – not one of our better days, let me tell you.

In the days that followed Samuel, my wife and I felt a lot of different emotions. There was shock at the original diagnosis. He had been ill for a while and so there was relief that we could pin it on something. There was confusion as we struggled to get to grips with the condition and all the different things we needed to learn about, to manage it. Samuel was really brave at first, almost blase about it, but in the weeks that followed his anxiety over needles increased.

For me, I’m slightly ashamed to say, my overriding emotion was anger. I was cross – I felt like someone had poisoned my son. I wanted someone to blame, and of course there isn’t anyone. A typical male response, possibly. I am a bit of a control freak and in my day to day job, I’m used to sorting problems. This was one problem I couldn’t sort.

So to a certain extent, that’s what this site is. Diabetes is a BIG problem, getting bigger and one I hope to have some small part in sorting.

The site is called CureSam after my son but Samuel is just one of 300,000 Type 1 Diabetics in the UK. However, if we can cure him, obviously we are curing everyone. So he will be part symbol, part mascot, part metaphor.

By raising funds, sharing experiences, promoting the positives, removing myths and increasing awareness, I hope that this site will go some way to Curing Sam.

More specifically, I will be raising funds by taking part and blogging about all things cycling (and occasionally triathlon) related.

I have had a bike for as long as I can remember, but can’t remember a time that I have spent more time biking than now. I will be 40 years old in 2011, but every time I get on my bike, I still get that little rush I got when I was a child. It’s like freedom. The smallest sense that anything and anywhere is possible. Factoring in the health benefits (more important than ever as middle age approaches!!!) and the environmental upside too, it’s not hard to see why cycling is proving more popular than ever.

By discussing all these things here, I hope that mine and my families experiences can have prove helpful in some way to coping with and curing diabetes.