"I don't wish anyone the moment you find out your child has diabetes. It was an absolute shock. I was devastated, I felt like the sky had fallen on me, I wasn’t in the mood for anything. I was very, very upset," Alina told us when we talked at the camp.
"Our whole life has changed. Now everything has to be calculated, we have to be careful. The phone is essential day and night. And at night we're woken up by alarms, by phone notifications showing us Darius's blood sugar. I often wake up without alarms several times a night and check to see if he is okay.
I've always been afraid of injections. When I got the vaccine I fainted. At the hospital, when I arrived urgently with Darius and they discovered he had diabetes, the nurses told me that from now on I would have to give him insulin. I was devastated.
The first few days the nurses gave him the insulin injection. I couldn't. But I figured they wouldn't let us home from the hospital if I keep doing this. I had to make up my mind. Then I said okay, I'll give him the insulin, because the disease will be with us for life. I closed my eyes when I stuck the needle in. It was terrible. But we had to get used to it...
I'm still afraid that Darius will lose me one day and will have to fend for himself. I can only hope that he won't give up, that he'll be strong enough to cope with this illness! I try to strengthen him, to encourage him not to care what people say...
Here in Yuppi it's different. Here it's all about energy. Here it's an escape where you don't think about sickness or anything else."
Alina shows me the bracelet she received last year when she went to the Yuppi Camp with her family for the first time. "Look, no one in the family has taken off their bracelet since then. It's such a great memory."
Annually, 400 children are diagnosed with diabetes, 420 children learn that they have cancer, and the number of those diagnosed with an autoimmune disease is even today unknown. The lives of these children, these families, change in a matter of seconds. The small everyday joys are replaced by helplessness, fear and anxiety, feelings that never go away. Hundreds of plans are cancelled, all certainties become uncertainties. But a camp should not be like that!
Because illnesses do not take vacations, but chronically ill children need to. Offer now a chance at childhood!
