I would like to tell you a little about our family and the challenges we live with every day.

If you met us you would see 5 beautiful, happy, healthy, well loved children and two adults that love each other very much and live for their children.

If you delved further into our lives you would see how determined we are to keep our family this way even if we are constantly handed challenging health issues with our children and ourselves.

	About me I am married with five beautiful children, 4 boys and 1 girl aged between 16 and 8.  My husband Steve and I started going out when we were 15, even though our families didn’t approve at first because of Steve being Aboriginal Australian and me being white Australian.  They thought that the two different cultures just wouldn’t work.  But we showed them that it can work!  I left school in year 11 to start hairdressing, Steve completed year 12 and moved to the city from our small country town to play professional Rugby League for the Brisbane Broncos and started an electrical apprenticeship.  9 months after Steve left Murgon I transferred my apprenticeship to a Brisbane salon to be closer to him.  We were married in 1990 at the age of 19. In 1992 not long after our first Child Sam was born my husband Steve developed Type 1 Diabetes at the age of 22. He was at this time playing professional Rugby League for the Brisbane Broncos, Queensland and Australia. Steve In 1992 Steve had the best playing year of his life.  On returning home from England after a 3 week World Cup tour and World Club Challenge game he started loosing weight, was very thirsty and had an infection in a wound after an operation.  All of this didn’t make sense until he was diagnosed with an auto-immune disease, Type 1 diabetes.  Steve’s main concern was if he would be able to play football again at the level he had previously achieved.  Well he did and this was mainly due to his attitude and the way he managed his diabetes.  By keeping a very strict control of his levels through diet and insulin injections he was able to achieve his goals. Steve and I went on to have another 2 children, Billy born 1994 and Sunita born 1996.  When Sunita was 6 months old I developed Graves Disease (overactive thyroid) which is also an auto-immune disease.  I treat this with tablets that keep my levels under control.  We often wondered whether the children had a risk of getting one of the diseases but were told that they had only about 5% chance. Charlie is diagnosed 2002 Steve and I had another 2 children, Charlie born 1999 and Freddie born 2001.  All the children were very happy and healthy until May 2002.  Just after Charlie’s third birthday one night when he was going to bed he asked me to fill a drink bottle with water and the first thing he asked for when he woke the next morning was for me to fill the drink bottle again.  As we had tested the children on Steven’s meter every now and then and they were all fine I was not really alarmed but asked him if I could test him on Daddy’s tester.  He didn’t want to do this so I thought that I would just test him when he went to sleep that night.  When we did test him his level was 21mml.  We phoned the hospital and they asked that he be taken in right away.  He started on insulin injections the next morning.  We were very lucky that we had knowledge about diabetes and diagnosed it before he got very ill.  Charlie accepted his daily routine of 7 finger prick test and 4-5 insulin injection a day and everything that goes with having diabetes very well.  We put this down to the fact that he had always seen Steve do everything so it wasn’t as scary as it is for children who have never seen the needles before. A Double Wammie 2003 By early January 2003 we had everything under control with Charlie’s diabetes when we noticed Billy who was 8 ½ at the time was showing signs of diabetes.  We tested him all that day and by afternoon knew that he too had developed Type 1 diabetes.  He accepted this very well and already understood a lot about diabetes because of Charlie.  Billy was also diagnosed with Coeliac disease in May 2003 which means he can’t have any foods that contain gluten eg wheat, oats, barley, rye and malt.  The Hat-Trick 2004 Over the next few months we kept on testing the other children and by October 2003 we noticed that Freddie our youngest child was showing very early signs of diabetes.  I found this a particularly hard time, as Freddie was still producing insulin but this was slowly decreasing - why can’t I stop this from happening!  By March 2004 Freddie started on insulin injections just 2 months before his third birthday.  He also accepted this very well because he was going to be like Dad and his 2 other brothers.  Freddie was then diagnosed with Coeliac disease in November 2005. Something different 2006 In late 2005 Sunita aged 9 ½ was playing basketball when she collapsed on the court, on visiting the Doctor he put it down to a fainting episode.  In Feb 2006 Sunita had another faint after swimming, so we took her to a neurologist who informed us that there was a slim chance it was Epilepsy and if so, the seizures would become more frequent and stronger.  Within 2 weeks she had another seizure. This time she didn’t faint but her face jumped and twitched uncontrollably.  I phoned the specialist and he suggested we have an MRI to rule anything else out before starting her on Epilepsy medication. After the MRI we went to visit the specialist. Steven, Sunita and I entered his room and within 5 minutes our whole world came crashing down.  We were told that she had a brain tumor.  Here we were worried about putting her on epilepsy medication, and now we are being told that our daughter has a brain tumor.  Sunita was in the room at the time so we had to be very mindful about what questions we asked.  They couldn’t tell us much more than, it was a hamartoma or a low grade glioma, which has a very broad spectrum.  The tumor was in the Thalamus (core of the brain) which is responsible for all of her gross motor nerves so we couldn’t do a biopsy.  Now we have to wait and see if it is growing and how quickly.  We had to wait 3 months before the next MRI until we would know if it was growing and if so how fast.  As anyone would imagine this was a very difficult time. Over the next 18 months she had 4 MRI’s which showed no significant changes, so the Doctor advised us to wait 18 months before the next MRI, but fingers crossed there will never be any change.  If this is the case the doctors say that the tumor is just a birth mark where the cells haven’t formed properly.  The tumor may have never been found if she didn’t have the epilepsy seizure.  After two years on the epilepsy medication and 18 months of having no seizures Sunita was allowed to go off the medication so everything is looking bright.    The healthy one I couldn’t leave Sam’s photo out!  He is the only member of our family who isn’t medicated, lucky for him! Things happen for a reason I am not sure why so many things have happened to us but I am now trying to make a difference to other people who have been affected by diabetes.  I have started my own business designing and developing funky, bright, useful, convenience based products for managing diabetes.  I find that with so many diabetics in my family already I have a great amount of experience and knowledge of what is needed to make diabetes as convenient and manageable as possible.  I speak at conferences around Australia, I have spoken at a diabetes educators conference in New Zealand to 250 Diabetes Educators from Australia and New Zealand and towards the end of this year Steve and I will travel to Canada to speak at the International Diabetes Federation World Diabetes Congress in Montreal. I hope that by telling my/our story and the positive way we deal with diabetes in our family, that it will never stop our children from doing anything, the same way it never stopped their father.  It may help other families to look at their lives and realize that life isn’t that bad even though they may have diabetes or another illness.   I love the fact that I am helping others and I feel this also helps me, as the business has been a great distraction when things start to play on my mind. As diabetes, Type 1 and predominantly Type 2 affect a huge population, I hope that I can be of help in spreading the word that by managing their diabetes and being positive has so many benefits.  If we as a family can be positive with what challenges we have been handed, there is no reason why other families can’t! This is my motto: “A Pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, An Optimist sees an opportunity in every difficulty” by Sir Winston Churchill Take care and always enjoy life, which ever direction it may take you. Elissa