This isn’t a story I ever imagined I’d be writing, and yet here we are — six days into life with a 16-month-old with type 1 diabetes. I’m starting this blog as a way of making sense of it all, of documenting the steep learning curve, the hard moments, the unexpected wins, and everything in between. Not for sympathy and not for dramatics, just for honesty. And maybe, somewhere along the way, it will help another family realise they’re not alone in this strange new world of carb counting, tiny fingers, and strength they didn’t know they had.
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The doctor finished checking Tom’s blood and looked up at me.
“You need to go straight to A&E.”
No dramatic pause. No alarms. Just a calm, matter-of-fact sentence in a small GP room. And somehow, I didn’t panic. I felt… weirdly calm. In my head, this was probably just an infection or a virus and we’d be home by bedtime. Easy.
I called my wife and told her the doctor wanted us to go to A&E. She said she’d meet us there. I carried Tom out to the car, clipped him into his seat, and he promptly fell fast asleep — completely unbothered.
I drove with a letter in my pocket, a snoring toddler in the back seat, and absolutely no real understanding of what the next 24 hours was about to bring.
Looking back now, the signs had been there for a while.
Over the previous two or three weeks, Tom had been drinking a lot more water than usual. We blamed it on everything: hand, foot and mouth, teething, a phase. We even mentioned it to nursery one day and they casually replied, “Now you mention it… he does drink more than the others.” Still, nothing felt serious enough to panic about.
Then there was the irritability. The night-time battles. This was a child who had always gone down easily and slept through, but suddenly we were fighting to put him down and we were up two or three times a night and every time, all he wanted was water. We wrote it off as a developmental leap or just… being 16 months old.
To try and calm our own nerves, we started a water diary. Between 900 and 1300ml a day. Nappies so heavy they could have doubled as ankle weights. On the “better” days, we’d convince ourselves we were imagining it all.
Tom also loved his food. Breakfast was usually milk, a banana, Weetabix and toast. A solid start — but apparently not enough, because after we dropped him at nursery he’d go in for what can only be described as his second breakfast. The greedy little hobbit in him was thriving. The nursery app would proudly tell us he’d eaten everything, sometimes seconds. We thought, Great — he’s not fussy and we’re getting our money’s worth.
Looking back, maybe he should have put on a bit more weight for the amount he was eating. But he’s always been active, so again, we brushed it off.
Then, the week everything changed.
My wife picked Tom up on the Monday and nursery mentioned he hadn’t really eaten his lunch or dinner. Our immediate thought? Brilliant. Another illness. And whose turn is it to take time off work this time?
Later that evening, we noticed the white clusters in his mouth. A quick Google and we were fairly confident it was oral thrush.
That same night, we did another Google — one that would quietly change everything.
Symptoms of type 1 diabetes:
Drinking more – Check
Urinating more – Check
Oral thrush -Check
Irritability – Check (although, let’s be honest… whose 16 month old isn’t feral from time to time)
We decided one of us would take him to the doctors the next morning. I took the morning off work, fully and very naively expecting I’d be heading in after lunch.
At 8.30am sharp, I called the GP surgery.
“You are caller number 17 in the queue.”
Thank goodness for the automatic callback system, because I then spent the next half an hour chasing a half-naked, hyperactive toddler around the living room with the world’s smallest plastic pot, trying to capture any wee that I could. No amount of Bluey was going to slow him down. Powered by banana and Weetabix, he moved like a caffeinated monkey.
Forty-five minutes later, I had two small victories: an appointment, and a urine sample sitting in the fridge. (It was only later I discovered the pot was not water tight. A special parenting moment.)
The doctor was brilliant. She listened as I unloaded absolutely everything — symptoms, nursery updates, sleep patterns, then she tested his blood.
25 mmol/L. I don’t know what that meant, I had no clue what a normal reading should be.
Then she looked at me and said the sentence that now feels burned into my brain:
“You need to go straight to A&E.”
And that’s where it truly began.
Not with a dramatic collapse. Not with an ambulance or sirens. Just a calm instruction, a sleeping little boy in the back of the car, and a normal road that was quietly taking us into a life we never planned — but are learning, step by step, to navigate.
If you’re a parent reading this and something about it feels familiar — the constant thirst, the heavier nappies, the disrupted sleep, the irritability that seems bigger than just “a phase” — please trust your instinct. You are not being dramatic, you are being observant. You know your child better than anyone else ever will. I’m not saying your story will end the same way as ours, but I am saying it is always worth asking the question, even if it feels unlikely or uncomfortable.
For us, that simple question turned out to be the beginning of a very different life — one we are only just stepping into, led by a tiny, fearless boy named Tom, who still just wants his banana, his Weetabix, and most definitely a very well-earned second breakfast.
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