Martin Ashworth

Elliott

The day everything changed – our son’s Type 1 Diabetes diagnosis.

30^th August 2025. It’s the day our son Elliott, aged 4 at the time, was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes.

We had been on holiday when we first noticed the signs. Looking back now, they were the classic “4 T’s” – Tired, Thirsty, Thinner, Toilet. At the time, we didn’t realise how serious that combination could be. You tell yourself it’s the heat, the excitement, being out of routine. You don’t jump straight to thinking your child is seriously ill.

As soon as we got home, we made a GP appointment, just to be safe. That appointment turned into a hospital admission the same day, and our world changed overnight. Nothing prepares you for hearing that your child has a lifelong condition.

The hardest part

There have been a lot of hard moments since that day, but the one’s that stay with me the most were within the first few weeks.

I took the first few days in hospital with him and then swapped with my wife. Every four hours, day and night, Elliott needed blood tests, finger or toe lanced to draw blood, injections of insulin, checks, observations. He was scared, confused, exhausted, and didn’t understand why it kept happening.

I had to hold him still while it was done, he would try to pull away, try to escape, crying and shouting for it to stop – and I was the one holding him there while the nurses did what they needed to do. In his eyes, I wasn’t helping him, I was helping them hurt him. Then they would leave the room, I was left to sit alone, trying to comfort my child, dreading the next one.

When we were finally allowed home, I thought things might feel better. In some ways they did – but in other ways it felt even more overwhelming. We walked through the door carrying bags full of prescriptions and equipment that we didn’t know how to properly use yet.

·       Needles

·       Insulin pens

·       Fast-acting insulin

·       Slow-acting insulin

·       Finger prick lancet

·       Test strips

·       Glucose monitor

·       CGM sensors

·       Sharps bins

·       Emergency injection

·       Guides

·       Paperwork

·       Notes

·       More notes

It felt endless, and it is.

You sit there looking at it all thinking, how am I supposed to keep my child alive with this? How do I continue doing my job? How does my wife continue doing her job? What do we do about school? How can I ask someone to look after him when they need to know how to do everything? I don’t even know how to do everything properly myself yet! How do we do anything anymore?

There’s no time to ease into it. You just have to learn, because there isn’t another option.

Not long after we got home, Elliott was sat on his bedroom floor. He was quietly looking down, I could see his little brain was thinking over everything, the whirlwind events that had occurred. He looked up at me and said, “Am I going to die, daddy?”

What do you say without frightening him? What do you say when you don’t fully understand it all yourself yet? How do you word your response? I said “No you’re not going to die; I won’t let you.” And I hugged him.

Elliott being Elliott

If there is one thing that keeps us going, it’s Elliott himself.

He turned 5 in October, just less than two months after being diagnosed. He is still the same funny, happy, non-stop dancing, ball of energy he has always been.

He hasn’t let this diagnosis change who he is. He still runs around, still makes us laugh every day, still finds something to be excited about even when life has thrown something huge at him. Kids are stronger than we realise, sometimes stronger than their parents.

He’s learnt how to do things right from the start, he even teaches grown ups how to do things like finger prick tests, insulin injection prep, what his blood sugar readings mean.

Why I’m fundraising

Type 1 Diabetes isn’t caused by diet and it isn’t something you grow out of. Your body’s immune system has attacked the cells that produce insulin, it continues to do this until there are none left, they don’t come back. You become dependant on injections of insulin to continue being alive.

Insulin is like a key; it unlocks the cells doors to allow glucose to leave your blood stream and enter the ones that need energy. Without it the doors remain closed, no glucose can leave your blood stream. Your blood glucose levels rise, you have no energy, you become hungry even when you’ve eaten, thirsty when you’ve drank loads, you need the toilet constantly because your kidney’s are trying to remove the glucose from your blood stream. You become ill, you lose weight, your body panics and starts to burn fat for fuel, producing acidic compounds overwhelming your bloods ability to balance pH. You enter DKA (Diabetic Ketoacidosis), your organs start to fail, you go unconscious and then finally without insulin, you die.

Right now, the only way to live with it is constant monitoring, constant injections, constant thinking, every hour of every day. I’m raising money to help fund research for the future.