Hello, my name is Timah Lawrencia. I am sixteen years of age. I was born on 28th of April 2003. I have been living with diabetes for five years now and I have been taken to so many hospitals and they all diagnosed me as a malaria patient because diabetes symptoms has the same symptoms that of malaria.
Before I got to know that I had diabetes, I witnessed many signs and symptoms like bedwetting, weight loss, tiredness, excessive drinking, and also excessive hunger. So my mum took me to the Poly Technical Clinic on the 15th of March 2015 but they couldn’t diagnose me so they transferred me to Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital where they diagnosed me of having diabetes. It was indeed a sad news for my family because no one has diabetes in the family but why me.
During that time I knew nothing about diabetes and its consequences, so the doctors took their time to explain it to me but yet still I was not able to understand. The doctors told me to avoid eating fatty foods, sugar, milk, apple etc but I paid no heed to them and continued eating it. Later on, the doctors and nurses introduced me to a group called Diabetes Youth Care (DYC), then I discovered small children living happily with diabetes.
There are challenges that I am facing in life while living with diabetes. These are:
Firstly, a problem at my injection site due to that I sometimes feel uncomfortable to inject my insulin because it is swollen but I don’t feel pains over there too.
Again, the development of boils under my armpit, breasts and under my buttocks is also one of the challenges. The boils first develops and later on vanished so I thought is just a normal boil, but later it developed into a big one that needed treatment and medical care so I took it to the hospital for treatment and it went away.
Furthermore, candidiasis is also one of the major challenges that I am facing in my diabetic life. This disease always come and vanish in the air and never thought would be seen again but it will still be there.
To conclude, we want to say thank you all – may God richly bless you for your support and love for diabetic patients in this world. We appreciate your tools you give us like glucometer, syringes, test strips, lancets, so on and so forth. You love us all and we are also saying a big and huge WE LOVE YOU TOO, to you all. And without your love and support diabetic patients are nothing in this unfavourable world so please we are edging you all to continue to support us in life or else we will be just dust in the air what it likes that it does to us. Thank you all. Bye.
Yours faithfully,
Lawrencia