The Cure is a tempting mistress, but we're not waiting around for you.

When running a marathon, or backpacking, you don't set off with a sprint. You find a pace you can sustain for the length of the event. And when the event lasts sixteen years, a calm steady approach looks best to me. With Frank's diabetes, we're now over two years in, with fourteen to go until it's his responsibility at the age of eighteen. Frank's condition has taught us much about diabetes, and much more about ourselves and our wider community.

Our National Health Service has come up trumps as far as we are concerned, and the Benefits system means that we can tick over without having to sell-up to fund the time we need to put in, to look after Frank especially during his younger years. So thanks to the UK taxpayers for helping us - and I'm one of them too!

So how do we deal with the condition, and how do we feel about a cure? I've covered managing diabetes in other blogs, so I won't go over the old ground of finger prick testing, multiple daily injections, observations every ten minutes during the day, and procedures during the night. We just have to get on with it all, we have no choice.

And "The Cure"? Well we're not holding our breath or counting down the days. Even before we had personal involvement with diabetes, we knew that a cure was many years away, so when we had the diagnosis, this lack of a fix on the horizon didn't come as a surprise to us.

We can't wait for a cure, in two senses. A cure would alter Frank's and our family's life, enabling us to jetison all the mental, physical and emotional effort in managing the disease, and avoiding all the personal discomfort for the boy with the fingertips of steel and the pin-cushion bottom. And we can't wait for a cure, as we've got to live our lives in the here and now; not some fantasy dream life at some unspecified time in the future.

The day-to-day management of Type 1 Diabetes takes all our capacity, and we don't think very much about The Cure. Sure, we support the efforts of the JDRF (Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund, an international organisation), and Diabetes UK who give lots of support. But we can't put our lives on hold until a miracle cure eventually turns up.

Frank's just an ordinary little kid, in almost every way. Apart from the time he's having medical attention, he's just charging about as four-year olds should. The picture shows him zooming off into the distance, on his scooter bike on the Wivenhoe Trail with his cousin.

We have benefited massively from the diabetes community. Thanks to the internet we have access to all the information we could ever want. But, even better, we have made contact with scores of people in similar positions, sharing experiences, looking at how best we can look after ourselves, and live a regular life. We have played our small part by forming Colchester Circle D, to support local families with Type 1 Diabetes.

There are super blogs out there (including "click of the light", "muffin moon", "instructions not included", "shoot up, or put up"), with lots of practical information, emotion and humour. I love these blogs, some written by people who have had diabetes many years. The way they pace their lives, and their approach to "bad days" are an inspiration. (For the information of non diabetics - even the most careful experienced diabetics have bad days - the condition certainly does not obey the rules that we follow when we do our best to manage the beast.) And little is said about a cure. They're all busy just getting on with their lives.

The Cure is a tempting mistress, and some type 1 diabetics are in hot pursuit. They expend lots of their energy pushing for extra funding, and posting on the internet to raise awareness of diabetes. Maybe it's our make-up, but we simply don't have the stomach for such a fight. Our energies are so focussed on getting by, that we simply don't have the capacity to be angry about the condition, or to lobby for its place in the public's and the authorities' perception of the ranking of Type 1 diabetes, compared with dozens of other rubbishy diseases.

It's Diabetes Awareness Month, and this blog is part of my contribution to this. So, if you were expecting me to beg you to donate to JDRF, or to rail on about our terrible lives, I'm sorry to disappoint. Actually, we enjoy a very good life and we're doing our best to get the most out of every day, inspired by our own brave little hero who just lives for the moment. The Cure may be a tempting mistress, but I don't think she's coming our way any time soon. But it would be nice, and hand over your money.....