Friends for Life UK 2010

This past weekend I was lucky enough to attend the Children With Diabetes UK Friends for Life conference. There are no words to explain how fantastic the conference was and how much I enjoyed it (let's just say I'll be at the front of the queue for a place next year!)

Tom and I with Rufus!

We arrived on Friday night, settled in and began meeting all the parents I'd been speaking to via the CWD emailing list for so many months. That evening there was an official welcome, which included a stand up comedy routine from Olly Double (who has a comedy DVD all about diabetes! Read about it here) - absolutely hilarious, it had all of us in fits of laughter.

Over the course of the next 2 days we heard speeches given by various people - Gary Scheiner, Joe Solowiejczyk, Fiona Campbell to name a few. All fantastic, ranging from carb counting tips to helping deal with d as a family.

Joe S and Tom aka werewolf and vamp!

The halloween party was a great evening. Animas had brought along an excellent facepainter and she did a fantastic job ghouling everyone up!

In terms of companies there, there was Medtronic, Roche, Bayer, Animas and Cellnovo.

We grabbed as many freebies as we could carry - lots of glucose products from the US (don't think I'll need to buy any more dextrose for a good year or so...) including watermelon flavoured glucotab type things! Amazing...and here we are in the UK happy with our orange and raspberry variants! I also picked up a free OneTouch meter from Animas, a pump pouch (in the shape of a dog!) from Roche and lots of different logbooks from the various companies.

I have a few other photos I want to put up, but I'm awaiting permission from the children's parents.

I'll end with this: Tom, Gary Scheiner and I at the halloween party.

Not only is he the carb-counting king, he wasn't all that bad on the dancefloor! Thanks to his wife for taking this photo for us.