By Lucy Rickard, Midland-Kalamunda Reporter
HENLEY Brook’s Logan Chilman faces a daily battle with Type 1 diabetes.
He can’t eat lollies and snacks like his friends, and he needs to be extremely aware of his food intake, and balance it with insulin shots throughout the day.
Parents Brett and Gayle say Logan is doing well, but have been battling with a lack of funding to upgrade their son’s monitoring equipment to include a pump, which would take away the necessary but painful multiple daily injections.
The seven-year-old might be shy, but he’s still brave enough to take on hundreds of politicians in Canberra and tell them about his life as a schoolboy with diabetes.
As one of 100 youth ambassadors for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, Logan will head to the steps of Parliament House to talk about his life, and the positives that would come from additional and more readily available funding for diabetes sufferers.
Gayle said that while Logan understands his diagnosis, and what this means in his day-to-day life, he doesn’t yet understand the significance of this upcoming trip to Canberra.
“This trip is about telling politicians that it’s important to help these kids,” she said. “If we don’t find a cure for them, then they can lose an eye, or a limb to diabetes.
“There are quite a lot of complications that can go wrong, no matter how good or controlled you are.”
Gayle said as well as raising awareness into the lack of funding and research for diabetics, she hoped to meet others in similar situations and hear their stories.
She is hoping to get the insulin pumps put on a list of essentials, so that they are recognised as a necessity for Type 1 diabetes and can be made affordable and readily available. Logan and Gayle will be at Parliament House Forecourt in Canberra on Thursday, March 18.
Visit www.jdrf.org.au for more information.