Joe Fraser doesn’t strike you as the wildest of young men, but when he had finished his finals at Oxford he did what students do and got drunk. Very drunk. So did everyone he knew. “Put it this way,” he says. “We weren’t drinking from glasses.”

The next day Joe rang his mother from hospital. “I’ve been waiting for this day for nine years,” she said. For Joe this was the first indication that, ever since his type 1 diabetes was diagnosed at 13, his mother had worried that at some point normal youthful exuberance would affect his health.

“It’s hard on her but there’s nothing I can do except get along as well as I can,” he says. “I’ve always thought of it as my responsibility, my issue that I have to try to control. When you’re 13, you think you’re grown up. I didn’t even want medical help, which was ridiculous. All I wanted was for people to leave me to work it out for myself. You don’t want to be nannied by your family.”

Coping with a lifelong condition is never easy, and discovering that you have type 1 diabetes is especially unsettling because of the need to monitor your health every day — and the dire consequences if you don’t. It affects about 350,000 people in the UK, including more than 25,000 children, and rates across Europe are increasing by 3 to 4 per cent each year. No one knows why this is happening, but foryoung people who develop the condition the transition is full of potential physical risk and emotional pitfalls for the individual and their family.

Perhaps because Joe’s parents have medical backgrounds, they have taken a matter-of-fact approach to his condition, or, at least, that is what they have astutely conveyed to him. Neither is he the type to make a fuss, but Joe admits that he grew up quickly when his condition was diagnosed and, if he is a more sensible than the average 23-year-old, that is because he regards a measure of caution as a small price to pay for keeping his diabetes under control…. Continue Reading