Childhood diabetes: ‘It was eye opening for Jasmine to see that there are children like her thriving in the world’

It was something Maria Dunne came to realise when her 10-year-old daughter, Jasmine, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes last August, having been hospitalised with diabetic ketoacidosis, a dangerous lack of insulin in the body.

“It was a long struggle, a long journey, and then she had to spend a week in hospital. And when she was released, she really struggled. Her whole life had changed and she really wasn’t enjoying this whole new life: diabetes, injections, monitoring and the whole lot,” she says.

“Socially, when she was diagnosed, she felt her friends in school had pulled away, you know, ‘oh, what’s this, needles’ and things like that, so she really felt isolated.”

Jasmine’s care team in Tallaght Hospital told Dunne about Helium Arts, the children’s health and arts charity that has recently expanded to Dublin.

“They thought that it would be a fantastic thing for Jasmine to do, because she does love anything at all to do with arts and crafts and things like that,” Dunne says.

Their mission is to offer free creative workshops in communities, hospitals, and online as a way of helping children with life-long conditions build community and find solace in art.

Helium Arts CEO Helene Hugel explains: “There are about 12pc of children living with long- term health conditions. It’s been documented, for example, that they have fewer friends, they have fewer close friends and they also have fewer opportunities to actually create those social connections because they miss out on a lot of normal everyday activities.

“We have artists that work not only in the outpatient space of hospitals, we also have artists who work in the community and through our workshops over the six-week workshop or perhaps a summer camp.

“We have medical support in the room, which is really important for parents, for example, who may have children who are not yet self-managing. It seems like a light touch, but it just seems to make a big difference.”

The initiative started in Cork, but has since opened workshops in Limerick, Galway, Tipperary and Mayo.

The Dublin branch has been on the cards for the past five years and finally opened in spring.

“I suppose what we’re doing is we’re realising our ambition and our strategy which we set out to do in 2019. We’re delighted to have the opportunity, not only through our partnerships, but also through the funding and then support from families to be coming to Dublin now with this,” Hugel adds.

Jasmine enrolled in their six-week online camp, which had Zoom sessions each Saturday, where the children would be guided to do artwork, write stories, and play with clay.

“They sent all of the materials to the house. I mean, a giant box came addressed to Jasmine. She thought, oh my God, Christmas and Easter and everything has come at once,” Dunne says. It was entirely free.

“She realised that life doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom, that there are children out there who are thriving just like herself. She also got a little pen pal, they were writing letters to one another and telling their stories to each other. It turned out that he also had type 1 diabetes so it was really kind of eye opening for her that there are children like her in the world and that you can go and have a full life.”

The impact the programme has had on Jasmine has been obvious, not only to her family, but to her teachers at school too.

“Helium Arts really opened her up, like a flower, she bloomed, she blossomed. She would be coming in from school and she’s like, ‘have I got Helium Arts today?’ And then come the crack of dawn, the minute the sun was up in the sky, she’d be up and she’d be ready and she’d have the laptop ready,” Dunne says. When the parent-teacher meetings came around, Jasmine’s teachers asked Dunne what Helium Arts was, since she had been talking about it in school so much.

Having that outlet is particularly helpful for the stage Jasmine is entering into, Dunne admits. “We are coming out of what’s known as the honeymoon period.

"So this is when the hormones start to rage within the body, because she’s obviously coming into puberty. At the moment, her hormones are all over the place, so the sugars are quite high, they’re not coming down, she’s quite emotional,” she says.

“We are on a list for an insulin pump that she will be receiving, hopefully before the end of the summer.

“Our training begins in August, so we are hoping this pump that she’s going to get makes her life just that little bit easier so that she can be a child and be free and be able to have the life that she wants to have without constant monitoring or constant injections and needles and stuff.”

While she and her family contend with further change, and how to navigate this next stage in Jasmine’s condition, the arts and crafts won’t be taking a back seat, and Jasmine remains in contact with her pen pal.

“For that hour, or how long it’s going to run for, that allows Jasmine to just have that happiness and have that experience and have that ‘this is me and this is what I can do’ time.

“To have that freedom as a 10-year-old child,” she says. “To not have to worry for an hour or two about diabetes, about having to do an injection or about having to do a reading or anything else. For that hour, she is just a child.”

For more information or to find a workshop, see helium.ie.