This is my latest diabetic portrait. The truly inspirational 19-year-old Sophie Constable who lives with both Down's Syndrome and Type 1 Diabetes. This is how her mum describes her..........
Sophie is passionate about life. She plays football for a girls' disability team, represents Hertfordshire at netball, swims, and horesrides having come first in her event at the RDA National Championships 2 years ago. Sophie is a massive Man Utd supporter and went to Moscow for the Champions League Final 2 years ago and to Rome last year. She loves to travel and has visited, amongst others, Cuba, Egypt, India. Sophie's great interests now are music and dancing, specifically street dancing and belly dancing. She loves going to gigs. Sophie loves to cook and eat, she has recently taken up photography and just entered her first competition. Sophie went to mainstream schools and got 5 GCSE's, though she wasn't happy about the grades. She's now at college doing an IT course. Sophie has been an altar server at church for nearly 11 years which is something she is very proud of and particularly likes training up the young servers when they start. Sophie loves to raise money for charity and over the years has raised thousands of pounds. Mostly she auctions or raffles memorabilia she has been given at Manchester Utd but she has also organised quiz evenings. Sophie has given the money to different charities but mostly it has been for Africa.
The week after getting diabetes she said she loved it. She's never really minded the bl tests or insulin and loved the fact that she was geting " 5 meals a day" and always got priority in restaurants and on planes. For the first year it was all a breeze and I felt a bit of a fraud siitting in the diabetic out patient clinic. Since then it's been more of a pain. As Sophie has Down's Syndrome as well it makes things a bit more complicated. During the day Sophie does her own bl tests and insulin and carb counts her packed lunch which she prepares herself for college. Night times are more difficult as she needs help with working out how much to eat for her night snack and the blood sugars can be unpredictable. We do blood tests at night, when she's asleep, and if she's hypo we give her food and she goes straight back to sleep. Occasionally she cheats but mostly she's very responsible about what she eats. Sophie's HbA1C, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight etc are always great, in fact she's very healthy.
This is Catherine Amey who I just shot in a cafe in Worthing, West Sussex. The full story will appear in a women's magazine in a month or so but here she gives a rough outline of why we did the shoot:
This is Peggy Ryle and the good people of the St Leonards-On-Sea Sequence Dancing Club. Peggy, a lovely lady and formidable character, is 76 and has had Type 1 Diabetes for 66 years! Although she's had the odd health problem, She's still going strong and dances with her partner Ray six times a week.
