“type 1 diabetes doesn’t give you any breaks,” vanessa explains. every day, type 1 diabetes patients must take insulin shots or wear an insulin pump and monitor their blood sugars closely. too much or too little insulin can de deadly.
vanessa is not new to the flagpole challenge. more than 32 years ago her father lived on
top of a flagpole
at mel lastman square in toronto to raise money for type 1 diabetes research. his stunt lasted one week and raised $250,000.
the small huts the volunteers will be living in contain everything they should need, including food and water, a camping toilet and, for vanessa, enough insulin and blood glucose meters for 4.1 days.
among the volunteers, morale is high — even though temperatures in toronto were below 10 degrees.
“100 years since we discovered insulin, 100 hours up a flagpole — seems like a light lift,” says chris overholt, the second volunteer to camp out for the cause.
vanessa and overholt will be in two separate flagpoles in toronto — one just outside the toronto general hospital and the other outside of the td towers on king street. they are joined by wilson gaglardi in vancouver, ryan mcdonald in calgary and leanne souquet in montreal.
ryan macdonald gets ready to spend the next 100 hours on a platform set up on a flagpole on monday, april 4, 2022. macdonald, whose son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at the age of five, will camp out on a platform as part of jdrf canada’s campaign to raise $100 million to find a cure for diabetes. azin ghaffari/postmedia
t1d
type 1 diabetes
, previously referred to as
juvenile diabetes
, can occur in any age, although it is typically diagnosed in children or young adults. from 2013-2014, roughly three million canadians (8.1 per cent of the population) had a
diabetes diagnosis
, of which 9 per cent is type 1 (approximately 270,000 canadians). in 2009, children diagnosed before the age of 19 had a 10-year shorter
life expectancy
than the average canadian.