The Wendy Benyk and Ray Maher Family Gift
Learning your child has been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes (T1D) reroutes the trajectory of an entire family. Wendy Benyk and Ray Maher experienced this firsthand when their daughter Brooklyn was diagnosed with T1D, and everything changed.
What can I say changed the most for me, as a mother of a daughter with T1D? I am constantly worried about what will happen next in my daughter’s health. My daughter is only 23 years old and in great physical shape, but already she has endured so much pain. My daughter is not even able to drive her car for more than one hour without her hands becoming so unbelievably painful.
I want people to understand that it is not just the constant struggle of watching what your child is eating, the blood sugar test, or the continuous monitoring. It is the fear that your child’s health and longevity are changing and deteriorating daily.
Wendy and Ray made a generous and significant contribution to accelerating the pace of T1D research by making a leadership gift towards establishing the JDRF Centre of Excellence at the University of British Columbia.
This Centre will be the first of its kind in Canada, among just four others worldwide. In Vancouver, world-class researchers are poised to bring therapies to the clinical testing stage that could lead to a cure for T1D and positively impact other autoimmune diseases.
The JDRF Centre of Excellence will be a game-changer for T1D research. Wendy and Ray have helped to set that change in motion.
A cure would mean hapiness. I would be so grateful and relieved that my daughter and all other T1 diabetics could live without being in constant pain and worry.
Although most people who are not connected to someone with T1D have the belief that this is not a bad disease because of the discovery of insulin; therefore, it is not life-threatening, and it is so much less tragic than other diseases, I would want them to know that there are so, so many ways in which someone who has T1D is impacted and affected. And each and every one of these impacts is negative and takes a toll on them. And that it goes on every single day, hour, and minute of their life.
JDRF is so grateful to Wendy, Ray and their family for their incredible generosity. Their support will allow us to accelerate the pace of research and bring us closer to our goal of turning type one into type none.
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