I have recently read the news about the 61-year-old man who has been cured of type 1 diabetes, thanks to the groundbreaking cell transplant technique.

I was diagnosed at the age of 10 with type 1 diabetes, 20 years ago.

The doctors told me that there would be a cure by the time I was middle aged.

I can't imagine what life would be like without having to inject four times a day and test my blood about six times a day. I don't think that having diabetes really affects my daily life.

But if I think about it, wouldn't it be great to be able to eat whenever I liked without having to worry if I need to inject, or worry about my blood sugar going too high or too low?

Or to be able to get up in the morning or go to bed at night without having to worry if I have remembered my injection, or worrying if I will go unconscious in the night from low blood sugar?

Being diabetic is like being on a real-life roller coaster ride with your blood sugar.

If your levels are too high, you feel tired, withdrawn and unable to concentrate, and this is similar if your levels go too low.

They say you have to think like a pancreas, which is a tricky job especially working out how much insulin you need to take, depending on what you have eaten.

Even after 20 years, I still don't really have a clue. It's all guesswork. I can't wait for the day when I can stop worrying about all these things and become a normal person, if there is such a thing as normal.

The thing I always tell myself, when I get fed up of the hospital visits, the needles and the worry about low or high blood sugar, is that I am so lucky that it is only diabetes that I have to contend with. LISA LEIGHTON, Abingdon