“Surely,” I thought, dragging my tired sorry arse up Mt Kilimanjaro, “trekking wasn’t this difficult the last time…”

OK, so I only had one other mountain trek to compare to, and that was in Nepal (quite a different experience) but I hadn’t realised that my training for this trip had been so inadequate. Everything just seemed to take so much more energy this time. I knew that I wasn’t exactly in tip-top form medically but I thought that all that ailed me was a bad case of thrush!

By the time we tumbled down off Mt K and hit the safari trail, my trousers were starting to fall down because I was so skinny. I was driving Ali, my tent partner, crazy by waking up two and three times in the night to pee – no minor operation when camping in the Seregeti!

Natasha (right) and her friend Cindy on a rather more relaxing adventure

Ali had to shine the torch for me to make sure there weren’t any hungry beasties prowling round the tent while I ducked out for a widdle. “Don’t let me drink anything tonight,” I would say to her when we went to bed. But inevitably I just couldn’t help myself and would get through a couple of bottles of water each night.

While on the mountain and then on safari, I had lots of possible things to blame my thirst and exhaustion on. When I got to Zanzibar and I wasn’t doing anything at all but sitting around on the beach drinking fruit juice cocktails, it got harder to understand why I was so obsessively thirsty, and why I had to have naps during the afternoon, with bedtime coming round at 8.30pm (and that was the late nights).

I knew there was something wrong, but Tanzania didn’t seem to be the place to find out what it was, so I held off another week till I arrived in South Africa, where I met up with my parents and some local friends. My diary entries record that by this point, I was getting up four times in the night to go to the loo. Not happy!

I went to see the GP in Cape Town that our friends recommended. She asked me a few cursory questions, looked knowingly at me, tested my BGL (30mmol/L) and sent me off to the hospital post haste.

Getting set up on a drip and having extra tests done in Emergency was a horrible half-hour. I could hear my mum talking to the receptionist in the other room, saying, “If it turns out she has Type 1, she will go into melt-down!” And to be honest, it was the illness I probably dreaded most, short of getting something terminal. I was terrified of needles at the best of times. So when they confirmed it definitely was Type 1, I cried for five hours straight, and then I pulled myself together.

I had two days in intensive care in the fabulously luxurious Cape Town Medi-Clinic, where there was only one other patient, and two nurses for each of us. My wonderful doctor took great care of me, was beautifully off-hand about what a minor issue diabetes would be in my life and how well I would be able to manage it, and was in all ways generally relaxed and supportive. When I was moved to the ward, I had a bed with a view of Table Mountain! Could have been worse…. I did obviously some very unpleasant moments, notably the first time I stuck the needle into my tummy. The heart-rate monitor I was wearing nearly jumped off my chest. The drug rep was watching the screen in some concern – it read 130 bpm! “Are you a bit stressed about this?” she asked me.

The only slightly frustrating thing, other than trying to work out the technicalities of administering my own insulin, was the number of very well-meaning kind health-care professionals (all non-diabetics) who told me that it was “no big deal” and that I would be perfectly fine. “How the ?!@#$ would you know?” I wanted to ask. I would have given a lot at the time to have heard those exact same words from a diabetic person, though.

Anyway, after that, it was complicated and confusing but I had my parents with me for two weeks which was a great help. The day after I was discharged, we went to a wonderful posh Cape Town hotel, famous for its afternoon teas, a visit we had planned months earlier. I didn’t have a clue how to manage my insulin for this event, so I just did the best I could and ended up with a BGL of 28. When I showed my doctor my results at my next appointment, he naturally asked me what that particular one had been. I answered, “Afternoon tea at the Mount Nelson Hotel,” and he laughed and laughed, and told me it was priceless. What more could you want from your doctor?!

So I carried on with my trip, with only some slight variations to the itinerary I had originally devised for myself. Among many other things, I went to Namibia on an overland truck, I did a week’s surfing lessons in South Africa, I took on African public transport and won, I snorkeled with whale sharks in Mozambique, I drove through Botswana in a hire car, I got soaked by the spray from Victoria Falls, and generally had a wonderful time with a lot of great new friends. That was in 2005, and my next trip to Africa is now well into the planning stages.