Sadly COVID cancelled our face to face meet up in 2021. BUT, we didn't let that stop us.

We had a virtual tea party, and CURE DM sent cakes and treats to some of our community. We made a wonderful supportive community video and shared it along with a day of on line social media posts, stories and information

This year did not go exactly as planned - we had a great event planned for our community to attend Butlins, however due to Covid this was rearranged for 2021. We put on our thinking caps on and found a way to spread awareness from our lock-down living rooms!

It couldn't have gone better - we made Awareness Day badges and sent them all over the world. We are delighted to have sent out 600 badges to the UK, USA, Canada, Japan and even Australia!

The day was marked by an on-line campaign, where we shared stories, information, support and news every hour via our Facebook page. You can see some of what we shared here.

Cure Myotonic Dystrophy Awareness Day 2020

People changed their on-line profile pictures on facebook and twitter - it was amazing to see so many MILES images!

We also had an updated collage made to celebrate our UK CDM community, and help raise awareness of our amazing children.

Artwork: Liam Murray for Cure DM CIC 2020 

This year we held our 2nd Butlins Gathering, which was a huge success with over 70 people attending. It was so wonderful to see our children and families spending fun, quality time together - some of us stayed for the whole weekend and made plans to stay for a week next time!

It seems a tradition has been formed - we all love this weekend so much we decided to come back again!

Once again we produced badges and sent them all over the world, and had facebook and twitter profile pictures changed. It was good to see more of our USA family getting involved this year and we hope to increase the 'International' part of our awareness day next year!

On our 2nd International Awareness day we produced an amazing collage of all our children, to help spread awareness of Congenital Myotonic Dystrophy. To make it truly 'International' we invited our overseas DM family to join in, and the final piece was truly wonderful. 

We celebrated the day by organising a meet-up at Butlins Skegness, and were delighted when almost 50 people joined us. We were pleased to help support families attend by providing free tickets or a donation towards travel costs. Thank you to Daytrippers UK for supporting us with this.

We hired the whole of the bowling alley out and had so much fun, with families getting the chance to get to know eachother. Later on we hired the restaurant and had a lovely meal and drinks together.

It was an amazing weekend and we are so pleased to be able to offer this to our community.

Artwork: Liam Murray for Cure DM CIC 2018

Artwork: Peter Ashley and Cure DM CIC 2018

In 2016 we realised we didn't have an awareness day for Myotonic Dystrophy, there were lots for Muscular Dystrophy, but nothing specific for us - so we decided to change that and plan one for the following year.

We chose the end of July because this was the best time for people with children to be able to meet up (school holidays) and we wanted to mark the occasion with an annual get-together.

We marked the occasion by making profile pictures, having badges made and organising a meet up. we decided to use 'bubbles' to represent the breathing difficulties many of our community have, but that we can find ways round this - such as bubble wands. Also - who doesn't love bubbles!

Our meet up was in Birmingham were a large group of us had a lovely picnic, and many photos were taken. Friendships were formed and memories made - we decided this was going to be one day a year where our families would have fun together.