“The helpline answered on the hardest night”
One parent shares what it meant to reach a real person at 2am, three days after their son's diagnosis.
“We got the diagnosis on a Friday and spent the weekend reading everything we could find. By Sunday night I was convinced I'd already failed him,” says Maya, whose son was diagnosed last spring.
“I called the helpline not really expecting anyone to pick up. A woman answered on the second ring. She'd raised a daughter with the same condition. For the first time in three days, I was talking to someone who actually understood.”
Our family helpline is answered by trained specialists — many of them parents and carers themselves — every weekday, with an out-of-hours line for urgent calls. Last year it took more than 9,000 calls. Not one of them was billed.