Seven and a half years ago I learnt about a bile duct for the first time; in the days running up to my Dad’s 60th birthday he’d been a bit itchy and had started turning yellow. An amazingly astute GP (with personal experience of what was to come), swift turnaround in our local hospital and […]
This weekend was/would have been Dad’s 67th birthday. I mentioned it to a few people on twitter and got a couple messages from people asking how I was and mentioning I’d not blogged lately, when I checked back this post is long overdue. What to share really, well at the risk of stating the obvious, […]
Going to keep this one short, there is enough written about the limitations of fighting metaphors to last a lifetime (however long that is). Susan Sontag wrote Illness as a Metaphor back in 1978, since then many, many others have visited this territory. I was reminded today of Jay Rayners obituary for John Diamond (hat tip to […]
It was five years ago today, yet I remember nearly every bit of it as though it was yesterday. I can recall his name, his walk or rather his strut, his voice and his manner, perhaps one blessing in disguise is that I can’t remember his face. It’s odd that but I often wonder whether […]
18 months and a day, 78 weeks, 13 thousand one hundred and twenty eight hours, that’s how long it is since Dad died. There have been 547 sun sets and 547 sun rises since Dad left us. Well, true to form, this isn’t an easy calculation to make because technically speaking I think it should […]
Ding dong! Hello, this is your First Officer speaking, please return to your seats and fasten your seat-belts as soon as possible. As you are aware we have entered a period of turbulence, myself and your Captain today will do all we can to adjust our altitude to ensure a safe and pleasant journey for you. […]
I’m a member of a very small club that I really wouldn’t want any of you to be members of. That ‘club’ that exists only in loose tweets or sharing of experience, and is no way a club in the true sense of the word, is made up of people who have all felt the […]
Last November my Dad died from bile duct cancer, cholangiocarcinoma. Bile duct cancer is an incredibly rare cancer with current estimates of 1,000 new case in the UK each year and 2,500 in the US and an annual incidence rate of 1-2 cases per 100,000 people in the Western World. Search twitter for people talking about […]
I’ve not blogged too regularly of late, I blame Social Care Curry Club, which has been a brilliant distraction and useful channel of so much energy. That said I felt like today warranted a post, as today is Dad’s 66th birthday. Well it would have been his 66th birthday but he died last year. Do […]
Today it is six months since Dad died. I can’t quite believe it, one minute it feels like yesterday and the next like it was years ago, six of the longest and shortest months of my life. Time is a funny old thing, especially where grief and loss are involved. To mark the occasion this […]