Dear Tim, I wanted to write to wish you luck in your new role as Chair at Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust. It’s no easy task, to try and turn around a Trust that has consistently flouted common sense and common decency for a couple of years now. I was pleased to hear you’d been […]
A couple of weeks ago I watched a documentary on Barack Obama’s time as President of the USA. I was in the US when he was elected and wrote about the power of hope and optimism on my personal blog as he campaigned for re-election four years later (as Dad was dying). The documentary clearly […]
I’ve not blogged in an age, mostly because I’ve struggled to find anything positive to say. Anyone who has read this blog before will know that I don’t require myself to be positive (in fact I think society is obsessed with doing everything in it’s power to portray wonderful joy and happiness, especially on social […]
There have been several claims in the news recently that singing in a choir is as good for your health as yoga! Unfortunately there is zilch evidence to support that claim which was based on a very small scale, observational snap shot of a handful of teenagers in Sweden. So while medical benefits may not […]
Unusually for me I didn’t check twitter the moment I woke up this morning, instead I visited the twitter website as soon as I turned my mac on. It was this that meant I spotted something quite surprising, to me at least – that last night I’d reached the (completely meaningless really) marker of 35k […]
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 […]
My Dad died four months ago from bile duct cancer, cholangiocarcinoma. Since then I’ve seemed to blog less, and in a way that may be no bad thing, I’ve been doing lots of thinking and reflecting and recharging, but have had less concentration and less inclination to put fingers to keyboard. Then this week a […]
It’s 81 days since my amazing Dad died. He had been fighting bile duct cancer, cholangiocarcinoma, for five years and two months. Today is World Cancer Day and the campaign is seeking to dispel four key myths about cancer, I hope this blog helps to dispel at least two – that cancer is a disease […]
A week ago I wrote a post explaining Dad’s latest situation with #cholangiocarcinoma Don’t give up the ship, fight her till she sinks. At the time we’d just seen his oncologist and heard the news that Dad’s one remaining option was to have chemotherapy in an attempt to stem the tumour in his stomach bleeding, which […]
Ten days ago I wrote a blog post The beginning of the end? that reflected on my Dad’s journey/fight/life with cholangiocarcinoma (bile duct cancer) over the past four years. Well ten days on and things seem to have progressed even further. In March alone Dad has had three blood transfusions, which equates to about 8 […]