Our Story

Bit of a cheesy title, I know, but I will explain later.

Time to give you another glimpse into our lives. As you probably know by now, we have meetings with our consultant every three months which is when we tend to give you yet another update. We have come to plan our lives around these quarterly intervals. When ever we book something into the calendar, we always check how it fits in with the next appointment.

Having looked back since our last installment, we’ve actually had quite a busy time.

The real highlight has been meeting the latest addition to the family who is also the first of the next generation. My great nephew – Jack. But I will tell you about him a little later.
Baby Jack

With our newly discovered leisure time we have started going to a few concerts. We have seen Jules Holland and friends (he was ok), Suzanne Vega (she really is a bit strange) and the highlight for us both was Nile Rodgers & Chic at Blenheim Palace (amazing). If you have the opportunity to see them, I thoroughly recommend you take it. It was an incredible performance. You may be able to spot a bit of a theme to our tastes, nothing really particularly new!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_WAw58tOZDo

We also managed to fit in an enjoyable week in the Peak District with a few picturesque walks. It is a stunning part of England. Whilst there, we spent a day at the RHS Chatsworth House flower show, courtesy of gold medal winning Harvey’s Garden Plants. We came away with lots of ideas to try in our garden.

The view from our rented cottage in the Peak District. And Chatsworth House above.

As a belated birthday treat for Bim we had afternoon tea at the Shard on the 53rd floor. It is the highest restaurant in Europe I believe. The food was great but the views across London were quite breathtaking.

Afternoon tea in the Shard

A word about work life balance!

During my eleven years at Framlingham College, I would regularly raise concerns about work life balance in my appraisals. Not just for me, but for the whole department. Each year my line manager would agree that something should be done to try and help, but each year the work load became heavier and the scales became tilted further away from the enjoyable, life part of the balance. Now that I am working on a freelance basis, I work on average two days a week and have the other five to do everything else! With Bim working so close to home now, we are able to really enjoy our time so much more than we ever have. I can assure you that, whoever decided everyone should work five days a week and have two off, got it completely the wrong way around! If you ever have the chance to change your work life balance for the better, go for it. You won’t regret it.

Another important event recently was my father in law, Keith’s 80th birthday. Keith is not the sort to want any fuss but we did spend a lovely family evening together and had an enjoyable outdoor meal to celebrate. This is the menu we cooked and a few photos from the evening.

I think the Malteser cheesecake was the favourite course!

So, back to baby Jack, and the reason for the title of this blog. Jack is the first child of my niece, Paula and her husband Rich. You will remember that it was a year ago in July, that my mum died and the whole family gathered in Canterbury to be with her at the end. It was understandably a very emotional time. And now, one year on, we have gathered in the same place to welcome Jack into the family. Jack would have been Ma’s first great grandchild, and while she did not get the chance to meet him, she did know that he was on his way, which I feel is comforting and creates a connection between them. As usual we all met up in Bill and Emanuelle’s restaurant, Cafe du Soleil. Thank you again to both of you for all the fantastic food and drink. Jack is now six months old and was born in Hawaii where the family live, so this was our first chance to meet him. It was a delight to meet such a content, happy baby boy. He really seemed to enjoy all the attention he received from everyone.

Here’s the family photo.

Emanuelle, Jack, Bill, Paula, Rich, Emilie, Luke, Jenny, Dan, Bim, Me, Ellie, Adrian, Janet.

Now, I realise I have not said anything about our oncology appointment yet. This is because there is not really that much to say! I continue to feel very well and show no symptoms. The PSA has gone up slightly, as it has for the last few meetings, but is still low. So no change in the treatment regime for now. I continue with a hormone implant every 12 weeks and the clinical trial of Metformin. Dr Woodward did say that when the PSA reaches 4 (it is now 1.4) she will introduce a new hormone called Enzalutamide which should help control the cancer for longer. There is also a lot of exciting research going into immunotherapy drugs at the moment, and we did discuss the possibility of going on a clinical trial for this in the future. So we have plenty of treatment options to come, which is positive. For the time being we are going to carry on enjoying life to the full, which will hopefully involve another trip to our favourite group of islands early next year. We will keep you informed.

Thank you again for reading our blog. It will be interesting to see how many people it reaches this time. We had over 350 readers on a previous blog from right across the world. Amazing!