It's all abaaat faaaamily!

This week I have been so proud of my family. Firstly, I saw a lovely Christmas floral decoration that my talented cousin Teresa had created.

Then, on Sunday, my dad played his latest harmonica gig in a Soho pub. We were all very impressed. My IT skills aren't quite up to uploading a clip of the "harpist" in action, but hopefully I'll add that in the not-too-distant future.
My brother Max surprised me with a "missing you" message - unheard of! But much appreciated and he and his wife Helen sent a beautiful box of chocolates in the post; another lovely surprise.
Then got an unexpected invitation to another lovely cousin's (Elise's) Birthday dinner next week. Looking forward to catching up with her.
It's easy to get caught up in being "busy" but I really appreciate my family, they are a unique lovely bunch and we all get on well and enjoy having a good laugh. I hope some of them read this too!!
Finally, the new addition to our own little faaamily, Kizia, a local stray.  She makes me laugh all the time too.

I'm a bit scared to hang any of my beautiful glass Christmas baubles due to the unnatural fascination she has with the Christmas tree (also a local stray, rescued from a neighbour's recycling last year - Scrooge has nothing on me in this austerity Christmas; however, I prefer to call it being "green").
Have a great week,
Kelly

Flinging myself off a cliff

Venue: Babadag Mountain, Turkey
Date: Oct  29th 2014
Occasion: Celebrating 5 years cancer-free by throwing myself off a cliff

I didn't intend to go paragliding.  I briefly considered it as I investigated my holiday resort, but then dismissed it as something other people do and definitely not something that I do. But I'm not me anymore, or not the person I used to be at any rate. I survived cancer, for God's sake, so not much else should scare me. So when I got to Olu Deniz (means Dead Sea, not the most auspicious of names) and saw lots of people paragliding onto the beach, I started pondering, why is it always other people doing amazing/fun things and not me? So I didn't think about it for too much longer and booked the experience.
Early in the morning, the bus arrived at the hotel.  The windscreen had a huge crack running down the centre of it. Did someone land on it? Try to escape before reaching the top of the mountain? Neither option allayed any fears. My mum at this point had gone for a panicky lie-down by the pool with a few cocktails (still 9 am), to wait for my return.
Babadag (Baba - "Father" and Dagh - "mountain" in Arabic) is HIGH. Imagine the highest mountain you can think of, then double it. In my fear, which was focusing to a point, it loomed even higher. 2 km to be exact, and very close to the sea (less than 5 km).

My pilot, Hasan, "chose" me from the other panicky-looking people on the bus.  Thankfully, I wasn't the last to be chosen, bringing back awful thoughts of school PE sessions.  I didn't have much time to think about anything, no instructions apart from "just stand up" which was something I thought I could manage.  As soon as the chute rose above our heads in the wind, our feet came off the floor and we swooped off the top with a sickening sideways slide of my stomach.  I couldn't think of much apart from "God this is high, I'm not sure I'm going to like this.." but as I shuffled back to sit in the "seat", it was comfortable and I began to enjoy the beautiful feeling of freedom in the air with no turbulence and just the slight rushing of the wind.  The views of the Blue Lagoon and the coastline with it's 12 islands were breathtaking.
I begged the pilot "no spinny spinny" but we had to do "something little bit extreme" (wasn't this extreme enough????) to drop down to the beach after approx. half an hour in the air.  While we were above the sea, the horizon suddenly lurched at an unnatural angle and then again.  We then floated smoothly down to land on the walkway by the beach in front of a cafe called "Help". No comment.  While the pilot joked with his mates, I used my kneepads and sank gratefully down on the grass, unfortunately looking like I was praying to Allah.  He didn't take offence and just said "Ok, that's fine, you lay down". 

Slightly fake/nervous smile before take off.

When I returned to the hotel, my mum had finished her cocktail and half of the one she had got for me, bless her!
Fabulous experience, so glad I did it.

Raising Awareness (2) - Early Cancer Symptoms

I like to raise awareness of early cancer symptoms when I can.  Many of my friends in the Young Women's Ovarian Cancer Support Group (held the first Wednesday of every month at Maggie's Centre, West London) tell me that their GPs dismissed cancer as a diagnosis at first because we/they were "too young".  To that end, I subscribe to Macmillan Cancer Voices which is a very useful resource to find opportunities to help people working in the cancer field with research, or to join hospital or other focus-groups to help patients and carers.  

I volunteered to give a talk to a group of GPs in Bexley, as that is my original home borough.  I spoke to about 20 GPs and practice nurses and the feedback was great; they found it very useful to hear about things from a patient's perspective.
Curiously I also found it felt good to talk about things to a captive audience (!) and (maybe) make a small difference to future doctor/patient interactions in difficult circumstances.

Some of the feedback the session received:

Dear Kelly,

The South East London Cancer Network would like to thank you for taking part in the ‘Improving the Earlier Diagnosis of Cancer' event at Holiday Inn Bexley yesterday.  The event was well received and GPs really enjoyed listening to your journey.

Here are some of the delegates' comments:

'All brilliant, thank you!'

'Very good meeting.'

'All of it was valuable. Overall excellent.'

'Excellent event. Very informative and useful. Please keep doing it.'

'All presentations brilliant and very useful to bring patients.'

'Please continue with these meetings.'

Very satisfied.'

'Learnt a lot from patient's viewpoint'

June 23rd 2014, I arranged to meet a strange man in Whitechapel.  He told me to look out for "a bald man reading a Kindle, hopefully there aren't too many of me!"  I had offered to relate my experiences of being a cancer patient for some research being carried out by Macmillan, in order to improve the whole experience for other patients.  There are so many small things that could make you feel a lot less stressed, and that's before you think of the big improvements that could be made.  Hopefully some of my less fun experiences will be taken note of.

Macmillan at St. George's held a Health and Wellbeing meeting on 23rd Sept 2014 for people who are coming to the end of their cancer treatment.  I was pleased to be able to present my experiences, and we also had useful sessions with a dietician from the hospital, a physiotherapist and Patrick, a lovely hypnotherapist who I originally met on the Coping With Cancer Stress course.  He lead a very interesting hypnosis session, where we all decided that we had only had our eyes closed for about 5 mins but it turned out to be 20 mins. 

I ended my talk with a final motto, which my friend in France taught me recently; he swears that no Frenchman ever suffered from stress, so maybe we can all learn something from it.

"Doucement le matin, pas trop vite dans l’apres midi "–

Take it easy in the morning and not too fast in the afternoon.

Have a lovely weekend!

When life gives you lemons.........

Here's my perfect recipe for home-made lemonade; I developed it in my French kitchen (oooh la la!) last week and it was lovely to fill the room with a citrussy scent.  It contains a lot of sugar but much less than those in the shops.  A recent survey by Action on Sugar showed Sainsbury's cloudy lemonade made the top ten list of soft drinks containing the highest amount of sugar, packing in 11 teaspoons of sugar per 330 mL.  My recipe uses less sugar in 750 mL and you could still use less if you prefer.

Ingredients

2 large juicy lemons

10 teaspoons sugar or less

approx. 750 mL water

That's it!

Heat a couple of cups of water (doesn't matter exactly, just less than the total amount your final container can hold) in a saucepan with the sugar and the lemon zest (I used a potato peeler to zest the lemons).
Bubble gently until the sugar is dissolved, then leave to cool.

Juice the lemons and add the juice to your container; put it in the fridge while your sugar/zest mixture is cooling.

Strain the cooled mixture through a sieve, add to the juice and top up to 750 mL with water. Keep in the fridge.

Very refreshing!

Thank you to M. Koen Caremans-Somers for the kind gift of the "top hat" for my bottle!

Running

I've been enjoying running lately. Yes, weird, I know. I've started going to Wimbledon Common with a friend at the weekend.  At 7 am in the morning. 7 am. The other day was absolutely beautiful, sunny and very few people about. Oh, apart from the man with ONE LEG who easily ran past us while we were puffing along.  I wish I was joking.  In our defence, he did look very fit though.
The traffic noises were far behind us.  We could actually hear birds singing and leaves rustling (or was that my friend secretly rummaging for a snack?).  I saw a tiny frog clambering from a pond.  On other days, I have seen butterflies, people saying hello (!), golfers, bees, a weird bloke with a handsaw sticking out of his rucksack, collected blackberries and spotted a secret hazelnut tree I'm hoping to beat the squirrels to.  After an hour or so we return home happy and I get on with my day.  It seems a very long day and I have loads of energy to fill it. If you have run a few (6. Yes 6!) km before breakfast, it gives you loads of time you didn't know you had.

Seem to have spent a long time playing with creating my running map - almost as long as running the damn thing.
http://www.runmap.net/en/route/2445292-wimbledon-common/#/z13/51.43584,-0.22819/google_roadmap  

Can't say we're brilliant runners yet, but it's fun tracking our progress on www.mapmyrun.co.uk.  I think it's the scientist/geek in me - or is it the competitive streak?  You can watch yourself moving up (times may go up as well as down!) the charts of the courses on the website if your route crosses any that have already been uploaded. 

  

PT

I've just got back from a session with my personal trainer (PT) and rigor mortis is setting in.  I call him 'my indulgence' but really the workouts he gives me have become a necessary part of my routine.  I work at the hospital four days a week and on Tuesdays (my day off) I make sure that my mental and physical health takes priority.  That doesn't mean I necessarily look forward to the gym, it just means that it is what I do to make myself feel better.  There is never a session when I come out and think, "I wish I hadn't done that!" - it's always a positive thing, even if I didn't run very far or manage to lift the weights that I could last week, that's irrelevant. The main thing is I was moving and concentrating on moving and therefore not thinking about other stuff.  

It also helps that I get on really well with my PT - we talk about everything and anything and have a laugh and also it can be a bit of a therapy session - hopefully for him as well as me.  It's good to have someone you trust who you can talk to and who is a friend but in a professional way.  Of course, looking and being fitter will ultimately help me to feel better about myself, so that is one less thing to weigh on my mind and worry about.  I've been seeing Dan for 2 years this year and would definitely recommend a few sessions with a PT to anyone who is lacking a bit of physical confidence.  I have gone from barely being able to step at 60 steps per minute on the elliptical cross trainer (after my surgery) and too nervous and unable to try the treadmill, to lifting heavy weights and doing planks and anything else he throws at me - sometimes literally!  I'm easily able to run (not fast!) for 45 mins on the treadmill.  The progress has been slow but steady and definitely worth it.  Of course, personal training does not come cheap, but I cut back in other areas and make it a priority and it is money well spent if you see it as an investment in health.  

Seeing the Rainbow

Sometimes it's good to not analyse or try to control everything.  Just sit back and enjoy something for what it is.  It's all the more precious because it's impermanent. Flowers, pets, cake, rainbows, rainbow cake! friends, life.

Reaching out for for happiness doesn't seem to work.  Happiness, or contentment, is a by-product of doing what you feel is important to you.  I believe it's a feeling that life is full, you are comfortable, you are happy with what you have - you have no longing for "things". This leaves you free to be creative and feel a sense of accomplishment.  In "The Antidote" by Oliver Burkeman, he describes the "negative path": the idea that the more we strive for happiness and other feelings like security and confidence, the less we achieve them. So, paradoxically, it is by thinking more about the downers in life, such as the inevitability of death, the inescapability of suffering or the impossibility of security, that we achieve something like happiness. He concludes that although extreme insecurity is a bad thing, it provides one huge benefit: you cannot be worried about losing your security if you don't have any to lose in the first place.  This is quite a freeing way of thinking, and is certainly how I've felt since my cancer diagnosis.

That's why cancer makes you look at things differently.  The security you thought you had is taken away.  You are forced to face up to impermanence and embrace impermanent things.

I enjoyed making an ephemeral piece of art today. I was inspired to create some environmental art in the style of Andy Goldsworthy.  In the past, I don't think I would have understood the thinking behind this at all.  Spending a long time making something and knowing that it will just deteriorate?  But I was really absorbed in the work for a good couple of hours and enjoyed other people coming up to ask about it.  It was a very pure mindful activity, making something for the sake of it and creating something beautiful but non-lasting.  I made it in Bramford Community Garden and plan to do a similar activity for some Girl Guides we are working with tomorrow evening.  

What do you think?

Flourish is a word commonly used these days instead of happiness, When we flourish, we often feel happy, but that's simply an effect of the real goal, which is to live in accordance with our natures, doing the things we do best to the best of our abilities. Rather than seeing this as the indirect route to happiness, we should see it as the direct route to what it actually is. Happiness is neither the journey nor the destination, it's simply something we encounter on the path when we travel the right way.