Update on progress.......

So it’s been quite a while since my last post. After the fantastic Pseudomyxoma Forum held at Basingstoke Hospital I felt a well earned rest was deserved. Work had been equally manic and I had a number of projects on the go at home.

 Family life has been great! Jessica, my eldest left school recently and had her school prom. She looked fantastic all dressed up in her prom dress and went off to the event in a stretch limo with all her friends. A real proud moment, it doesn’t seem that long ago she was just starting school!

 Tracey and Chloe are well and looking forward to our upcoming family holiday.

 I have been busy and finally completed the extension of my garden pond and now have a number of Koi carp swimming around quite happily in it. It’s great to sit back and relax next to it with a nice glass of red wine.

I have also had a some success with my photography recently with my photo’s being used by the BBC on their website and on the national weather forecast on the television!

My health is currently good. I feel well, continue to run and the recent pond project was all done on my own, by hand. Shifting a couple of tonnes of top soil and laying bricks was very had work (especially for and office boy!) and I often came to work on a Monday battered and bruised from the weekends work but glad that I was able to do it. Things could be so very different.

 As August draws near and the anniversary of my last operation looms our minds are increasing occupied with my upcoming annual CT scan.  I feel that this is an important one. Three years since my first operation, then a reoccurrence in 2012 makes me nervous that Pseudomyxoma will return once again. If it does, where will it reoccur and will it be operable?

There will be one huge sigh of relief if the results are good.

We also received some bad news recently. Our good friend Chris (Chris P) from the Christies Pseudomyxoma Forum lost his battle with PMP on 30^th June. I felt a particular bond with Chris. We were diagnosed around the same time in 2010 and Chris had his MOAS at the Christies Hospital in Manchester some two weeks before me. We compared notes on our recovery and helped each other along. Unfortunately the outcome of the operation for Chris was not so good and the team there were not able to remove all the disease. Chris however remained optimistic, always one of the first to offer welcome to newcomers to the forum and give support and share his knowledge. Chris has the proud honour of being the author of the MOAT (The Mother of all Threads) as we called it as it is the longest running thread on the forum with 98k views! Chris’s dry wit and lengthy posts were something that everyone looked forward to and always read with a smile. As time went on Chris’s posts became less frequent and I think it was clear to all that he was having a difficult time. He will be sadly missed by us all and our thoughts are with his family.