When Life Gives You Lemons: Marni Smyth

About a week ago my friend Suzanne shared a post on her timeline.  It was a Go Fund Me link for her friend Marni.  Marni was fundraising to buy a new powerchair. This chair is going to cost more than her car! Yet without a decent chair Marni is denied access to the life that most of us take for granted.  She is denied independence and the opportunity to pursue a career she loves, for which she trained and is supremely qualified to do.

An empty wheelchair

One of the first things I did the day after Andy died was to bag up all his meds, injections and creams and take them back to the hospital.  They were a visible sign of his cancer, they were not Andy, they were things that had become part of our lives after his cancer diagnosis and I didn't want them in the house any more.

I wanted to remember a time when life with Andy wasn't medicalised.  When it didn't revolve around hospitals and chemo and drug regimens.

In only a short time we had collected quite a pharmacy for Andy

Another year over, and a new one just begun...

"So this is Christmas, and what have you done?  Another year over, and a new one just begun..." (John Lennon)

Well hello 2015, and what do you have in store for us?  2014 was interesting to say the least.

It's amazing when you sit down and do a bit of an audit of good things versus rubbish things that happened last year we did manage to squeeze in a lot:-


Good Things

Going to Disneyland Paris
Going to the Caudwell Butterfly Ball and Kylie Minogue meeting Daisy (while Andy sneakily managed to put his arm around Kylie's teeny tiny waist)
Going to Latitude Music Festival in our Camper Van
2 Marathons, 1 Ultramarathon, 2 10ks, 2 Half Marathons, a couple of 20 mile road races and a smattering of club races/cross countries completed
The arrival of Pluto! (our working cocker spaniel puppy aka bundle of trouble)
A lovely family reunion at Andy's cousin's wedding
A few days in France, sans enfants
Celebrating Daisy's 10th Birthday - a huge milestone
Seeing the Poppies at the Tower of London

Pluto (5 months) in the Autumn Leaves

Spontaneous Planning

We are at the end of another half term and have made it through in one piece.  I am so grateful for every school holiday we get to spend together because we have lost so much family time over the years. This time of normality has also shown us how different our lives in the real world are as we try to function as a family, this week provided many examples and made me realise that what I am constantly trying to do is spontaneously plan in order to do the normal childhood stuff other families take for granted.

It can't have escaped anyone's attention that there is a lot going on in my home town of London at the moment - all this week we have had the Diamond Jubilee Celebrations then in a few weeks time the Olympics start.