Today is the 1st of November. The 1st of November is the start of Pancreatic Cancer awareness month. This is my 12th Pancreatic Cancer awareness month since my adorable Seth died in June 2014. Over the last 12 years, I have done many things to raise awareness during...

6th October 2026 12 birthdays without Seth he never reached his 50th and today would have been his  62nd. Over the last 12 years the world has changed, my life has changed, but the one thing that’s remained constant has been a deep yearning for Seth. 12 birthdays, no...

Can you remember what you were doing on this day last year? I can with crystal clear memory After six months and 16 rounds of torturous chemotherapy, 55 hours of cold capping, MRis, CT scans, investigations, and blood tests…  I finally got to surgery. Brutal surgery...

9.45 am on the 14th of June was the exact moment when time ran out for Seth … for 33 days in May and June 2014 time had slipped away, far too quickly with a deafening sound. 12 years later the pain of loss is still as intense… it just isn’t there ALL of the time. It...

After eighteen months in the world of hospitals appointments, tests and investigations I can truly say NHS admin is just rubbish If I hear Wes Streeting talk about digital enablement, the NHS app and improving efficiency and experience one more time........ well, I...

Today is World Cancer Day and I am sharing my diagnosis of lobular breast cancer. From mid Feb I will share a week-by-week summary of my experience of chemo, surgery, radiotherapy, and hormone inhibitors over the 12 months of 2025. I will share this experience through...

October to November 2024 The warmth of the October sunshine beating down as I walked down a wide street in Barcelona much warmer than an English summer. I was excited to be going to the patient experience colloquium to present Seth’s story and some of the professional...

New Year’s Eve a time to reflect; a time to celebrate and both of these are on the agenda for tonight. When I think of New Year’s Eve, I think of being a child and a teenager and the preparations for New Year’s Eve parties at home with my mum and dad. Each year there...

How can it possibly be 11 years since Seth died? but it is, and I have lived those eleven years every day with the trauma distress and injustice of his early death. It would have been really easy to drop into deep sorrow, unmitigated pity but I did not take that route...

When Seth died in 2014, I could not have imagined that 10 years after his death I would become involved in a small way of co-producing a contemporary dance performance. In Spring 2024 when I was planning to mark the 10th anniversary of Seth's death, I was contacted by...

Everyday is someone’s birthday, a celebration, a chance to reflect on where you have reached in your life course, a chance for the people you love to come together to celebrate. Today it is 60 years since Seth was born, a landmark birthday, another one he missed....

Each and every day on social media photographs and all kinds of memories pop up that take you back through the years. Some days those memories make me smile, some days they make me sad and some days they make me weep. This week those memories were more poignant, all...

Labels - Definition - A classifying phrase or name applied to a person or thing, especially one that is inaccurate or restrictive. In healthcare, we seem to be focused on labels, labels that denote profession, that denote positions, that denote relationships; labels...

I have sat where you are sitting so many times before in this same building grieving for someone I loved. There was always one constant beside me and that was that my auntie Margaret was always there supporting me, holding my hand, a physical presence that gave me the...

Bedside Bedside it’s not a word used very often and when it is.... its usually with an additional word like lamp, table, or manner. I have sat at many bedsides, usually with someone I love dearly, in unusual circumstances sitting in a space that is not routinely...

Ally or Thief ? As we come to the end of 2023 I am reflecting on time and the question is time a thief or an ally? The honest answer to this question from my perspective is I don’t know. On the 15th of December I set out on my annual hide away from Christmas: a time...

Last weekend as I was walking around the park with Gertie I was thinking about my beloved Seth and the tears just ran down my face, no conscious effort, they just fell. It was reminiscent of the hours, days weeks and months immediately after Seth's death the tears...

Something that binds, fastens, confines, or holds together. Where did I end and where did you begin? For years we were as one A clump, indistinct, together, moving forward. Two people but one couple one entity. One entity decoupled a cruel parting short brutal and...