MCL and Me

I was at the clinic today , well actually a double clinic as it was haematology and then endocrinology. The visit the phlebotomist to take my blood samples was pretty straight forward and she found a good vein, which is just as well as in total I had 14 phials of blood drawn. Six of these were for a research programme I am participating in where they take samples of blood every few months. I was a bit more apprehensive about this visit than usual because over the last two or three weeks I have had a tenderness and slight swelling on the right side of my chest. Well ok let's not beat about the bush here, my right man boob or moob has been tender and slightly larger than the one on the left. Then I noticed what appeared to be a little lump or to give it the technical name the endocrinologist used a "nubbin". As you might imagine I was not exactly thrilled to make this discovery but I tried to be rational about it and since I had no other problems I decided to wait the coupl...

As before if I have an email address for you then you have probably already seen this..... I just wanted to write to say thank you to all those of you who bought a copy of my novel and/or donated to my Just Giving site. I know there are lots of demands on people’s time and money so I really appreciate you making the effort to help the charity Cure Leukaemia. I’m pleased to report I have to date raise £297.80 thanks to your generosity. If you wanted to make a donation or buy a novel but haven’t yet got round to it you can still do so via the links below. http://bit.ly/ReunionBlurb http://www.justgiving.com/SimonStanford http://www.abctales.com/user/raetsel Or if you want to make a donation you can just thrust cold hard cash into my hands and I’ll pay it in to the Just Giving site. Thanks again.

It's my Birthday week and in recent years I've started taking the whole week off work and that's not to avoid buying cakes for the office as I will be doing that once I get back in on Monday. On my birthday itself, Sunday 27th June I kept up another mini-tradition, namely that of taking my Dad to watch the Warwickshire Bears play 20-20 cricket as his Fathers' Day present. This year was slightly different as the only reasonable Sunday game was away to the Notts Outlaws at Trent Bridge. It was a gorgeous day and we really enjoyed ourselves. The effective use of the Big Screen and the Public Address system at Trent Bridge added a lot to the enjoyment. Unfortunately the Bears lost rather badly. Chasing an achievable 150 the Bears were all out for 117 off the antepenultimate ball. ( It's not many days I get to use the delightful word, "antepenultimate"). On Monday and Tuesday of this week Gareth and I had a little trip away to that London place. Also known as...