Today I finally finished my run of 4 talks in 3 weeks with an address to the CF Trust’s regional conference in Oxford.
Rosie, the Chief Exec of the Trust, originally asked my consultant to come along and talk about the adult service, but she couldn’t make it so the baton was passed to me. I love doing talks and things in general, but especially for the Trust. And even more extra-specially when it’s to talk up the amazing team at Oxford who helped keep me alive long enough to reach transplant.
I would pop the text up on here, but it was a 30 minute speech and the text is close-on 3000 words, which is quite a good deal mroe than anyone really wants to read on a blog, but if you really, totally desperately want to read a copy of it, let me know and I can mail it to you.
It went really well – by all accounts so did the entire day – and it seemed to strike the right notes I was trying to hit. It’s always hard to pitch a speech to parents of people with CF, particularly some very young children. You need to make sure you’re not belittling the task that lies ahead, the enormity of dealing with all the crap that life with CF throws at you, but at the same time it’s important to let them know that CF doesn’t strip your life away of all meaning or ability to have fun and it certainly doens’t mean you’re going not going to be able to make something of your life.
I think – I hope – that I managed to pitch it right this time. Certainly all the feedback I received from the day was positive, but then it’s got to be a pretty awful and borderline insulting speech that will make anyone come up to you afterwards and tell you it was rubbish, so it’s good not to get too carried away.
It was nice, though, to have a chance to catch up with the team who came along. Clinic time is so precious I’m always reluctant to stay and chat too long, but today I got there at lunch time with a chance to sit down with them (and my parents, who decided to come along for the day) and have a really good catch up and chat about things – medical and non.
On the way home I developed a killer headache and was running much later than I’d planned, so I had to pull out of a rehearsal visit in Northampton for the project I’m working on with the Royal and instead couldn’t do much more than veg on the sofa and eat a bowl of soup. Really bizarre, hard-core headache, it was, but it doesn’t seem to have recurred as badly since, so it must have been a one off and probably thanks to dyhdration more than anything else. Was a sucky end to the day, but it had been a good one for most of it, so no real complaints.