Thank you everyone for my birthday wishes.  How time flies.  This time 2 years ago I just discovered I had a blood clot, as I had trouble breathing and my left arm and hand had swollen up, but this year I am away on a training course and living the high life in sunny Inverness.  This morning I woke up in a hotel room instead of a hospital bed (although the room smells kind of the same ;o) and while the day was spent trudging my way through legal terms and documents it was still a much better birthday than that one 2 years ago – although having all my family with me then was amazing (but that morning I kind of wondered if I would make it to see the evening).  It is days like today that I truly realize how lucky I am.  I am getting a second chance at life and I know that my life is going in a very different direction, a better direction, (a God led direction) than it was before I was ill.  Before I became ill I would never have thought of doing something like this, as I would have thought it to difficult for me, somewhat above me.  But now I am willing to give these things a shot, as life is too short not to try and at the end of it all I would rather say that I tried and failed rather than I was too scared to try at all.

Happy New Year, may 2018 bring you many blessings and much joy.  This year is going to be an interesting year for me as this is the year that I will finish my treatment – this both excites me as well as terrifies me.  It excites me because I will be finished and will get my life back and because this last dose of chemo floored me and it has taken me weeks to get any kind of energy back .  It excites me because I have no idea what my life will look like at this point next year.  It excites me because I will no longer have to worry about catching something and being in the same room with someone who has a cough or sneeze will no longer send me running.  It excites me because I will be one year nearer to being “cured”.  But it also terrifies me because I will no longer have the support of the chemo and while that stuff is poison in many ways, it is also the thing that keeps the leukaemia away.

So what are my New Years Resolutions?  Like many of you I have lots of plans covering everything from my organisational skills to weight loss and exercise (Scottish Slimmers will be amazed at how much weight one person can put on over Christmas and New Year).  I also plan to spend more time with God and I hope to try to listen more to Him and to trust Him with the direction that my life is to go in.  This is a New Year and will be (at some point)  a new start so lets take a deep breath, dive in and see where it goes.