Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Still Alive!

My oh my, you probably think I've died after my last post back in November 2014 and no update since! I'm very sorry about that.

So in 2014 I had had 2 sessions of chemotherapy — half doses were all my new kidney would tolerate so in total I had effectively one dose. At that point they decided not to stress the kidney (or me) with more chemo. In February 2015 I had a fairly short session of radiotherapy, 17 sessions, one each weekday.

And that was that! I was very tired and a bit down having gone through all that, but by July 2015, a year since I fell down the house stairs, I was ready for the follow-up brain MRI scan. It showed no residual signs of the lymphoma, yay!

I know the doctors don't use words like "cured" until you've been 3 to 6 years without any relapse, but at the moment I am feeling a lot more positive again, and to all intents and purposes I am back to as normal as a blind diabetic with a kidney transplant tends to be :)

Afraid to say I still haven't quilted anything to report of. What I have been focusing on, second half of 2015 onwards, is my poetry writing. I've written poetry for 25 years now, since my later teens, and I've occasionally talked about it on this blog. With the encouragement of poets and editors that I know I've had a website designer set me up a new website, Giles Turnbull Poet. It became active about 6 weeks ago, but I am aiming to do a blog post on the site once per week. I have to be careful about adding poems that have the potential to find homes in magazines and competitions, so only extracts of 1 longer poem appears on the site at the moment; I will figure out some other extracts that could go on the site, plus there have been a couple of publications alrady during 2016 — I reached the shortlist of Cinnamon Press single poem competition, and publication in Rockland Magazine and Fair Acre Press' Maligned Species project with a poem about stinging nettles. This week I have been writing articles on blindness and poetry for Corncrake Magazine in Ireland, and for the forthcoming summer issue of Poetry Wales.

You can still find me on Twitter and I'm still on Facebook.

I hope all is going well in all your personal and quilting lives, and I'll keep popping by to see what you are up to on your blogs :)

Giles xx