This has been a remarkable two weeks. Last
week our printer delivered 250 copies of the songbook called ‘Sing of God and
Science’ that I have been compiling over the past year. It is aimed at Key
Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 children and a copy has gone to every Church of England primary school in Ely Diocese (mainly in Cambridgeshire but some in Norfolk, UK). There
are nineteen songs in the book, nine of them written within schools in the
Diocese; the remainder written by Barney Leeke (a fellow Licensed Lay Minister)
and myself. It has drawn several favourable comments and I am in course of
working out how to make it more widely available. When it is available, I will
make it known here on this blog how copies can be obtained.
The compilation of the book has taken longer
than we originally hoped and has happened alongside my diagnosis and treatment for
Non-Hodkins Lymphoma, needing first chemotherapy and then radio-therapy. Just
this week the consultant told us that he could find no residual trace of the
cancer and that he thought there was a good chance it would not recur, having
reached this milestone one year after treatment ended. I was moved from a four monthly to a six
monthly review pattern. Wonderful news and a time for immense gratitude.
Both the treatment and the book project
have entailed a lot of waiting and we have learned just how hard waiting can be,
both by our own experience and through talking with some of the very many other
cancer patients we met. Throughout both situations we have been very aware of
being borne up in prayer by many, many friends and knowing that has undoubtedly
sustained us at the more difficult times. Our grateful thanks to all of you. Alongside finding strength in this,
we have also been consistently grateful for the amazing resources and the truly
remarkable staff at all levels at Addenbrookes. We are so very grateful to them
and I have also been profoundly grateful to Pam who has watched over me with a very
great concern and done all she possibly could to help me be positive and
comfortable throughout the year.
We are also very grateful to have been
within easy driving distance of the hospital. For the many patients who live
further away than we do, regimes similar to mine must be way, way more tiring,
especially for those who have to negotiate the unpredictability of the A14 as
it is in course of being re-developed.
So it has been a year of blessings amidst
the unpredictability of the chemical battle being waged within me and we are
both thrilled to have reached this stage. Our prayers now go out especially for
friends we know who have not been so blessed and, as ever, it is so hard to
even begin to make sense of the less successful outcomes of other peoples’
treatments. We can only be sad with them and for them.
This entry could go on and on, and have
no-one left reading it all the way through – so I will stop now and ask those
of you who have walked alongside us to give thanks and praise as we are, for
all the blessed moments of our recent lives. However, it is good to be able to
add into all of this the news that I have now been formally invited to be a
Visiting Fellow at St John’s College, Durham for the whole of the Summer term
to work on further ideas for singing of God and Science more widely than just
for children. This, too, has been an amazing morale booster in the last few
weeks and being ‘cleared’ by the consultant means that we can be less
apprehensive about being well enough to enjoy the ‘un-flat’ terrain of Durham. once more, we feel very, very greatly blessed.
Radiotherapy mask fashioned to
the shape of a patient’s face to ensure
that the treatment is consistently precisely
targeted.