A very confronting issue to start the day & fun after that

We didn't have to worry about how we were going to replace our daily visits to the Glowing Sessions.

This week we have appointments every day, and this morning Donna arrived on our doorstep at 9am, bright and bubbly and with a wonderful Yorkshire accent. 

Donna is our main contact for the Community Palliative Care Service.  In many ways, this is probably the most confronting of all the services and areas we will be a part of.  Previously, discussing palliative care as a part of the care packages available to clients was quite OK.  To suddenly have it so close to home makes it completely different.

The most common perception of Palliative Care is that it's about dying.  Sure, this is a part of the care provided, but Palliative Care is "about living for as long as possible in the most satisfying way you can, within the limits of your illness."  This is a quote I have taken directly from the Cancer Council's booklet Understanding Palliative Care.

The care we receive from Donna and her team will help Alex to remain at home, independent and in control.  Team members will be able to assist us with medications, we have access to a 24/7 helpline for urgent queries, they will co-ordinate services from a range of professionals to suit us such as dieticians, physios and OTs.  We can have access to this team for years.

Donna will be our main contact, and we are very fortunate to have her.  She is one of those happy, bubbly, personable characters and I am very sure that she is going to be an enormous help in the future.  She's the type of person you often see chatting & laughing with friends in a coffee shop, or on girls day out trips, or you'd chat to in the supermarket queue.

We'll see her next week when she comes to introduce Barbara to us.  Barbara will probably be the main team member we see so it will be nice to meet her early, even if we won't be seeing her for a while.

Once Donna left, we headed to the office to pack some orders.  We then set off to start our deliveries, but on an impulse, we stopped before the first delivery because we saw a coffee shop that we hadn't tried properly before. 

I know I've spoken about the views from some of the cafes we've tried - beautiful parks, lovely huge trees and gardens all under an endless blue sunny sky. Well, this morning's view was a bit different -

Believe it or not, this does carry on with the theme of "one day ....".  For way too long now, Alex has been calling in to servos to pump yet more air into a rear tyre.  It was a relatively new tyre when a stray piece of metal had the audacity to wedge itself into the tyre, causing it to slowly deflate - ALWAYS.  So, after each stop to pump up the tyre, Alex was usually heard to mutter "one day, I'll see about getting a replacement".  And today was "the" one day.

Personally I'd much rather the huge trees, endless blue skies and sunshine, but I can imagine there is a large part of the population who would love to sit and dribble over an absolutely huge display of tyre rims.  If this sounds exciting, then Tempe Tyres would be your cafe of choice.  They do have some yummy cakes and very reasonably priced coffee if dribbling over the view wasn't going to be enough.

After this, the rest of the day was quite normal.  Finding available loading zone spaces, deliveries (sans trolley today) and then home. 

A quick visit to the local "doctor" so I could get yet more prescriptions, and then a visit to our chemist and home with more packets of tablets.

We're heading out tonight for a wonderful Vietnamese meal and it should be fantastic, so I'll sign off now, put some Lanolin Beauty Lip Balm on and we're walking down to the restaurant.