What an interesting event.
|
left-right: Emma Thomas, Lorraine Williams, Mr Fausto Palazzo (and in background slide, Alaska Blue, Emma's gorgeous and beloved rescue sled dog, who featured in her talk, as a great source of support and inspiration through her illness) |
Thanks to all who came along and to all who helped out and
to our speakers and to the Royal Free for hosting us and the great catering
team who did our refreshments and to those who have sent lovely feedback
afterwards.
One person texted me yesterday to say:
“thank you for working so hard to organise such an
enthralling lecture.”
I love these meetings. So much work goes into them but it is
so worth it.
We learn such a lot and it is so good to meet and chat to
other thyroid patients.
Thyroid surgery is not actually particularly relevant for me
to know about. As someone with an underactive thyroid, as opposed to thyroid
cancer, Graves disease (overactive thyroid disease) or a very enlarged goitre
growing down into my chest, I won’t ever need thyroid surgery, unless something
highly unexpected happens sometime down the line.
But I still enjoyed learning about it from eminent
Consultant Endocrine Surgeon, Fausto Palazzo. And I enjoyed hearing from
patient, Emma Thomas, who had her surgery more than 20 years ago, when she was
just 21, even though she actually had a bad experience with complications, her
story was inspiring as she has learned so much about how to manage the
condition surgery left her with, hypoparathyroidism. And many of her lessons
were relevant to anyone with a chronic health condition who wants to take responsibility
for being as well as they can be.
We had been planning to have a third speaker, Louise Davies
was going to give a talk on how yoga can be beneficial for people with thyroid
disease, but I was concerned our programme was over full and our speaker was
concerned about timings as she had to be somewhere else straight after our
meeting, so we agreed to rearrange her for a future date (tbc) and we
had a short relaxation session instead. That was lovely too. We’ve done
relaxation sessions at previous Patient Voices events but this was the first
time we’ve done it at an info event and it really worked beautifully. More of this in future I think.
We also shared photos of our summer activities – the London
10K, Jill Liddington’s walk from Yorkshire to London and the London Group
summer walk from Broadstairs to Ramsgate. Some of our group had also
been to a follow up session with the researchers at Imperial who wanted to
canvas the views of thyroid patients on changes to how data is being used in
the NHS.I hadn’t realised how busy we’d been till I stopped to pull all the information together.
In a couple of weeks BTF has 30 walkers taking part in the Carrot Walk in London (as well as more walkers at events in Birmingham and Glasgow) organised by the
charity Fight for Sight. And next year there’s going to be a special meeting in
Leeds for parents, carers and children with thyroid disease. So we promoted both
of those upcoming events too.
We finished with another epic Q&A session.
I’ve a lot to write up. And donations to bank. People as
ever were very generous.
And I’m quite knackered, it’s a 150 mile round trip for me
to get back to London these days and it’s a tiring day as you can imagine. But
it’s all good. I’ll post again soon with write ups of the talks and some of the Q&As.
If you came to the meeting and would like to share any comments on here please do, I seem to be very low on comments on these days though I know lots of you are reading the blog, please don't be shy - all comments are warmly welcomed!