After numerous long evenings and weekends our sauna is back in use. Completely renovated shower room, new floor in the dressing room, floor heating in both, new stove, new lights, benches sanded down and appropriately treated, sauna room walls washed and treated, log building painted from the outside. The works.
Today it was in use for the first time and the electricity was free 2-4 pm as part of the Octopus Energy trial, so it didn’t even cost a penny to heat!
This is our boys conducting a quality inspection.
My mum’s breast cancer came back a month ago - it’s stage 4 and it’s metastasised to her bones. Her life expectancy is about 6 months without treatment. She has triple negative breast cancer which is rarer, more aggressive and significantly harder to treat than the more common hormone-responsive breast cancers.
There’s a new immunotherapy drug, pembrolizumab, which is effective on advanced triple negative breast cancer when given alongside standard chemotherapy. But it costs £3000 per treatment and she needs 18 rounds of it. Her oncologist applied for funding and got it!
After 6 months of treatment my mum should have 23 months of “progression free survival” compared to 16 months if she had chemo alone. She’s only 57 so every extra day I can have my mum in life is truly a gift. I’m so so grateful for our NHS.
Ok fine I'll start. Got married recently, it was about as stressful and mortifying as any such form of public performance, so I'd made my new husband agree we could get a Greggs immediately after the ceremony to stop me feeling sick.
We rocked up into the queue as a party of ten, me still holding a ridiculous bouquet, most of our friends looking self-conscious in their wedding finery.
Woman at the till gave us our cheese savoury stotties for free by way of congratulations, and the guy working in the back claimed it was the "Northernest thing" he'd ever seen. I have never been more proud.
(worked a treat to settle my nervy stomach for the rest of the day, as well)