Detoxing and Reenergised and Talking, it's a Class Act.

March 28, 2017

"It's a short respite for me, but my poor body screams for it"

.... Aidan Murphy.

With self proclaimed 'Toxic Tuesday' scheduled in one weeks time, my body (and mind) is enjoying its time off my daily chemotherapy tablets. In aviation terms, it's all to do with 'weight and balance'. As for Oscar my Oncologist, it's his way of ensuring my blood cell levels are up. If they are not, the Chemo must wait, as it has done before.

With the toxins down, the exhaustion I usually get afternoon walloped with is about 20% of what my body usually faces. As I said before, the trick here is to save and store that credit of energy. Why ? Because my blood cells will be screaming for it next week and I need to be in a position to put my hand on it, well my heart actually and then duly deliver it.

I've spent the last week fine-tuning my INSIDE OUT talk. Taking feedback from recent talks I have done is of immense help. When we get to the end and it's question time I say, and very much mean:

"Ask me ANY question you want, there is nothing off limits, not even my cancer".

Of course the awkward silence follows, nobody wants to be first. So I have developed my own solution to this dilemma. I ask myself the very first and indeed most awkward questions. I put some humour in to it when answering my own question and with that, the flood gates open. To be honest, I surprised myself on how calm and collected I was during this phase of the talk, lets hope I plough on the same way as we progress. To be honest and frank about it (whose Frank?), the way I see it is, I'm the deep sea diver. I'm sent down on a dive to part of the ocean nobody or very few have been to. My mission? Come back to the surface and tell what I saw, seen, felt and experienced. But in my world, it's not the deep blue ocean that's of interest, but rather the dark and dreaded world of Oncology. For my part, I'll keep diving, then returning to the surface and finally.. telling. Filling most of those blanks, then helping with others that may need more dives and dive we will !!!

A Class Act To Follow: Hot Air Ballooning.

Not one to be left out, Aoife asked would I give a talk to her class in School (3rd class). I put a few hours aside over the past week and have put together a 50 minute piece. But this version is obviously very different, it's all about 'Ballooning'. With a strong focus on the class-worthy aspect of educational and science values associated with the sport but not forgetting the F word.. FUN. Make it fun to learn, deliver it with some humour and you will have the kids eating out of the palm of your hand. The best part is they are now learning something entirely different, but the brilliant part is, any one of these kids has the future potential to be an aviator, hell even an astronaut and as such, this type of presentation could very well be ticking definite career orientated future boxes, and that's the part people that I personally like, err I mean love ❤❤