Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Local news, marking time...

It's 7 weeks since I had my thyroidectomy, I'm healing well, but I'm just really marking time till the next stage of the journey. On the 7th of April I go 'radioactive'! It's a thyroid thing…but to prepare for that, I have had to stop taking the medication which I take to replace what the thyroid does normally, and I also have to eat a low iodine diet to make the thyroid cancer cells desperate, then ZAP!

In the meantime here are a few things I have been doing recently.
I managed to get to see the sculpture exhibition 'Shapeshifter' on about the last day of the Wellington Festival of the arts.
Yes this is a sculpture





Last weekend I went to the Wine Country quilt exhibition in Waipukurau which is about 4 hours from Wellington. My quilt group, Coastal Quilters, hired a bus and we left at 7.30am and got back in the late afternoon.
My favorite quilt was by Lyn Stoddart, and was a wonderfully warm wool 'wagga'' style quilt.
This week I have also been taking photos of slightly silly signs.

This is a painting on a power box, the eyes are stuck on later by some joker! 


Add caption

Why not just print the letters smaller?

sparrows eating the bread outside the bread shop

 The weather today from Tawa Countdown supermarket. Looks quite rural really
below is more like it, our street is all dug up and has been for weeks. Its hair raising driving over these drawbridges and sometimes I can't get out of the driveway at all.

Saturday, March 1, 2014

Surgery :-(

Hi everyone
I wasn't sure whether to post this or not. It feels like I am just making excuses for not updating my blog but in the end I decided that I would write it down in case it helps anyone else.
After many years of having a lump on my thyroid checked it was biopsied and suspicious cells were found. At the beginning of February I had a thyroidectomy and on Monday I will also be told of the pathology results and plans for follow up treatment. If it is cancer, it is very treatable and most people do well after the initial hiccup of surgery then getting medication right. So if you have a lump in your neck, go and see the doctor.

I'm not getting very much done at the moment, I'm sleeping a lot and going to a lot of appointments either for myself or with my mother who is also going through hospital treatment. I have however been invited to join a group of textile artists who have a website called Through Our hands. They represent a wonderful lineup of textile artists and I'm very excited to be asked to be a member of the group.

here is the only thing that I've worked on recently, it is a class sample for the New Zealand Quilt Symposium in January 2015. I'm hoping to quilt it and take better photos next week when my scar has healed up a bit. At the moment it is a bit hard to stretch my arms out, looking up is even harder!