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About this blog

still sorting life out

Entries in this blog

With love.

Seems as if time has flown since I last blogged and now we are just a few days short of Christmas, so only one thing to do. Wish you all the best for the days ahead, a peaceful and joyous time with family and friends. May the year ahead be one  of progress and new  opportunities. Bless you in all you do.    

swilkinson

swilkinson

Dancing with Robyn and Robin

It was the WAGS Christmas party today, my second favorite party.  I missed a couple of parties last weekend as I was out at Broken Hill with my younger son Trevor. I wanted to be there that weekend as it was his birthday on Monday 27th. As he is a long way away from friends and family he loves it when  I can be there and it was his access time to his five year old Alice too so we had a ball.  We took Alice to Playtime at the local Salvation Army, to please her we went to see the movie "My Little

swilkinson

swilkinson

Great fun with some wonderful caregivers and stroke survivors

I have just been on the WAGS Women's Weekend.  I can say we laughed and cried, told of our journey, played silly games, ate together, played together and danced with wild abandon on Saturday night and had so much fun.  The pink boa in the photo is a tribute to Terry who was her daughter's caregiver and sadly died this year.  I was sad, as we all were, to recall those who were not with us for so many reasons. I have been going to this weekend since 2007, some years I have only gone on the Saturda

swilkinson

swilkinson

Looking forward again

Today I went to the Stroke Recovery group WAGS that Ray and I used to go to, I don't always attend the monthly meetings and today one of the members came late and slipped into the seat beside me and said:  "I am so glad you are here today I take so much strength from you."  This girl has just been diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer so I know she is going through a bad time.  She always seems happy but I know it is not always as it seems and she is struggling.  We have had long talks from time

swilkinson

swilkinson

Has my thinking changed?

I was talking to the church secretary today about the operation, my recovery and why I see life differently now.  I have filled in a series of forms to continue as a Lay Minister in my church but still have some misgivings about going back to doing all the work I was dong prior to the melanoma diagnosis.  An operation of any kind is a watershed, a time when once again we are brought up against our own vulnerability.  It has certainly been that way for me.  I hear of a lot of people who have had

swilkinson

swilkinson

Getting better, doing less.

After six weeks of convalescence, seven weeks  since the operation I am finally out and about again. As the surgeon said might happen I do have some swelling in my left leg if I stay on it too long but at least I can drive somewhere, walk around for a while and then rest, which means I can do my own shopping, meet a friend for coffee or go to church again. I really do empathise now with people who do not have that ability to get around. It is not a good life for someone who has been active, I gu

swilkinson

swilkinson

Driving next week

Due to he surgery I had five weeks ago and the subsequent infection I have been unable to use the car for the past five weeks.  I was told I could drive if I had an emergency but it was unwise to do so before the graft was in a stable state.  So for the past five weeks it has been mostly spent sitting or laying with feet raised.  Then on Friday the community nurse told me the graft  was healing at last and here I am, almost able to resume the life I had prior to the surgery.  I say almost as the

swilkinson

swilkinson

A health scare and time to think

On the 23rd of August my life took a dramatic turn.  I had had a small mole behind my left  knee, I had it checked out a couple of times over the years but it was assessed as harmless.  Years went by with my time taken up as caregiver to Ray and then as a widow and I filled my life with busyness, trivial in itself but filling an otherwise empty life.  I ignored the little spot as it grew bigger and suddenly I realised it had really changed and so I went to my GP who referred me to the local Skin

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swilkinson

Some stroke encounters

On Saturday I went to the Combined Stroke Groups morning tea. I have stepped back from the Stroke Recovery group that Ray and I belonged to “WAGS” in the last six months but got a reminder email from one of my friends who belongs to that group and then a phone call to ask why I was neglecting to meet up with my good friends there. So I decided to go back to meet up with them again and was glad I did. Friends from all the different parts of our life are a gift and I should never stop being thankf

swilkinson

swilkinson

Getting through winter

Oh winter woes are upon us, we are expecting the coldest weekend of the year this coming weekend.  It must be true it was on Facebook!  Seriously there has been a debate about rising price of heating a home and how a lot of older people are scrimping on heating because of high power bills.  I admit to be one of them  I sit at night with a rug over my knees, I make them anyway so have a lot on hand.  I have a hot water bottle to warm my bed up, old fashioned I know but it does the job, extra blan

swilkinson

swilkinson

Re-visiting old pain

One of the church ladies has just gone into the same nursing facility as Ray was in.  I knew I had to visit her but thought it would be okay as it is now so long since Ray died there.  I went into the facility this morning but she had gone out on a little bus trip (she is at hostel level so able to walk etc) so I missed out on seeing her this visit.  The secretary said she would leave a note to say I visited.  I found it more difficult than I thought as while I was walking through the facility w

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swilkinson

uncertain times

Sometimes I really wonder what life is all about.  I think I watch too many newscasts on television, there not being a lot of interest to watch in mid-winter here.  In this age bad news travels fast and bad news from all over the world hits our TV screens especially in the late news which I often watch before I go to bed.  Events like the fire in London where so many people died because of bad building materials, local traffic accidents due to wet conditions and constant news of strife and shoot

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The key to the future

Sometimes when I watch the news I know how well off I am, but sometimes I want more out of life than I currently have. I know compared to others I have many blessings but from time to time I still want more than I have. I have just read an article about lowering your expectations of life, from time to time I know we all have to do that.  I will be 70 on Sunday and I think those "O" Birthdays make you think about life, where you are now and where you want to be.  I am good at over analyzing life,

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swilkinson

Fruit salad or Irish stew?

Each week I do certain things, visit my old ladies, catch up with friends over coffee, do some housework, some gardening, maybe have some time reading in the sun. Officially I have days off from the church work Monday and Wednesday but that really is a fallacy. We are trying to set up a lunch group on Fridays to follow the Coffee Morning, a soup and a roll lunch for some of our church people but also people who come to us for welfare. So three Wednesdays in a row I have attended one of those mee

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swilkinson

Reflecting on Friendships

I guess some people wonder why I still post on this site, after all my husband Ray died in September 2012 so I ceased to be a caregiver way back then.  Well, the answer is because I have made friends here, friends who gave me their support during the long battle Ray waged with strokes, TIAs, fits and seizures and supported me after he died.  Some whose journeys I have followed since I joined in 2005 or whose supporter I have become in all the years between then and now. When I first started as a

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swilkinson

A few mostly domestic matters

This is really only a domestic update. Autumn is here, shorter days, and just lately much colder nights. The sun is still warming but is strong for a shorter time so I love to spend time in the garden when I can. As usual there is much to do, just the usual jobs like repotting, weeding, resettling plants to maximise sunlight to keep them going through winter so there will be blooms in Spring. The weeds are still growing after all the rain we had in March and April so still a lot of maintenance.

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swilkinson

when time stands still

I had a funny phone call from a friend this morning.  She and her husband had been to an Anzac Day Dawn Service.  Somehow with all the items that needed to be plugged in at the Town Hall the power circuit blew and the town descended into darkness.  An electrician was called in and finally fixed the power and the ceremony recommenced.  But when she glanced up at the Town Hall clock it was slowly going backwards!  Her husband is a clockmaker so after a hasty breakfast he went to fix the clock.  I 

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swilkinson

Connections (meeting Elizabeth)

Life has many ways of connecting people. I have just been up to visit my daughter and her family for a few days. It had been three months since I had been up there, I get entangled in issues locally and it soaks up my time.  I have to reset my priorities.  The weather was what we have been having here, brilliant sunshine followed by pouring rain, the left over vestiges of a cyclone in Northern Queensland. It has been wet most of the month of March and now April is looking as if the weather will

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swilkinson

Caring for others

Definitely not looking forward to winter. We go off daylight saving next weekend and I know suddenly it will be dark at 5.30pm again. As I am a six hour sleeper that means a lot of long dark nights alone. I just love daylight saving as it means long days when I can be busy and still have time to sit on the verandah and read until the sun goes down, have a late evening meal, and go to bed just before midnight feeling that I have done something worthwhile with my time. I have a lot of hand work to

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swilkinson

Rainy day blues

It's raining.  It has been raining for about ten days now.  I know this has to happen if we are to live in a beautiful green world but day after day of rain makes me blue. It isn't cold rain, as we are on the end of what has been a hot summer we still have a lot of humidity so it is gray, rainy and warm and humid at the same time so I don't have a lot of energy for clearing up the inside of the house and am short on time when it is not raining to do the garden tidy up I need to do. There are so

swilkinson

swilkinson

Autumn blues

Just going through a time when life is pretty routine, I often feel that at the end of Summer , start of Autumn (fall) and as we have had a lot of rain I have spent a lot more time indoors than I usually do this time of the year. Which is probably why I am feeling a bit mopey. Since the trip to Hawaii to meet Sarah there hasn't been a lot of excitement in my life. Okay I know that if I want to do anything exciting it is up to me to organise it but once again I am going through a spell where all

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swilkinson

Multiple choices

I think one of the worst things for me when I was a caregiver was to think that I didn't have a choice. That I had to look after Ray whether I wanted to or not. The solution for me was to get out of bed each morning, put my feet on the floor and and say: “Today I choose to look after Ray.” That way I felt as if I only had to do it for one day and could choose again tomorrow so it was my choice not what fate had inflicted on me.   I am only just getting to that place in widowhood now. I have be

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Meeting Sarah

I have just met up with my third overseas Strokenet member, Sarah Rademacher (in the past known as spacie1 and hostsarah now srademacher) and I met in Honolulu and spent time together in Waikiki as we had promised we would. Now I have met Barbara King (Babsz) and her husband Eddie who actually came and stayed with me many years ago and Ann Rogers and now Sarah. Not bad for a girl from the Antipodes. But it was a long way to travel in the case of England where I met Ann at her son's wedding and H

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swilkinson

At last! My end of January Blog

How good it is to have the blogs back and finally catch up with the people who post regularly, the members of the Blog Community. I have been reading blogs here since 2005 so I have read thousands in my time on here and I admit to being a blogoholic. And I really miss you all when you are not blogging for some reason or when the blogs are down. It happens from time to time that I am away and not able to access a computer and that precipitates withdrawals if it happens for too long. So you were a

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swilkinson

Time to think some new thoughts

I am a born nurturer. I had thirteen years looking after my dear Ray before he died, I thought that was the end of my caregiving days but somehow I just go on caring for people, not in my home, not every day but as the need arises. I do this partly as the pastoral worker for my church and partly out in the community with the friends I have made in the dementia and stroke groups. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind doing it, but I do get tired, sometimes very tired. So a few days out in desert c

swilkinson

swilkinson