Friday 7 October 2011

looking forward to autumn

The Indian summer is most definitely over.  Time to look forward to the autumn.  It feels very much like starting a new term at school!


Last night, we celebrated the news that our daughter Katie has found a new flat in Manchester.  We'll be up there again in a few weeks time to help her move in.  


Oxford Photographic Society's 2011 exhibition opened on Sunday in the Town Hall Gallery, so we must find time to visit and have a good look. Please drop in if you are in the area between now and the end of October.  If you have read the blog for 20 September, you will recognise my image!






We are looking forward to visitors this weekend.  Di and Gwen are walking the Thames Path long distance footpath and will be reaching Oxford soon, giving us the opportunity to provide B & B for the intrepid walkers and catch up on news.  


We are fortunate to have other good things to look forward to in October and November, but you'll have to come back to find out what they are.  In the meantime, we are thinking of our meso warrior friends who are not so fortunate, in particular the family and friends of Mick in Australia and Becky in the USA who both died recently; Anita in Australia who is recovering from surgery; Ronny who is fighting hard to beat a 4-8 month prognosis and Mavis who will shortly be back on chemo and taking part in a new Phase 3 drug trial NGR-hTNF.  


NGR-hTNF acts by selectively targets the blood supply to the tumour.  It showed great promise in the Phase 2 stage, where patients who received the drug on a weekly (rather than 3 weekly) basis stayed free of disease progression for more than 9 months, compared to a median duration of 4.7 months overall.  I know from experience not to give too much weight to crude statistics when assessing an individual's response.  However, these stats look good. Nine months progression-free survival may not sound like very long if you are fit and healthy.  But believe me, you can cram an awful lot of life into that amount of time if you have an incurable disease.  May it work even better for those taking part in the Phase 3 trial. I have added a link about NGR-hTNF under clinical trials, top right.







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