Hello all, just checking in before bed, and found your lovely new messages :) Thank you - the support you're giving me makes me smile and brings me joy. Rick, Startup, Billy and Niffler - thank you so much for your good wishes, positive words and sympathy - it really does help. Chilly - that makes a lot of sense - maybe I'm just more attuned to the dratted thing, so it feels worse. It's even possible, I think, that there's a psychosomatic element - I know there's something there, so I feel it - but in fact I'm not even sure that it's possible to feel something in that part of the eye. I know some people don't even realise they've got anything wrong till the tumour has grown significantly and started impacting on vision, so maybe ... was going to say maybe it's all in my head, which it is, literally :), but possibly also figuratively :)
Yappity, what a good way to look at it! 50:50 - could be a lot worse, after all. The key thing is whether one has a missing chromosome in the tumour (something known as monosomy 3) - if so, it tends to be curtains, following liver mets; if not, chances are much better. I think the Liverpool eye cancer centre can test for this, so I will ask whether it's possible at some stage to get this done, as I'd like to know. There is currently no cure if it metastasises, though there are one or two things in the distant pipeline, I think, so maybe the trick is to keep going long enough for those to become available. I'll post more about these once I've done a bit more reading. Justilou - ha! I thinkI may refer to the problem as M&M from now on :)
IncrediblySadToo - you said help can come from unlikely sources, and today I found you're absolutely right! At the end of my street is a lovely park - it rises to the top of a hill. At the top is a stone circle and meadow, and you can look out from there and see right across the town to the old castle and the sea beyond. So, I walked up to the meadow today. As I was going, I fell in step with a woman walking her dog, and we got chatting - just as strangers do, sometimes. Well! She told me it was her birthday today, but was spending it alone as she was estranged from her family and didn't have many friends. I think she has moved here quite recently. She said she's an artist and violinist and quite unwell - mental health issues and epilepsy. She asked me how I was - and I thought, well, I'll just tell her! I don't know why - never met her before - but we did seem to hit it off quite quickly and she had an openness about her and a good sense of humour. So, I told her about the M&M, and she was just incredibly helpful and down-to-earth. She told me, for example, that I might be able to get some help from various agencies, and some financial help for my daughter, and gave me her number and address. Turns out she lives just round the corner from me. She also has a lovely dog, and, when I said I wanted a dog but worked away too much so couldn't have one, she said I could borrow her dog whenever I wanted! What a wonderful Christmas friend to find. Two middle-aged women, complete strangers, standing at the top of a hill, hugging, with hearts reaching out to one another, the sea in the distance and the mist rising. I took a pot of Christmas roses round later and left them on her doorstep to say happy birthday / happy Christmas / thank you. With her in mind, and all of you who are supporting me on here, I feel very moved today. Thank you. xxx