Thoughts in the West

Two weeks ago I mentioned a friends husband had been diagnosed with Myeloma - sounds like some harmless cell but is in fact a fairly rare form of bone cancer, incurable but it can be treated and held back.

In the course of trying to find out more, I joined a Facebook Group connected with the disease, mainly victims and their relatives. Having been accepted in the group, I was asked to explain why I was joining "a group no one wanted to be part of"!. So I gave a brief description and one of the first to write a very friendly "Greeting" comment was a young lady, currently undergoing treatment. She happened to have been born and raised in the town my son now lives in and I suspect lives in the Southampton area now.

We got in to a bit of bantering about Bavaria and I began to look behind the scenes and saw she is going in to an exciting, frightening stage - a donor stem cell transfer and starting today with more chemo and all that is involved in getting ready for the operation itself.

She - I will call her Pep (same as Bavaria Munich FC trainer and next year Manchester City FC) - really ought not to be inflicted with this disease. She is just a few years older than my daughter and Myeloma is usually a cancer inflicting the 60+ types like me. She probably stood a better chance of winning the lottery than getting Myeloma.

Sooooooo - this morning walk planned to send her a photo of the dogs giving her a paws up with the Alps in the background but it was too misty. Sent her a You Tube video though - Sound of Music: Climb Every Mountain, the final scene as the family do exactly that (rather than the rather morbid surroundings when the Abbess sings it in the monastery),

In the evening popped over to Hawangen with another trailer load of garden rubbish for the dump and at the top of a hill saw the scene in the Blip. Had to darken the foreground and clouds to get the rays to be prominent. It's looking west over Memmingen towards the British Isles and is dedicated to Pep.