Cath Harper talks about exercise and other stuff.

We had a very lively chat with Cath about the benefits of exercise, the downward spiral into inactivity and depression if you don't, and the upward spiral into better muscle tone and feeling better if you do. Whichever way you look at it, exercise is the way to go.
Then, as our meetings often do, we ended up discussing all sorts of things and booked Cath to come back later in the year to talk about shifting sputum. It's amazing how many laughs you can get out of such a disgusting subject. We all loved her paint chart of sputum shades though - very useful in an exacerbation to be able to call the nurses and say "I am producing number nine today."

HSBC Bank and a BIG CHEQUE

Last night we were presented with a large cheque, both size and amount. Two employees of HSBC Bank abseiled with us last Sunday and HSBC Bank have matched the amount of sponsorship they raised, much to our delight. Also, good news, we recruited quite a few more people for next year's abseil event.
A BIG thankyou to the abseilers, their sponsors and the bank, for their generosity

This was our fourth year staging our fundraising event and it just seems to get better and better. This year we had sunshine, showers, hail and wind, but no one cared about the bad stuff as they all seemed to be having such a good time.

We had sixty one adults, abseiling the big rock, and fourteen children.
Lots of spectators and supporters came too.
At the end of the day we had already collected £2,546 and there is still a lot of sponsorhip to be collected, what dizzy heights will we reach?
It's what we call a great day !
Many thanks to Call of the Wild who don't charge us for putting on this event each year, which means that every penny raised is spent to help the one in five people in Wales who are living with a lung condition.

Birds in our gardens

We spent a delightful afternoon with Amanda Skull, talking about the rise and fall in numbers of bird visitors to our gardens. I think we surprised ourselves on our knowledge of the birds we see regularly at our bird tables - we scored ten out of ten on Amanda's top ten chart. It's amazing to think that starlings, which used to be the thugs of the bird tables, are now on the endangered list. Let's keep on feeding them and enjoying them in our own back gardens.

Ancient Egypt

How nice it was to see some Egyptian sunshine on a cold day in February in South Wales. Lillian Bath gave us a lively account of her, and her husband's travels in Egypt. Those bronze age people certainly achieved some incredible feats of engineering using only copper tools. They must have been very inventive to have solved all the problems they must have encountered when carving, tunneling and building. Nowadays we just pick up the phone and call a "man who can !"

ABSEIL AT DINAS ROCK - EASTER SUNDAY 4TH APRIL

Why not join us for an exciting experience this Easter and support a great charity at the same time. If you can't, you can always donate using our justgiving page.

NEW ! - portable concentrators from Air Products.

Lynne Sandhu from Air Products, and Hannah Howard, the nurse who does our oxygen assessments, came to our meeting on 15th January, to demonstrate the portable concentrators which are to be made available to us. These will make it easier for people needing oxygen for 15 hours a day to get away on holidays - no more arranging in advance to have equipment delivered to a holiday address.
These devices are pushed, or pulled on wheels,thus limiting the type of ground they can be taken on - no strolls on a beach or a river bank, they require a flat surface. If any of us are issued with one of these we will have to hand back any portable cylinders or liquid oxygen we have now.
So, these will increase flexibilty but will limit mobility. What a shame that Air Products have decided to supply two different portable concentrators, the Inogen One and the SeQual Eclipse, which will do the same job, instead of extending the choices to us by offering the smaller, and easily portable, Airsep Freestyle.
We were told that you can't suit everybody, but if we had been offered a choice of the larger model to suit the LTOT patients and the lighter weight portable to suit those patients needing ambulatory only, We think the needs of more people would have been met.