Inspiring stuff

I recently wrote about my friend Jo who is recording her battle with lymphoma on her blog, and alluded to another friend who has been diagnosed recently with cancer. The other friend is Shara, who married Olly almost exactly a year ago, who has breast cancer. The prognosis is good, I hear, in a recent email, Olly wrote: "we are both feeling upbeat and confident that she will get over this. If she deals with it like everything else in her life there will be no problem at all." Olly is a brave man, as he has decided to run the London Marathon to raise money for the charity, Breakthrough Breast Cancer. If you want to support him, you can do so here:

Jo's blog

2007 got off to a bad start when I heard that an old, but far too young, friend had been diagnosed with B-cell Hodgkins Lymphoma. Jo went to Australia in 2002 on an extended holiday and ended up staying and marrying an Australian guy, so I have only seen her a few times in the last few years.

Here she is, a couple years ago at Ham polo club.

Today, we got the fantastic news that her chemotherapy is doing its work and the tumour on her chest has shrunk to half its original size.

But despite everything, Jo is clearly remaining amazingly cheerful and has started a blog. I asked her if I could link to it as I think it is a great blog, although deeply personal; as she said "it is only really about me and my family and of course Bree the labrador features large!!"

Lymphoma is a terrible cancer and Jo is the third person I know in recent times to have it. The first was Gregor Mackay (famous for being William Hague's press secretary) who succumbed far too quickly at the end of 2005, and the other is still fighting. If there is anything I can identify which connects these people is their popularity and vibrant personalities - I am not sure what this signifies.

UPDATE: For the life of me, I do not know why the link will not take the full address of Jo's blog, so I have taken it off. If you want to take a look at it, paste this link into your browser and it will work:

http://web.mac.com/joanna_buckley/iWeb/Jo's%20site

Thanks