Festive notes

It's only been a few months since Sandra completed all her treatment and thankfully had successful surgery, albeit with the challenges of recovery, she will be singing her heart out, within her choir, giving a Christmas concert at 7pm this evening (Saturday 10th) in St Andrews Church in Sonning. If you are not watching the England v France World Cup match! and live locally to Sonning, you are very welcome to attend. Sandra and her friends have very kindly nominated OOSO as one of their preferred charities, for which we are extremely grateful. We hope it goes well and you have a lovely evening Sandra, and thank you for your support.

Café Catch-Up

Earlier this week we had another successful get together, this time at Dobbies Garden Centre near to Swindon, with 15 of us enjoying a decent Christmas lunch with all the trimmings. Whilst most of us couldn't manage a full plate, we enjoyed the flavours of turkey, stuffing, nicely roasted spuds and of course the ubiquitous sprouts - love them or hate them we know it's Christmas! It was good to see that they had a vegetarian Christmas lunch option on the menu, so Dobbies got a big tick from me. And to boot, I picked up x100 onion sets for our allotment in their sale for only £1.80, 75% off!

So why not join us for our next Café Catch-Up at Notcutts Garden Centre OX44 9PY just south of Oxford (close to the junction B4015 and Oxford Road A4074), on Tuesday 10th January at 12:30 for a light lunch or just tea, coffee and cake.  Please drop me a line if you'd like to come along.

New Year Zooms

As a reminder, please put Tuesday 3rd January at 7pm in your diary for our upcoming New Year Zoom, a session not to be missed. We're very lucky to have VIP's joining us at each of our next three zoom sessions, here are the details:

• 3rd January: The very eminent Professor Mark Middleton, Head of Oncology at the Oxford University's Medical Sciences Division, will update us on the latest and most exciting new treatments for oesophageal and stomach cancer; 
• 7th February: Dr. Kerry Avery, Associate Professor in Applied Health and Care Research, NIHR Bristol Biomedical Research Centre, will update us on a national project titled 'ROSE', to test the effectiveness of an online symptom reporting system to improve patients’ recovery after they are discharged home following oesophagogastric surgery;
• 21st March: And Consultant surgeon and regular guest Mr Richard Owen, will talk us through how CT and PET CT scans work, with worked examples, explaining how these images are interpreted.  

These all promise to be very practical and supportive sessions, each followed by 30 minutes of general Q&As, where you are invited to join in and open up discussions. If you have a particular question that you would like discussed, you can email it to me in advance here . 

If you are not on our regular zoom invite list and would like to dial in, drop me a line here and we'll include you on the circulation list.

Reasons to be cheerful

We plan to send you just one more Newsletter before Christmas with our usual good cheer and a brief review of what we have achieved in 2022.

Until then...