And there goes the week

Greetings all
It's Sunday. I went rowing today. Well, everyone corrects me right there. Apparently it is called paddling when it's a dragon boat. About 20 of us met at the Yacht Club at 7.45am to put this enormous canoe (do you remember that book from the Dr Seuss series about the bear cubs who went camping and made a canoe out of bark?) into the harbour and then 20 pink people have to climb in it without tipping it over. Lean out Robin. It was a blast and those ladies are a pretty lively bunch.

The idea was hatched by a woman in Darwin who had fought off breast cancer and decided she needed a) something to do, and b) a way of drawing together other people who have been down the same track; so she somehow scared up a big canoe and persuaded various survivors of this battle to get in with her and paddle. They bought pink shirts, practised twice a week and started entering competitions and generally making themselves known. I haven't yet read the literature so this is not necessarily facts, but the gist of the thing. Anyway, it's a sort of support group/fitness exercise/teamwork building thing which works beautifully. They lift each other and push each other and if one of the crew has had chemo and doesn't feel well, they put them up the front to enjoy a ride anyway. By way of a casual question ( only the ignorant could ask such a thing), I asked did all the original members still paddle. What I meant was: had any lost interest and stopped. I realised after receiving the answer that there is not really an easy way to leave the paddlers. They support each other until the very end. It turns out the single paddler who no longer attends has died.

I sort of bumped into this pink tribe on the plane to brisvegas last weekend and talked a bit about Mum and my participation in the lifelong breast cancer study undertaken by kConFab and also about the BRCA2 gene mutation which Mum and her sister and brother all had. They have all had either breast cancer, ovarian cancer and testicular cancer which I believe are related by this mutation.

It was an honour to be with this closeknit group of people. Although I kept hitting the poor woman in front of me with my paddle, she never seemed to get annoyed. I also splashed every one and got out of time.

There was a lone man standing on the rocks who was looking out for the crocodile we apparently rowed past. We also paddled past an overturned boat which I completely missed as well. I was concentrating on not knocking anyone out so didn't see much outside the boat...

Yeah, so sorry Dulce. I raved on again. Not to worry, I promise much interesting stuff next time.