I know, I know. All my good intentions to blog more regularly seem to have failed me.

I'm particulary aware that I had planned to comment on the meeting I went to a fortnight ago. Today is the second one, and I'm leaving in a little over an hour so I now have a deadline to hit if I want to post before the event.

I must confess that the first meeting wasn't as painful as I'd expected. It was a more structured than I'd thought it might be for a start. The clinic nurse leading it took us though several flip charts across the two hours of information that to be honest was in the printed material we'd been given but kicked off various discussions amongst the 10 of us there. (One lady dropped out half way through feeling it wasn't for her.). And that was the real benefit of going I guess. Hearing other people's experiences and discovering that you're not alone in some of the odd symptoms that no one really 'gets' just from a description of how you're feeling. Perhaps 'discovering' isn't the right word in that sentence. Intellectually I'd known it was the case, but this was much more real.

We're a varied bunch as well. The ex-military guy in his biker gang jacket, the matriarch with a gentle smile, the mother-earth vegetarian marathon runner, the young girl who is sadly wheelchair bound on occasions although walking at present, a long-haired self-confessed layabout who uses humor as a defence mechanism. Apparently were unsual in having so many guys: 4 out of the ten. Normally, we were told, it is just one or at most two. And it was interesting seeing bits of behavior that I recognize so intimately. The guy with his own stash of tea bags and biscuits because of the diet he's trying, the girl who needed a blanket because she was feeling the cold so much, the lady who was uncertain she had the strength to be as 'social' as the meeting required.

It was good to share experience and as long as it doesn't turn into a moaning shop for our symptoms, then hopefully it will be useful. But there are no 'solutions', just better understanding and possible coping strategies. All of us, when asked to out post-its on the flip chart at the beginning about what we wanted from the session, had variations on 'healing' amongst other things.