Nadine Williams

Hello faithful friends,   Another four months have slipped by since I wrote you a note, but our life is a little like a ship rolling in high seas  – one is on the verge of seasickness all the time and it’s a daily problem to stay steady on one’s feet.  Ours is now a [...]

Home-based Palliative Care a Team Effort

Once more beloved husband Olivier arrives home from hospital, but this time by ambulance.   This is a special home-coming, though, because the other option was to send him to a hospice. Even though his two doctors thought he was too ill for home care, I am delighted that he is back home here with me [...]

A Living Angel

  Australia’s first professor of palliative care originally set out in the world to become a medical missionary. But life and fate had other ideas, as SAMELA HARRIS reports on the man some people call… * * * IT’S as if an aura of serenity surrounds him. When Professor Ian Maddocks steps into a room, [...]

Hey presto! Petit chien is now a poodle!

Our petit chien, cute puppy Oscar has metamorphised. We thought we bought a Shi Tsu Maltese X with a shaggy, long-haired coat just like his mother. And, sure we saw the daddy dog, a handsome grey poodle, but our little bundle of joy was surely mainly Maltese, he wasusuch an adorable puffball.   How wrong [...]

Time for a Miracle

Those words of wisdom by Regina Brent when she turned 90, currently on the Internet are  comforting as I mull over the worsening situation with husband Olivier’s cancer. He is in hospital once again, this time with abdominal pain and we wait with trepidation for the results of more blood tests and xrays taken today [...]

Oscar has overtaken our house

Meet the newest member of our household, a handsome, hybrid poodle/Maltese/Shi Tsu named Oscar. Our new puppy is an adorable bundle of fluff, champagne coloured with an angelic face which belies his wicked playfullness.  He is the tiniest little soul and yet he is like a charged electric current of energy in our household.   He wakes at  about 6am, [...]