Day: June 25, 2018

London Calling

Another day in London and I am sitting on a busy tube trying to drink enough water to make sure I can complete the flow test and ultra sound I have scheduled for 0930.

I hope the tube doesn’t get stopped as I sit here with a full bladder!!!

Arrived early for my Ultra Sound.

It paid to arrive early as I was second in for my ultra sound and flow test.

The test started with the Ultrasound and a quick check that my bladder was full and then into a toilet where you pee into a funnel that cleverly detects your flow and records it as a print out.

Then another quick ultrasound to check whether my bladder was now empty.

It all clever stuff and looks high tech to me.

A quick photo for posterity and I am done.

The nurses were friendly and knowledgeable.

A quick walk then to UCLH on Euston Road and the Macmillan Cancer Centre where I need to provide another urine sample.

I hope it won’t be too long as my bladder is starting to fill once more😑.

A short wait and then I get seen. Another quick sample and that’s me done for the day.

Time to head home and take Teddy for a walk 🐶.

Patient Research Ambassador North Thames Meeting

Back in London today but for something different as it was the quarterly CRN North Thames PRA Meeting.

That’s Clinical Research Network North Thames Patient Research Ambassador Meeting.

Better to use the abbreviations 😉.

I will explain more about the CRN and being a PRA in a later post.

Today we started the meeting with a session of Mindfulness which was interesting and only took a few minutes.

I will be trying this at home and the good news is you can do it in bed😁.

We then got updates on the CRN from Christine and Iain.

And then a very interesting talk from Professor David Werry on Stroke Research and how he uses patients in the different stages of research from setting up the trial and all the way through.

I learnt a lot from this about Strokes but it made me wonder how much patient engagement there is in other trials.

We spent sometime talking about what we had been up to as PRA’s which was good and interesting to hear the range of things that are going on.

We finished off the day with a quick comms update and I made a quick video with Lauren about my research experience and my PRA experience.

Then time to head back home before coming back to London on Monday for my Urology Ultrasound!