Here at last is a write up and a few pictures from the meeting of the TBPI Group in Squires cafe/bar in August 2005.
Apologies for the long delay in compiling and uploading this. My only excuse is, as ever, a total lack of time. As many of you already know, Neil and I got married in December last year. Planning for that and coping with problems caused by our car being stolen a few short weeks before the wedding took up a lot of our time and unfortunately, the website has suffered. I will hopefully put that right now in the next few weeks...anyway, enough of that. On to other things!
In 2005, the weather wasn't completely on our side unfortunately, but it didn't stop quite a few people from camping. As ever, the wonderful Harry who owns Squires let us all camp for free. Friday night saw all who had turned up by then in the bar for a few beers. It was good to see so many old friends there
As usual, we had our Tea At Three on Saturday in the function room, which is just something we introduced in 2004 when Jacko used it to mark the anniversary of his TBPI. 2005 saw us celebrating Yeti's birthday, and all of us, well, some more than others (!) tucked into two gorgeous chocolate cakes and one toffee gateau. Fantastic! We intend to keep up this tradition every year as it is a very good way to start off the semi-official proceedings. I'm sure we can all find an excuse or reason to tuck into a cake or three, besides which, it is a very good way to get everyone together at the same time.
Later, we set up the main function room more formally this time for our talks and it worked really well. The talks however were, as usual, very informal and fairly unstructured which seems to work very well for us as a group. Having said that, Jacko did a terrific well thought out and executed presentation entitled 'Useful Gadgets.'
He brought many items from home to show us, and these ranged from the exotic (one handed welding mask) to the mundane (ordinary peg for doing up zip jackets!) See Sarah in the two pics on the left demonstrating this. Click on each of these two pictures to see a better one. Lots of his ideas are very useful for the would be DIY'er, much to the disgust of one of our members who thought that him having the use of only one arm excused him from DIY forever! (see the pizza wheel/knife that this man uses opposite.)
The girls from Jimmies (St James hospital in Leeds) Sarah and Fiona, (pictured left) Simon Kay's top physiotherapists gave us a demonstration on how to do ROM excercises safely and effectively, using Tel as the guinea pig. We feel that it is important or everyone, whether they are new to the injury or not, to be shown regularly how to do these important stretches safely, and we do hope to repeat this at every Squires meeting if we can. I think we all gained a lot from this demonstration,even those among us who hardly ever bother with the ROM. I know that since then, I have been keeping up with some of the gentler movements and feel better for it.
Karen also did a talk for us about OBPI or obstetrical brachial plexus injuries. With the help of the wonderful Gavin, her son, she demonstrated how these birth injuries have a long lasting effect on the function of the affected arm, and also explained some of the surgeries that are available to kids who have these injuries. It was very informative and I for one gained a lot more knowledge about OBPI and how it can be managed as the years go by.
After that, Gavin (pictured left) and the gorgeous Jack went all around Squires selling our new fundraiser wristbands. They did very well too, and if my memory serves me well, we sold around 35 over the whole weekend, for which we thank them, AND jack's Dad Pete who helped to sell even more later that night. Well done you guys!
The lads also counted out the pennies and coins in 'Phil the Skull' which is a ceramic skull Yeti uses to throw odd spare cash into. He brought it along with him to donate the cash, but refused to count it all...and I don't blame him! There was around £8.50 in there for which again, I thank the boys, but a very BIG thanks to Yeti.
Round about 8 o'clock, the band set up. Harry had booked them, which was great. It saved us from going to the trouble of setting up any entertainment! They were pretty good too, and played sort of rocky, punky stuff. Nice to have a bit of music while you have a few beers!
It was a very good meeting in 2005, with quite a few new people there as well as us old 'uns. There were less partners and family, but more injured people this year, so the numbers in total were around the same as 2004. We had less people from the medical professions this year, but this could have been something to do with the fact that the invitations went out a bit later than usual due to an oversight. Hopefully, I can rectify that for the next meeting in 2006.
On Sunday, we all said our goodbyes and slowly all headed off home. Just as well, as Harrry was starting to set up Squires ready for the Sunday rush of bikers that go there every week for their traditional 'full Monty' breakfast after a run out. I have to admit that I finally went home exhausted, but very happy at the same time! I do love these meetings and love meeting the people. Roll on August 2006!
Hoping to see you there!
Liz Finney
Only a few pictures available from the meeting. Sadly, my camera battery went on the blink, and guess who left the battery charger at home??! :0(
