Tonight's picture was taken in October of 2004. Mattie was invited to a Halloween party at the George Washington University that was being held by some of my students. My students invited children from the community to the event and treated the children to free books and then escorted them around campus for trick or treating. As you can see Mattie got a wonderful dog shaped balloon and also picked out a couple of books. He wanted me to read his Franklin the Turtle book to him on the spot and in our perspective he made a wonderful Winnie the Pooh that year!
Quote of the day: Listen to that little voice inside you. Sometimes it can whisper meaningful words of wisdom and make more sense than the deafening noise of opinions and judgments outside. ~ Roopleen
Peter and I have had a very LONG day commuting back home to Washington, DC! Try over seven hours!!! So I will be making this short. Our original direct flight from Toronto to DC was canceled and instead we were re-routed on a connecting flight through Philadelphia. However before packing up and boarding a plane, we had to present to an audience of professionals at 8am! The room we presented in was a huge ballroom and though this was the last day of the conference, people slowly started to fill up the room, despite the early hour!
The panel presentation we participated in from 8 to 9:30am today was entitled, "Quality of Life: A Need or a Luxury?" Each panelist covered a specific topic and covered personal experiences and research related to a sub-topic. The topics covered were:
- The utility of HRQL measurement in clinical practice
- Quality of life: the sixth vital sign
- The challenge of measuring quality of life during treatment with the implementation of a webportal
- Why quality of life guides the development of a the National Psychosocial Standard of Care for Childhood Cancer Project
To my surprise, I got to meet Ulrika Kreicbergs (far left) today. Ulrika is the Chair of the Palliative Care for Children Program which was established in coordination between a non-profit called Ersta Diakoni (part of the Ersta Hospital in Sweden) and Ersta Skondal University.
In our power point slides, we cited research literature by Kreicbergs! In fact, in both book chapters that I wrote this summer, I cited research by Kreicbergs. I happen to like her research a lot, especially because her focus is on child loss and the impact of this loss on parents and their quality of life. There is a very special feeling to meeting a researcher in person, a person who I have only known through words and paper. It is wonderful to now be able to connect a face and person to a name! It makes her work much more real and tangible to me which is an added gift!
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