Let me first apologise as this might be a bit longer than usual!

Secondly I would like to wish you all the best for 2016 and also thank you for reading me in 2015!

On a personal level, 2015, has been an exciting year and a clearly changed my way of living.

• The first milestone was definitely the start of my new treatment, photopheresis and this is not nothing. I spent or wasted almost a year to avoid this treatment but obviously I had no choice anymore.
• Had to start this as my schleroderma was moving forward and could therefore hit me hard…. I must admit that it is hard to get rid of that GVHD.
• Another milestone was achieving 5 years after bone marrow transplant and believe this had been a journey but for this, go read the previous 49 chapters!
• I had the energy level to restart blogging about Project Management and go to congresses.
• One of the main milestone achieved is that I did not think of November 21st as an anniversary of some sort… Would this mean that I am forgetting about that trauma??? I hope so!
• I also have visited according to Facebook 53 cities in 11 countries and reviewed tens of restaurants or hotels in those places… ( all in TripAdvisor).
• President of my local Rotary Club for the second time.
• By the way I also turned 50!

2015 has been a smooth ride despite the treatment but it definitely helps to get back to something closed to a normal life. I do really enjoy this and start feeling this may last for a bit even if I guess treatment will stay till mid-2016. I hope that this will also help to get my sugar level and triglycerides will go back to the right levels afterwards!

So as you can read I am still highly positive on all fronts and I strongly feel I head in the right direction… But I am really conscious that the line is really thin between healthy and going back to the ER with risks to stay there for a while. Having this as lesson learned now, you see me enjoying life while strictly following doctors’ prescriptions, as mentioned in a previous post, I am a good solder in this matter.

I intend in 2016 as explained in Chapter 49 to share even more my experience by helping transplanted people to go through this journey and I hope that I will have the opportunity to support positively some of them and bridge with my service club to fund some activities. I also now had positive contact with LotUZ and I hope that we will be able to help families in Belgium. For sure next year will be interesting and I do expect to move some lines in my little world to cope with these deliverables. I am sure that even if professionally it will be a challenging year (fortunately so) I should be able to set my private involvements up for success too.

So it looks like you now have my new year’s resolutions and my high level plan to achieve but what really matters in this is that we also have exciting plans for the family as well. I am looking forward to delivering 2016 with enthusiasm and enjoying life with my family, friends and colleagues. Sure we will have our challenges but this whole journey made us all stronger I.e. we will have fun!

For the ones following me on Facebook, you may have realised that it started on a high note with our trip in Iceland where we had so much fun but also learned quite a lot on the Icelandic culture that we had no clue of. I must say that it was a fantastic four days trip and my resilience from a health perspective amazed me as we had long walk in the snow and long drives during the night with heavy snowfalls and frozen roads but I could cope with all that and short night sleeps and flights… So glad to be where I am right now compared to 6 years ago when I was fighting for my life a you could read in early chapters what a journey.

I would also like the opportunity to thank you all for reading my blog and showing me your sympathy all these years… Let’s keep our fingers crossed that it will keep moving in this positive direction… Let’s have a great 2016 together!