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Cameron Liam Dargaville 
Welcome to Cameron's Web Page. It has been provided to keep people updated about Cameron and how he's dealing with NF. Here he is at or place in January 2009
Journal
Sunday, January 25, 2009 3:20 PM CST I know I have been ages in updating Cameron's page. Not a lot has been happening with him, well not that needs to be reported, until about December. But of course I was just too busy to update this, with my usual onslaught of Santa letter replies. For those of you who don't know, I work at NZ Post as a Payroll Officer, but for about 23 years I have been involved in the Santa letters, and now it is solely my job. What does the postal service do with letters written to Santa? Well we reply to them, every single one of them, we havea pre-printed letter, we just need to put the child's name and address on the front. I cover the lower half of the South Island, and I did almost 9000 replies, mostly on my own, which meant working at home till late at night, good overtime money though! And this all needs to be done in just 3 weeks, quite a massive job, considering I have my usual work to do at the same time. So now that I am finally on annual leave until 2 February, I thought I must tell you all how Cameron is getting on.
Firstly, the orthodontist, they are stumped, they don't know what to do with his teeth, as long as the tumour remains inside his mouth and pushing at the teeth, there isn't much they can do. So that is just a wait and see.
Then the biggy, the plastic surgeon, he came down to Dunedin to see Cameron (and some other patients of course) in December. He admits he was shocked when he saw Cameron, he expected the surgery would have had a much longer term effect than it did. Cameron's eyelid is now a centimetre thick and weighs 5 times more than normal, which is why he has such a hard time keeping it open. Mr Davis, the surgeon, said that by doing smaller operations each year is just going to take too much time out of Cameron's life, given that he already struggles at school it is unfair for him to have to be off school for 3 weeks or more after each surgery. So he is reluctant to do this but it is probably the only option for some longer term results, and that is to sacrifice Cameron's facial nerve, remove it altogether, thereby paralysing his face. If they don't have to try and work around the nerve they can take as much of the tumour as possible, and improve the appearance of his eye, then they can take some tissue from his thigh and put it in his cheek, use slings to lift the corner of his mouth, they may need to put a gold weight in his eyelid, the main point of this surgery will be to improve his appearance and hopefully keep the tumour at bay for a while, more than six months that's for sure.
I have been thinking a bit since the meeting with Mr Davis, when we had the last surgery I asked about the mass in his mouth, and he said he was leaving it because of the facial nerve, well now that they are sacrifcing it, perhaps they might be able to take the mass away and save any further damage to his teeth. It is worth asking, then again, surgery there may affect his taste and speech.
Anyway we haven't heard anything more since then, but I guess we will soon enough.
As for everything else, well it is the last week of the summer holidays here, Cameron has been off school since about 19 December. He is getting a new teacher this year, a teacher he has had as a reliever in the past, and he just loves this teacher, Cameron says Mr G is just the coolest teacher and school is fun when he is there, so hopefully having this teacher permanently might have a positive influence on his education.
Cameron and his brother went to Camp Quality again this year, once again they had a fantastic time. Unfortunately we aren't going on a family holiday this year, we were going to go back to my parent's place in Cromwell for a week, but my mother is in hospital she had surgery last Tuesday (she will be fine). So I am just hanging round home with the boys for a week and a bit. The weather has been fantastic, 30 degrees celcius or hotter for the last few days. I took them for a walk to Tunnel Beach last Friday, it was very hot walking back up the hillside, but they got a swim at the beach at least - it is about 2.5 kilometres from our house, it is a small secluded beach surrounded on 3 sides by sheer vertical limestone cliffs, accessed via a hand carved tunnel through the cliffs, built in the 1870s to give a Victorian family access to the private beach. The scenery is awesome, there are pictures on Google Earth if you have it installed (type Tunnel Beach, Dunedin, NZ in the search, click on the little blue boxes to see photos people have uploaded, I don't know how to get my pics on it for others to see).
Well hopefully I won't take as long to do my next update, but you know what I'm like. Take care
Bronwyn
Read Journal History
Hospital Information: Dunedin Hospital
Great King Street, Dunedin
Links: http://www.ctf.org Childrens Tumour Foundation
http://www.nf.org Official NF site
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