Thanks to everyone reading this, my just giving page was spread widely enough that it started getting some media attention. Only a week after diagnosis I was courted by two journalists. The first suggested Women’s Own magazine first and then to hit nationals afterwards. The idea was that I would actually get paid an undisclosed fee if it were to go to women’s own first. Therefore they actually approached my mum first and interviewed her then got some quotes from me too, I would’ve gone with this angle, as they said I’d be able to see the manuscript prior to any publication. Then I was approached by The  Press Association who insisted actually the other journalist couldn’t possibly offer that for copyright reasons. Then the first journalist said that any exclusivity agreement I signed with the Press Association wasn’t worth the paper it was written on and would welcome me back at any time! So you can see the infamous British tabloids work in a murky world.

I kept with the Press Association mainly as I’d had a longer chat with the journalist, and she wanted to go national faster. After about 6 hours she did a “read through” where she said please interrupt whenever you’d like to add or delete anything. I Managed to squeeze in a little bit of health promotion in the first draft and that all important link to my just giving page. Interestingly they did this without coming to the hospital, just a phone interview and they ask you to take the photos plus raiding your Facebook for other pictures. So much for investigative journalism.

The article was published in the Mirror (“The intelligent tabloid”) on Monday with no email from the Journalist to say it had been published (as promised) and most of my corrections excluded. Actually overall pretty happy with it, the last line about triathlons is very cheesy, I’m fully aware I’d much rather be competing for a triathlon, although I’m a useless swimmer. We chatted for about thirty minutes and at some point I quoted most of a friend’s* post about how raising money from my bedside was more arduous than other people’s very honourable money raising pursuits. Plus I did go over that I wasn’t an orthopaedic trainee. However I liked the photos and glad my fy1 colleague’s framed photo from the Croydon summer ball got into the daily mirror. 

*lanky with small eyes