a philadelphia story

"who let the miserable limeys in?"

Next month I'll be attending HU Connexion 2018, a health advocate conference in Philadelphia. This has been organised by Health Union, the people who run the Multiple Sclerosis website I write for occasionally.

To be honest I haven't written for the site for a while so I ignored their first few emails about the conference. Plus it's in America. Which is, like, a long way over there.

But the site administrators got in touch a couple of weeks ago and asked if I could write something about being a father with MS. After writing the article (first objective: make Mrs D cry; result: success) I mentioned the conference in an off-hand, "wouldn't it be nice" kind-of way. And everyone I told about it said I had to go for it.

By this point we'd missed the RSVP date but thought it was worth a punt.

And we found that not only had they extended the date but they would be delighted to have us there. So they're paying a good chunk of our travel costs, feeding us and putting us up for two nights at a pretty nice looking hotel in Philadelphia.

It's not somewhere we've ever thought of going but it looks a really cool city with a lot of history. And it's not every day someone offers to pay a good whack of your travel to attend a really interesting looking conference.

I just hope that the positivity of these advocates won't put people in the UK (myself VERY MUCH included) to shame with our constant griping and competitive disability point-scoring.

HUGE thanks to the team at Health Union who responded (really quickly) to all of our requests. You really helped us out and we can't wait to meet you!

And massive thanks to our American correspondent Ms. CrankyPants for giving me a bit of local knowledge and letting me know that (apparently) the Philadelphia 49ers have recently won the Super Ball FA Cup final.

Good to know, I certainly don't want to look stupid, do I?