It’s mid-March and it’s been a beautiful, sunny spring day… with some of the crispness of autumn, but without the dread of winter which begins to grow once you get older (particularly if you’ve recently moved to the countryside – into an old draughty house).
It’s now seven-thirty and it’s getting darker – the clocks haven’t been put back yet.
Lizzie and I are about to embark on our evening run… as we’ve now managed to do most nights for the last fortnight.
We go through the usual ritual of asking the kids if they want to come. ‘NO!!!!’ bellows Jake. Annie says no too – more quietly but just as firmly. She then admonishes me for not taking Cedric on the run.
‘Look at him!’ she says, pointing at the baleful hound, as we all stand in the kitchen – me in my running kit, Annie in the pyjamas she seems to wear 24/7. ‘He’s desperate to go!’
‘But we already took Cedric on a walk earlier,’ I protest.
‘Well,’ tuts Annie, ‘if you’re not taking him, he’s coming up onto my bed to watch TV with me!’
‘Annie, that is strictly forbidden!’ This is true, Cedric isn’t really meant to go upstairs in our house. It’s about the only rule the dog seems to abide by (most of the time).
‘Why are you so mean to him?’ says Annie. ‘He’s so nice. Go on, admit it! Admit he’s nice!’
‘No,’ I say.
‘Admit he can be nice sometimes,’ Annie attempts to compromise.
‘Oh, OK, Cedric can be nice sometimes,’ I sigh. And I guess that’s sort of true. The dog isn’t always terrible. When he’s looking up at you and wagging his tale (exactly as he’s doing right now, in the kitchen), he can seem quite nice. Maybe I’ve been a little harsh on him in these blog posts…
Minutes later, Lizzie and I are jogging down Bunton Hill with our headlamps on (and without Cedric). Lizzie has forgone her jeans and jumper running combo and has replaced it with some actual proper jogging kit. Like she’s serious about this running malarkey now.
Even at this time of the evening, the taste of spring is in the air. Summer soon, I think. Yeah!
There’s a huge, orange-tinted moon in the sky. I want to say a harvest moon, but I don’t really know what that is (other than a song by Neil Young) and it sounds like something you’d get in the autumn anyway.
The last few times we’ve been on runs, we haven’t really talked about what’s happened over the last eight months. Perhaps the well of conversation has finally run dry, on the topic of cancer (pardon the pun).
But this time, maybe because it’s been such a lovely day and it’s inspired her to say what she’s about to say, Lizzie decides she does want to talk about it.
‘I’m feeling really hopeful,’ she starts. ‘About life.’
‘I’m glad!’ I say, meaning it.
‘I don’t know if it’s because it’s spring,’ she continues, ‘or because we’re going running every day, but that’s really how I’m feeling.’
‘I’ve been thinking,’ says Lizzie, ‘about how lucky I am. If I lived in another country with no proper health service, and we had no money, I could be dead now.’
I keep quiet – not wanting to break Lizzie’s flow of thoughts as we continue jogging down the hill.
‘I’ve also been thinking about how lucky I was to get my surgeon, Mrs. S.’
‘If G…’ (G. is Lizzie’s brother-in-law, an anaesthetist), ‘… hadn’t been working at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, in Birmingham, and hadn’t introduced me to Mrs. S, maybe I wouldn’t be around either.’
Lizzie reminds me how Mrs. S is highly unusual amongst surgeons who deal with cancer, in that she doesn’t insist Stage 3C patients have chemo before their operation to shrink down their tumours. And Lizzie’s tumours were whopping before the operation… 16cm wide, some of them.
‘So that was incredibly lucky as well,’ says Lizzie.
I finally speak. ‘So maybe it’s lucky we moved up here after all. If we’d been in London still, it’s not like you have a brother-in-law working in the hospitals there.’
‘Yeah, maybe if we were still in London I wouldn’t be around now either.’
Wow! I think. At last, a clear-as-day, unarguable reason it’s a good thing we moved up here!
‘But instead of that happening,’ Lizzie continues, ‘I’ve been given a new lease of life.’
I can see Lizzie’s face illuminated under her headlamp. It’s true. I AM lucky, her expression says.
I marvel at her positivity. After having had such an incredible, enormous dose of misfortune eight months ago (followed by six enormous doses of chemo poison being pumped into her veins), it’s extraordinary she can once again use the word ‘lucky’ to describe herself. Good for her.
‘And now I feel strong and healthy. I feel if I have to have an operation – and chemo – again, I’m ready for it. I can survive it.’
‘All this running is really helping,’ says Lizzie. ‘And I have you to thank for that. In fact, thank you for everything over the last eight months. For supporting me throughout it.’
It means a lot to hear Lizzie say this. It means that even though she’s understandably spent a large chunk of the last eight months seeming pissed off with me – with everything – overall, I’ve done an OK job. I’ve come out in the black, on the brownie points/helping-ill-partner front, not in the red.
We’re nearly at the bottom of the hill.
‘At the end of the day,’ Lizzie now says, her face flushed in the lamplight, ‘when the shit hits the fan, health is everything.’
‘Health,’ Lizzie concludes, ‘is wealth.’
‘Is that a real expression?’ I ask.
‘Yup,’ says Lizzie.
We finally arrive at the bottom of the hill, turn around and look back up it.
‘Shall we run back up, until we get to the steep bit? And then walk?’ I ask Lizzie.
‘Yes,’ she says.
And so that’s what we do.
P. D. Clifton 
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