BLOG INTRODUCTION: ‘One Year A.C.’
A.C. stands for After Cancer.
But don’t panic… what you’re about to read isn’t depressing! I promise! Quite the opposite, I hope.
This is a blog talking about my partner Lizzie’s Grade 3C ovarian cancer… and the incredible (funny/sad) way she dealt with it over the course of one year (summer 2021-2022)… and the curious (funny/sad) ways me and our two kids dealt with it too.
‘Sad’, yes… but you might think ‘funny’ is an odd word to hear, in relation to this subject matter. But, the truth is, the situations we found ourselves in – and the words which were said – often did seem funny. I don’t mean wistfully amusing. I mean laugh-out-loud, snort-out-your-antioxidant-smoothie funny. Because, in grim times, Lizzie, myself and our family still found a lot to laugh about. Maybe it was a coping mechanism…
Stop Telling Me I’m Brave is based on the journal I started writing during Lizzie’s chemotherapy… just after she’d been knocked for six by Covid too. On top of cancer and Covid, the blog will also talk about another big ‘C’ – the countryside, which we moved to from London just before lockdown (and Lizzie’s illness) hit… a surreal story in itself.
I wrote the first entry in the journal on November 17th 2021… four months after Lizzie first received her cancer diagnosis. I’ve posted it, in the blog, one year after it was written. And that’s how this blog is going to work… every single entry (with the odd exception) will be posted twelve months after it was originally scribbled down. Well, twelve months-ish… this isn’t going to be an exact science! Why didn’t you blog it at the time? you might be wondering. The answer is… I couldn’t get my shit together. So here it is, a year later.
By the way… Lizzie’s an artist. And she’s very kindly allowed me to feature some of her wonderful oil paintings on this website. Here is a very nice one of some flowers in our garage (it’s probably called something more arty than ‘Flowers in Garage’ but I’m not sure what).
And here’s another one of a mouse (Lizzie likes painting mice, for some reason. Maybe it’s because there’s a plentiful supply of them in our house).
Anyway, that’s the intro… I hope you enjoy the blog (it feels weird asking anyone to ‘enjoy’ this diary of our rollercoaster year. But hopefully you will).
Oh, as a final note… this is a blog of course (a retrospective blog at least), so by all means read the most recent post first – the one at the top. But if you want to get some sense of our story, and the order things actually happened, then you’ll need to start at the bottom and work your way up (to do this, click the link below).
Enjoy!
P. D. Clifton November 17, 2022
P. D. Clifton 