Six years ago today, in the pre-dawn darkness of an Oxford winter, Michelle awoke screaming with pain in her abdomen. Convinced it was appendicitis, we called an ambulance (we didn't have a car), which took us to A&E (British for emergency room) at the local hospital. The doctors quickly determined that it was not appendicitis and not immediately life threatening; other than pain management we waited in limbo for quite some time. Eventually the source of Michelle's pain was identified as an ovarian torsion, caused by a mass that was initially thought to be a cyst but was subsequently diagnosed as the primary tumour of the cancer. Michelle had surgery 3 weeks later.
Thus it all began.
I have some belated updates to share, but I'll put those in a separate post. For now, I leave you with some pictures from our final pre-Porlock trip, to Lisbon, less than a week before the journey to A&E.