The Liz Army:
A blog
Patient. Patient advocate. Researcher. Student.
There are more than 500 posts here. Use this search to look for something specific. Good luck!
A note about my oldest posts: I began blogging about brain cancer in 2008, at age 29. I had no background or knowledge about healthcare when I started. Please excuse typos and other misconceptions. What you read here is me in real time, like a time capsule.
Flashback: A play-by-play of my life in 2017
As I transfer a terabyte of data from my OpenNotes (work) laptop to my new (school) laptop, I'm running across fragments of unpublished blog posts about my life between 2017 and 2026. Here's a post I never shared, outlining my whirlwind new life after I quit my job to join the full-time world of patient-partnered research.
The real publications are the friends we made along the way*
After nine years of working at the intersection of patient advocacy and health services research, this is my last week with OpenNotes at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Over these nine years, my role transformed. When Cait DesRoches offered me a job, I had no idea it would be the longest job I’d ever had, or that it would lead to a vision of what I would do next.
Spoiler alert, I'm still alive: 10 years later
I have had a brain tumor for one quarter of my life. I am the same person I was before but I am completely changed.
Watch The Open Patient documentary
I am not a doctor. I am not a researcher. I am not going to come up with the cure for cancer on my own. But as a citizen scientist I can play an important role by sharing my experience with you, the reader of this blog.