Choosing to Float: Learning to live with a life-limiting illness and find happiness once more

'It’s amazing how one moment in time can change the whole course of your life. How one event can make the bottom drop out of your world. How one conversation, in one sterile room, can take away the last shred of remaining hope that you had been clinging to.’

A week after falling pregnant with her first child, following years trying to conceive, Clare Campbell-Cooper found herself in a sterile room listening to a doctor tell her 26-year-old husband he had a brain tumour. In that moment, her life changed forever.

In Choosing to Float, Clare tells the incredibly moving story of a young family learning to cope with a brain tumour diagnosis. With raw honesty, she shares the journey that followed – from the challenge of adjusting to motherhood as her husband underwent brain surgery and the fear that her newborn son would never know his father, to transitioning from a wife to a carer and grieving the man she loved, as the tumour changed him before her eyes.

David defied the odds. He died during COVID, just before his fortieth birthday. He had 12 years with his son. With compassion and humour, Clare shares the story of the end of David’s life – from the agonising worry of not being permitted to be with David in hospital during COVID to the beautiful small moments they shared together at home in Devon in his final months.

A story of courage, love and resilience, anger, grief and hope, Choosing to Float is an incredibly powerful portrayal of life with a terminal illness. The book explores how it shapes you as a family, changes you as a person and teaches you to let the small stuff go, find joy in the moment and keep faith through trauma.

'If I can help one person get through this, then I have succeeded' - Clare Campbell-Cooper

At least 10% from every book sold is given to Brain Tumour Research.