Marie-Claire
“In 2007 my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She had been to the doctor numerous times and eventually was referred for a scan. After about 8 weeks of waiting for the scan my parents decided to pay for a private scan. By the time she was scanned she had two tumours the size of oranges inside her. She had an operation and treatment, but it returned 3 years later. She then went on to suffer a terrible death. She had another operation in 2012, where she had to have part of her bowels removed, and then it took two months for her to slowly die. Essentially she was sedated to death over a period of about 3/4 weeks, which meant she was starved of food and then liquids until she eventually died. She was so painfully thin when she died it was terrible to see, and personally I suffered from PTSD afterwards.
“She was always bitter about the time it took to get to her diagnosis- she always said ovarian cancer doesn’t need to be a death sentence if found early, but she knew it was coming back. It had taken months to get to a diagnosis, and only because she had decided to go private.
“She was let down by the system massively. She retired at 55, had cancer at 60 and died at 65.”
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