real life
Nicky Barrow, 33, and her husband Jim, 40, have been overwhelmed by the support they’ve received for his life-extending cancer treatment…
Two years ago, life was good for me and my husband, Jim. Married for six years, we had two young children Archie, eight, and Izzy, four, and Jim was about to take over the scaffolding business he’d been working for over the last 20 years.We were planning some exciting house renovations and had lots more to look forward to.
But ever since 2020, Jim had been experiencing some health niggles including acid ref lux and IBS. Although he’d been to the doctors a few times, his symptoms had been getting progressively worse and, by March 2022, he wasn’t able to pass any stools. “I physically can’t go and I’m desperate,” he told me. Following another visit to the GP, they checked his notes and realised that Jim should have been sent for a colonoscopy two years earlier. His referral had got lost during lockdown though and Jim had been too busy to follow it up.
Now, as his hospital appointment was rushed through, neither of us worried there was anything seriously wrong. But two weeks later, the colonoscopy found a “suspicious mass” on Jim’s bowel and at the end of May, we were called back to the hospital. That’s when a colorectal surgeon delivered the devastating news –Jim had inoperable stage 4 bowel cancer that had spread to his liver. As I started to cry, Jim went pale with shock. “Is it curable?” he asked the surgeon. “It’s treatable,” the surgeon replied and explained that chemotherapy would hopefully shrink the tumour. Jim’s diagnosis was a lot to take in. I don’t even remember the drive home and telling our friends and family was a horrible blur. “Daddy has a nasty tummy ache, but he’s going to have special medicine to make it better,” we explained to Archie, then six, and Izzy, three. Within two weeks of Jim’s diagnosis, his gruelling chemo began, which left him bedridden for days. His hair thinned quickly, so the kids helped him shave it off.
When Jim felt well enough, he’d go to work or pick the children up from school, but over the next six months, our normal family life turned completely upside down. Thegood news was that after 12 rounds of chemo, Jim’s tumour had shrunk along with the lesions in his liver. The plan was for him to continue the chemo after Christmas but during that break, he ended up in A&E three times with a blockage in this bowel caused by the tumour. He was in so much pain that he needed urgent surgery, leaving him with a stoma bag. Jim took it in his stride and after recovering from his op, he continued fighting, undergoing more chemo in 2023 and an intense course of radiotherapy.
But the treatment fail
