An Irish couple who are both dying of terminal cancer have warned people to demand to be taken seriously by their doctor when they feel ill.
Karen Stewart, 36, was first diagnosed with neuroblastoma when she was just 18 but overcame the disease and was cancer-free until it returned when she was just 32.
She beat it again but in January this year was told her cancer had returned for a third time and was incurable - though it could, for the moment, be maintained.
But around the same time her husband, Ed, started to feel unwell with chest pains which the couple initially put down to stress cause by his wife’s condition.
After he started to get nauseous when he ate, the father-of-three decided to go to the doctors where he was put on a waiting list for a scan.
In May 2017, he gathered the money for a private scan and was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and is currently living in a hospice near their home in Dublin with just months to live.
Ms Stewart told Irish magazine RSVP: “If you have pain, go get it checked, if you have a lump get it checked. It might be nothing but could be something. Don’t leave it until it’s too late.
“If you have a pain, especially if you have it weeks, you should seek medical advice. And if you don’t get relief straight away just go private, it costs around €250, and you get the results faxed to your doctor that day, that is how my husband found out.
“We had been putting it down to a suspected heart attack he had in February of this year”.
Friends of the family have now started a fundraising page for them, originally aiming to raise €5000 (£4,500) to give them money to spend the time they have left with their children – Keeva,10, Finn, 8 and Erin, 4.
But the fund has currently raised over $22,000 (£19,700) after they were flooded with donations from more than a 1,000 people.
