AT six months pregnant, Karen Whybrow was over the moon to have a second baby on the way.
But her life was turned upside down when her husband, Ben, got a stage four diagnosis at the age of 38.
His symptoms had been blamed IBS and – but their cause turned out to be far more sinister.
Karen, from , says: “He was 38 and it was pretty much completely out of the blue.
“He'd had some tummy problems which were all put down to irritable bowel syndrome, stress and an irritated stomach lining from food, so that's what he thought was wrong.
“He had been told years prior that he suffered from IBS, so for several weeks we passed it off as that.
“Then he had a little bit of bleeding one day and he was feeling really lethargic, just completely drained of energy.
“We went to the doctors, were fast-tracked to oncology to be checked, and they found this tumour that was obviously significant.
“Ben was then diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer, so it was already kind of palliative – though we weren't aware of that at the time.”
With a on the way, due on July 5, Ben was defiant that he would get better.
Karen remembers: “Ben said, ‘Right, you've got three months to fix me before this baby comes along'.
“That was his outlook throughout the whole thing: ‘It's not acceptable that I'm going to die, so it's just not going to happen.'
“We were forced into a world of fear, scans, , treatment plans, death and hope – far removed from the gentleness, softness and growth of .
“The learning curve was huge for us both.”
Tragically, Karen was widowed aged just 38, a year after giving to their second daughter, Harriet.
Ben died one month before he would have turned 40, on August 3, 2017.
It came after a heartbreaking chapter in Karen’s life, defined by hospital visits, chemotherapy sessions, and the relentless juggle of caring for Harriet and her sister, four-year-old Georgina.
Karen says: “My role became the caregiver, advocate and doer of things to help Ben stay alive. His role was to survive.”
is the second biggest killer in the UK, with 16,800deaths each year.
Some 94 per cent of diagnoses (44,100 per year) are in people over the age of 50. But it still happens in the young.
I was just in constant fight or flight. I was on edge and in a state of panic the whole time
Karen Whybrow
More than 2,600 new cases are diagnosed in people under 50 every year.
And this , a major study published in December revealed.
After his diagnosis, Ben was accepted onto a clinical trial and he had chemotherapy that wasn't available on the NHS.
FROM MATERNITY TO ONCOLOGY
Karen says: “It was obviously a positive and that chemotherapy worked really well….until it didn't.”
The treatment was intense, consisting of fortnightly sessions with harsh side effects.
Karen, now 46, says: “We would flit across the hospital from oncology to maternity, all the while trying to remember the right questions to ask of the right consultant.
“Within three hours of our daughter being born by emergency C-section and rushed to neonatal care because they were unhappy with her breathing,Ben hot-footed it across the hospital to have his chemotherapy.”
Karen says: “I don't know how I gave birth to a healthy child.
“I was just functioning because I had no choice as the kids and Ben needed me.
“I was just in constant fight or flight; I was constantly on edge and in a state of panic the whole time.
“The fight or flight probably wasn't that bad when I was pregnant because the naivety is still there and you kind of think it'll be OK.
“I remember one day crying really quite hysterically and I was still stopping myself because I just couldn't allow those feelings and the enormity of what was happening to sink in because I didn't know how I would cope.”
By 2016, when Ben was on maintenance chemotherapy, Karen says his started to come back.
He was and said his stomach would feel like a blown up balloon with needles sticking into it.
I had to tell the kids that daddy was dying and the doctors had done everything they could
Karen Whybrow
“Ben's symptoms just got worse and worse and he was having excruciating ,” Karen says.
“The tumour was large and his lymph nodes were impacted as well.
“Ben's tolerance for the treatment got worse and worse.”
He then endured 12 weeks of radiotherapy in the spring of 2017.
“After you finish you wait six or eight weeks because the treatment can continue working to destroy the tumour during that time,” Karen says.
“We were just waiting for these scans because they wouldn't do anything until this time period was up.
“We then were just in this limbo with Ben deteriorating before my eyes.
“His mobility was getting less and less because he just couldn't move properly and walk because of whatever was going on in his back.”
Tragically, a CT scan following the radiotherapy showed the tumour had grown and spread.
Karen says: “Obviously it was growing while he was having radiotherapy, which was what was sort of suspected; it was in his liver and his lungs and his lymph nodes as well.”
Ben was put on another form of chemotherapy in June 2017 but could only have one round as he was too ill.
“We literally couldn't get him out of bed to get him anywhere to have chemotherapy and his oncologist was on holiday,” Karen says.
They were left in an agonising limbo until frighteningly, Ben had a massive haemorrhage and started bleeding really badly in July.
Karen says: “He didn't want to go to hospital but in the end we had to ring an ambulance because he was in so much pain.
“He was getting scared understandably. It was just hideous.”
Paramedics allegedly couldn't get any drugs via injection into Ben because his blood vessels were collapsing.
He was losing huge amounts of blood and he went into – when the heart suddenly stops pumping blood around the body.
An air ambulance was called to take him to hospital, where Karen spent an agonising two nights by his side – breastfeeding Harriet, who was 13 months old.
She says: “I had to tell the kids that daddy was dying and the doctors had done everything they could and he wasn't going to get better.
“They couldn't do anything for him and to prepare.”
PROCESSING THE GRIEF
Karen says they then moved to a hospice which was a gentler environment.
She says: “I don't think they thought he'd survive being transported to the hospice from the hospital – but he did.
“We had two nights at the hospice and he died on the second night.
“He wasn't conscious for most of the time. He knew he'd been moved because he was sort of responding. He would say a couple of words to me, but that was it.”
Since Ben's death, Karen says she has found ways to cope by stopping drinking, swimming in the sea and running a marathon.
She retrained to be a life coach, setting up her own business called The Anchor Coaching, and uses hypnotherapy as a relief tool to get the trauma out of the body.
“All the therapeutic tools I've learned have helped me but it doesn't go away, it's always there,” she says.
“I still sometimes think even now, seven years on, that there's still bits of trauma in my body because it's taken that long for me to work through it and for me to process it.”
She says at times she can remember her husband and find a way to smile instead of breaking down.
“You can remember things and actually smile at them rather than just thinking about the unfairness and why it had to happen to Ben,” Karen adds.
“Ben's always there, he's always here with us because the kids' mannerisms sometimes are just completely their dad and I do things that I know Ben would have done – you've been with that person for all that time, you know what they would do.
“So it's kind of remembering those things. And just having space for it, for what Ben would have done.”
