A woman whose able-bodied husband died of cancer just three weeks after his diagnosis has urged people not to take unusual symptoms for granted.
50-year-old Thelma Ainsworth revealed that her 59-year-old husband and doctor Jonathan was reluctant for many months before he sought medical advice for some stomach issues he had.
However, at the time he decided to conduct tests, doctors revealed that his bile duct cancer had ‘spread everywhere.’
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‘It was more advanced than we could possibly imagine,’ Ms Ainsworth, a London-based lawyer said.
‘Even though Jonathan was a doctor, he didn’t get checked immediately, he waited until it was too late.’
‘Once you know that there’s something wrong, get yourself checked out as soon as possible.’
The pain in Jonathan’s belly reportedly began in 2019 when he was ‘always training’ during morning sessions.
For multiple months, he did nothing about it until he realized he had begun to lose weight.
Once he saw a doctor, he was referred for a scan which indicated he had a severe inflammation in the liver.
As Jonathan waited for the referral, the infectious disease specialist decided to take his own blood, and the results showed that all ‘wasn’t right’.
‘He went off to St Mary’s Hospital and they said that he had cancer,’ said Ms Ainsworth.
In October 2019, doctors said he had bile duct cancer, which reportedly affects about 3,000 people in the UK each year.
In the space of three weeks after Mr Ainsworth’s diagnosis, he slept once and died the morning after, leaving the 50-year-old woman and her two children without him.
The deceased’s wife initially began blaming herself, believing she was the reason her husband had died.
‘Since the diagnosis and for many months, maybe years afterwards, I blamed myself,’ she said.
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‘[I thought] that it was somehow my fault…because I didn’t get him to check himself out.’
It was three years on when she was trying to write a children’s book that she realized what had actually happened to her husband.
The 50-year-old woman discovered that her grief acted as a ‘blockage’ to her creative writing and chose to begin journaling to help her process the difficult emotions.
The words she put down inspired her first memoir, ‘I Am A Wolf Tonight.’
‘It was this blockage inside me that I felt I needed to release,’ she said.
Thelma Ainsworth described the book as ‘raw, unflinching and honest’, exploring themes of cancer loss, complex grief, love, resilience and perseverance.
There is ‘no right or wrong way to do grief’, Ms Ainsworth wrote.
However, she hopes her words will offer hope and encourage others to be patient and kind to themselves and treat every concern with utmost importance.
‘At some point you will reach a stage where you’re able to process that grief, but it will take years, and I’m not unusual in that.
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‘I hope that my book is helpful for anyone who’s been in that circumstance where they’ve had to go out of their way to reveal their inner animal in order to survive.’
