Publications
Partners
What was supposed to be the happiest time of a couple’s lives, turned out to be a tragedy.
Newlyweds Aimee (33) and Alan Simms (31) were enjoying their honeymoon on Cape Verde off the West African coast on 27 May when the unthinkable happened.
After two days of relaxing and enjoying their getaway, Alan stopped being his bubbly self.
He told Aimee he was feeling tired and took a nap before going to dinner, reports The Sun.
After eating Alan, from West Yorkshire in England, still didn’t feel well and decided to go back to bed.
At midnight he woke up with a very painful stomach, which led to his concerned wife calling the emergency nurse at 4 am.
The nurse thought Alan was suffering from food poisoning and administered anti-sickness medication and painkiller until he was able to see a doctor at 8 am.
When Alan arrived at the clinic the next day, he was very weak and doctors battled to monitor his vital signs, reports The Metro.
"I just didn’t know what was going on. I rang my mum crying. I said Alan's come in with a bad belly and now I think he's dying. She couldn’t get her head around it," Aimee said.
His condition quickly deteriorated and doctors asked Aimee to leave the room as they began CPR.
"I just sat on a step outside and it was probably about an hour before someone came back to me. I said, 'Is he okay, is he stable?' And they asked me to go into a room. That’s when I knew he was dead. They said they’d done everything they could.''
Alan tragically died on 27 May and the post-mortem revealed the cause of death to be lung cancer.
It has left Aimee bewildered because there were no prior symptoms that her husband had lung cancer, reports The Daily Mail.
"I just can’t understand it, in the space of 12 hours he’d gone from being fine and dandy to having died. He didn’t have any signs of cancer. It was horrible," Aimee said.
Professor Michael C Herbst, a health specialist at Cansa, explained: ''This is the strange thing about lung cancer – most lung cancer patients to date don’t have any signs or symptoms. Usually until the lung cancer has become advanced.
“As the lung cancer progresses, less and less oxygen becomes available for the body to use – the process is usually so slow that the individual doesn’t notice it.
“The body adapts to less and less oxygen being available until the ‘tipping point’ is reached. Many lung cancer patients then die unexpectedly and suddenly."
Alan was diagnosed with a benign tumour when he was 19 years old but specialists told him that it was nothing to worry about, reports The Metro.
”The mere presence of a benign tumour can never be linked to any form of malignancy.” Professor Herbst said.
Aimee says she takes comfort in the fact Alan was aware of what was happening to him and that he had cancer.
Sources: The Sun, The Metro, The Daily Mail
