‘I fight with the thought that she could have been saved’
After trekking more than 500 miles from Inverness to Maidstone, Stuart Gilchrist will lay flowers on his wife’s grave, on the day the couple should have been celebrating her 56th birthday. Stuart will spend the rest of his life questioning how things could have been different if his wife, Mandy, had been given a CT scan earlier, rather than waiting months in excruciating, unexplained pain, before the inoperable tumour was found on her pancreas.
Mandy was told she only had eight months left to live and during that time the Hobbycraft manager renewed her wedding vows, watched her daughter tie the knot and spent a final Christmas with her children and grandchild, before passing away in February 2019, aged 54.
Stuart, 58, from Camden Street, Maidstone, is raising funds for charity Pancreatic Cancer UK through his mammoth challenge, in the hope more can be done to speed up cancer diagnosis and to help those with his wife’s illness. The former soldier said: “I fight with the thought of if they had found the tumour earlier, how big would it have been? How big do they grow over three months?
“That’s not to say it would have saved her life, but she may well have had a bit of an extended life. At least she would have been given a fighting chance.”
Mandy met Stuart in 1981, aged 17, when he was posted to the County Town and she agreed to go on a date with him after a mutual friend paid for her electricity meter. “Mandy was the love of my life,” Stuart said. “I miss that woman every day. We had a great marriage, sometimes we fought like cats and dogs.
“When we first got married some friends gave us 18 months, but 37 years later we were still together.”
The couple had two girls and one boy, now in their twenties and thirties.
In January 2017, Mandy had bariatric surgery at King’s College Hospital in London to reduce the size of her stomach, after she gained weight following struggles with her mental health.
A few months after the op, she was experiencing a great