Triple tumour tragedy
Heartbreak as mum loses husband and two sons to brain cancer
A MOTHER spoke of her agony yesterday at losing two sons and her husband to different kinds of brain tumours.
Relatives will gather today for the funeral of Milo Hughes, five, who died this week from a rare cancer with his mum and two surviving brothers at his bedside.
The tragedy follows the death of Milo’s father Ian a year ago and older brother Oscar in 2014.
Mother-of-four Marie Hughes only discovered recently that the family tragedies were not simply down to terrible luck. Tests showed that Milo and her husband had Li-Fraumeni syndrome – an inherited predisposition to rare cancers.
Mrs Hughes, 45, a university administrator from Dunnington, North Yorkshire, said: ‘I can’t actually think of everything in one go. I have to look at Milo separately and Oscar sepacancers rately because if I look at it as a whole it is too devastating. If someone was to do a movie of my family, if they portrayed what had happened, nobody would believe it, it’s too far-fetched.’
Her one solace was that Milo ‘had a good death’. She said: ‘He died at home with us, feeling loved and cared for and where he wanted to be.’
Oscar was nine when he died of medulloblastoma – the most common type of cancerous brain tumour in children – in May 2014.
The sports-loving youngster’s death inspired his parents to start a charity OSCAR’s PBT (Ongoing Support, Care and Research into Paediatric Brain Tumours).
The charity’s website explains: ‘In the last 30 years there has been only one new drug produced for childhood and at the moment under 1 per cent of the Government cancer research budget goes to brain tumours. That is pretty shocking considering brain tumours are the biggest cancer killer in people under the age of 40.’
But tragedy was to return to the family. In February 2019 Oscar’s father Ian, a commercial director, was diagnosed with a brain tumour after a seizure. ‘The two of us were in disbelief as not only had he survived a different type of cancer only three years before but the fact it was a brain tumour was just shocking,’ recalled Mrs Hughes.
‘I remember sitting in the A&E unable to speak as I just had no words for him. We both had an immediate feeling of doom.’
Mr Hughes died in January last year aged 49 after spending Christmas in a hospice. He died of glioblastoma – an aggressive form of cancer starting in the brain.
Just weeks later Mrs Hughes discovered her youngest son Milo’s terminal illness.
She wrote in her blog last September: ‘My boy looks, apart from loss of hair, like a healthy active boy, but the horror of it is that he has multiple brain tumours.’ She described her heartbreak at being unable to promise anything when Milo told her: ‘I don’t want to die mum.’ His diagnosis of choroid plexus carcinoma led to the family’s genetic condition being identified.
The tragedies have also taken a toll on her eldest boys Seb, 17, and 11-year-old Lucas. But Mrs Hughes said both have been strong and wonderfully supportive. She said the support of friends and family had helped them get through the ordeal. An online appeal to pay for a holiday in America for Mrs Hughes and her two boys has raised more than £15,000.
‘I can’t think of everything in one go’