6<\/p>\n Karen Whybrow\u2019s husband Ben died aged 39. They are pictured on their wedding dayCredit: PA 6<\/p>\n Ben was a dad-of-two girls; Georgina (pictured) and HarrietCredit: PA<\/p>\n His symptoms had been blamed IBS<\/a> and stress<\/a> – but their cause turned out to be far more sinister.<\/p>\n Karen, from Cumbria<\/a>, says: “He was 38 and it was pretty much completely out of the blue.\u00a0<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n “He had been told years prior that he suffered from IBS, so for several weeks we passed it off as that.<\/p>\n “Then he had a little bit of bleeding one day and he was feeling really lethargic, just completely drained of energy. <\/p>\n “We went to the doctors, were fast-tracked to oncology to be checked, and they found this tumour that was obviously significant.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n With a baby<\/a> on the way, due on July 5, Ben was defiant that he would get better.\u00a0<\/p>\n Karen remembers: “Ben said, ‘Right, you’ve got three months to fix me before this baby comes along’.<\/p>\n “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.’<\/p>\n Man, 34, with incurable bowel cancer shared two symptoms he ignored<\/p>\n “We were forced into a world of fear, scans, chemotherapy<\/a>, treatment plans, death and hope – far removed from the gentleness, softness and growth of pregnancy<\/a>.<\/p>\n “The learning curve was huge for us both.”<\/p>\n Tragically, Karen was widowed aged just 38, a year after giving birth<\/a> to their second daughter, Harriet. <\/p>\n Ben died one month before he would have turned 40, on August 3, 2017.<\/p>\n It came after a heartbreaking chapter in Karen\u2019s life, defined by hospital visits, chemotherapy sessions, and the relentless juggle of caring for Harriet and her sister, four-year-old Georgina.<\/p>\n Karen says: “My role became the caregiver, advocate and doer of things to help Ben stay alive. His role was to survive.”<\/p>\n Bowel cancer<\/a> is the second biggest cancer<\/a> killer in the UK, with 16,800\u00a0deaths each year.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n I was just in constant fight or flight. I was on edge and in a state of panic the whole time<\/p>\n Karen Whybrow<\/p><\/blockquote>\n More than 2,600 new cases are diagnosed in people under 50 every year.<\/p>\n And this number is rising<\/a>, a major study published in December revealed. <\/p>\n After his diagnosis, Ben was accepted onto a clinical trial and he had chemotherapy that wasn’t available on the NHS<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n FROM MATERNITY TO ONCOLOGY<\/p>\n Karen says: “It was obviously a positive and that chemotherapy worked really well….until it didn’t.”<\/p>\n The treatment was intense, consisting of fortnightly sessions with harsh side effects.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “Within three hours of our daughter being born by emergency C-section and rushed to neonatal care because they were unhappy with her breathing, <\/strong>Ben hot-footed it across the hospital to have his chemotherapy.”<\/p>\n 6<\/p>\n Karen was juggling parenting a four-year-old, a newborn and her husband’s treatmentCredit: PA 6<\/p>\n She admitted she lived ‘in a state of panic’ during this periodCredit: PA<\/p>\n Karen says: “I don’t know how I gave birth to a healthy child.<\/p>\n “I was just functioning because I had no choice as the kids and Ben needed me.\u00a0<\/p>\n “I was just in constant fight or flight; I was constantly on edge and in a state of panic the whole time.\u00a0<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n By Christmas<\/a> 2016, when Ben was on maintenance chemotherapy, Karen says his symptoms<\/a> started to come back. <\/p>\n He was lethargic<\/a> and said his stomach would feel like a blown up balloon with needles sticking into it.<\/p>\n I had to tell the kids that daddy was dying and the doctors had done everything they could<\/p>\n Karen Whybrow<\/p><\/blockquote>\n “Ben’s symptoms just got worse and worse and he was having excruciating back pain<\/a>,” Karen says.<\/p>\n “The tumour was large and his lymph nodes were impacted as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n “Ben’s tolerance for the treatment got worse and worse.”<\/p>\n He then endured 12 weeks of radiotherapy in the spring of 2017.<\/p>\n “After you finish radiotherapy<\/a> you wait six or eight weeks because the treatment can continue working to destroy the tumour during that time,” Karen says.\u00a0<\/p>\n “We were just waiting for these scans because they wouldn’t do anything until this time period was up.<\/p>\n “We then were just in this limbo with Ben deteriorating before my eyes. <\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n 6<\/p>\n Symptoms of bowel cancer you should know<\/p>\n Tragically, a CT scan following the radiotherapy showed the tumour had grown and spread.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n Ben was put on another form of chemotherapy in June 2017 but could only have one round as he was too ill.<\/p>\n “We literally couldn’t get him out of bed to get him anywhere to have chemotherapy and his oncologist was on holiday,” Karen says. <\/p>\n They were left in an agonising limbo until frighteningly, Ben had a massive haemorrhage and started bleeding really badly in July. <\/p>\n 6<\/p>\n Karen, now 46, had to tell her children that their dad was dyingCredit: PA<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n “He was getting scared understandably. It was just hideous.”<\/p>\n Paramedics allegedly couldn’t get any drugs via injection into Ben because his blood vessels were collapsing. <\/p>\n He was losing huge amounts of blood and he went into cardiac arrest<\/a> – when the heart suddenly stops pumping blood around the body. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n “They couldn’t do anything for him and to prepare.”<\/p>\n PROCESSING THE GRIEF<\/p>\n Karen says they then moved to a hospice which was a gentler environment.<\/p>\n She says: “I don’t think they thought he’d survive being transported to the hospice from the hospital – but he did.\u00a0<\/p>\n “We had two nights at the hospice and he died on the second night. <\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n Since Ben’s death, Karen says she has found ways to cope by stopping drinking, swimming in the sea and running a marathon.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"Bride](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/karen-whybrows-husband-ben-cumbria-983851229.jpg\")
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