A mum was asked by her 12-year-old daughter "why she was yellow" days before being given heartbreaking news.
Misbah Ashraf spent 13 years helping her blind sister each day as well as being there for her five children before her world came crashing down as she started losing a vast amount of weight. The 43-year-old would help her sister, Saima, with day-to-day tasks at work and in her personal life after she became legally blind at 17, as well as managing family life at home but was forced to take a step back after her sister noticed she was losing weight.
She noticed that she was losing weight too quickly, as much as 4kg a week in June 2021, and after trips to the GP it was put down as her diabetes before her skin began to have a yellow tinge to it. Misbah dismissed it and said to her sister she would go after her daughter's 18th birthday which fell the next day.
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The moment that led to her finally getting serious help was when her 12-year-old daughter approached her and asked her why she looked yellow. This led to Misbah calling 111 before a doctor told her over the phone to go to hospital.
Saima, from Blackburn and who works at Merseyside Police as a senior auditor, told the ECHO: "The day before her daughter's 18th birthday I told her to go to hospital but she said no because she didn't want to ruin her daughter's day. On the evening of her daughter's birthday, her 12-year-old asked why she looked yellow.
"She rang 111 and they rang back to tell her to go to hospital because the only reason she would have symptoms of jaundice is if her liver isn't functioning properly. So she went in at 11pm that night and that week they found that she had pancreatic cancer.
"They found two separate cancerous tumours and they had to get a specialist in because they had never seen that before."
Saima described her sister as an "amazing" woman who "lived and breathed for her children". Even when Misbah began to suffer from poor health during chemotherapy she tried to put on a brave face for her children. Despite battling cancer for almost a year and a half, she fell seriously ill when she picked up an infection on Tuesday, November 15, with her becoming seriously unwell on Wednesday.
Misbah died on Friday, November 18, with her sister paying tribute to her her. She added: "One way of describing my sister is selfless. She always put others first. She cared so much about her kids.
"We have three brothers and she was the eldest, she was a like mum to us all when we were growing up. Then she grew up and had five of her own children, she lived and breathed for her children.
"Even when she was ill it was all about her children. She tried to make out like she was fine for them. Everyone who knew her never saw her without a smile.
"She had so much patience. In the end, it wasn't the cancer that took her it was an infection."
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