A dad died from cancer just days after going for a drink with his boss. His mum said "he just wanted to live an ordinary life" and he continued working even when he didn't have to.
James Robinson was just 44 when he died. He had just moved into a "dream house" with his wife and, her two kids and his daughter when he was diagnosed in February last year.
James was head of corporate at a property company and had a passion for music and art. It was towards the end of 2021 that he started getting chest pains.
His mum, Shelagh, said she urged him to go to the doctor to get checked, reports the Liverpool ECHO. He had an ECG, which showed that he had heart block, where the heart beats slower or abnormally due to the electrical pulses that control it being disrupted. James made lifestyle changes as a result and by November 2021 things seemed to have returned to normal.
Shelagh said: "He was elated. He'd stopped drinking and stopped smoking for six months and, due to the change in lifestyle, it improved something. But at the end of that year, he was having problems swallowing and he actually got something stuck, they had to bang his back.
"Things weren't going down properly. I was actually out with him just before Christmas that year and he couldn't even drink the fizzy drink he ordered. It hurt when it went down."
James was then given an endoscopy, where a camera is put down the throat. That discovered a devastating diagnosis - oesophageal cancer, one of the deadliest cancers, which kills more than 50% of people within a year of diagnosis.
Symptoms like problems swallowing, heartburn and indigestion can be mistaken for other conditions and often don't appear until the later stages, when the cancer is obstructing the food pipe and the one-year survival rate falls to 20%. Hence, it is a cancer known as a 'silent killer'.
Doctors at a hospital in Leeds talked James through his treatment options, including an eight-hour surgery and chemotherapy, and booked him in for a PET scan to see how far the cancer had spread. He thought it was treatable and hid the diagnosis from his family, telling only his sister Keeley, a 40-year-old artist in North Wales.
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Shelagh was stunned when her son finally told her, saying "Don't worry mum, I've got a loving family around me". Even so, James would have been angry if she told anyone, preferring to keep up the appearance of having a normal life.
He insisted on driving an hour to pick up and drop off his daughter, Iris, at her mum's house, and would take her to school, while going through chemotherapy. He continued caring for her even when he was bedbound from the condition.
Shelagh said: "He just wanted to live an ordinary life. He still worked, he didn't have to. We said to him, 'Why don't you just stop work and do what you want to do?' But he didn't, that was him. He liked to know he was going somewhere and doing something, and that was normal to him. He didn't want to do anything abnormal, he was always in denial."
Keeley described James as "really special to me", she said: "He called me every single day, sometimes just about what was going on, or sometimes about being ill. It was really strange. It's like he could accept what was happening, but he couldn't accept what was happening at the same time. He'd ring me really frightened like, 'I'm going to die, I'm going to die'. That'd go on for several minutes and I'd try and calm him down."
She added: "That's always been my role in our relationship. It's really hard to know what you can do for somebody with cancer, and I used to think, that's one of the most important things, and I was happy to do that for him.
James, who was scared of needles, never lost his "lovely curly hair" during two rounds of chemotherapy. But the oesophageal cancer wore away at him, making him "thinner and thinner, and weaker and weaker" until he was barely able to eat or stay awake.
Shelagh was "devastated" to see her tall son that way, and just before Christmas, doctors said "they couldn't do any more for him". Shelagh said: "The tumours had grown in his liver, and they give them three bottles of morphine and sent him on his way."
His mum looked after him in the last six weeks when he was on a diet of ice lollies because he had "abdominal discomfort" and was "retching all the time". He refused home visits by nurses, and despite moving into a hospice, he was talking about going home. James, from Bebington, Wirral, even went out for a drink with his boss, who picked him up from the palliative care centre.
Shelagh said: "He could hardly walk, they gave him a stick. What must the boss have thought of him? He was just like a human skeleton, a pregnant skeleton."
He died four days later on Tuesday, January 31, with his mum by his side. Keeley said: "We're all really sad, but it's partly a relief because it's not nice seeing someone suffer. As much as you don't want somebody to go, it gets to a point where it's inhumane to watch somebody go through that."
James' friends will perform a song they used to sing together at his funeral on February 23, which Keeley hopes will show the "really creative person" he was. She said: "If it was up to him, he would have wanted everybody in curly black wigs, black moustaches and shell suits. He would have wanted everyone to be really silly. He didn't like things being really serious."
He never felt able to talk openly about his own condition, so his mum and sister are talking about it for him in the hopes others won't feel so isolated in their experience with cancer and can face it with loved ones. Keeley added: "What would have helped James is if he'd normalised his cancer more.
"What he thought was best was not talking about it and pretending like it wasn't happening, so people couldn't talk about it. You had to kind of pretend it wasn't happening, up until he died.
"I remember him saying to me, 'I've got three months', and he had less than that, he had weeks. I said to him, 'Okay, you've got three months, let's normalise what's happening, let's normalise the fact that you're going to die'. I didn't want him to be afraid."
