A devastated mum fears she may not get to see her children grow up after being diagnosed with an incurable asbestos-related cancer. Helen Bone first made an appointment with her GP when she started suffering from pain in her abdomen.
After undergoing various tests, she was given the heartbreaking news that she had mesothelioma in August, last year. The 38-year-old started chemotherapy a month later in an attempt to shrink the cancer, Teesside Live reports.
The mum-of-two has also since been accepted onto a trial called MiST (5), which aims to find out if certain targeted drugs can treat mesothelioma that continues to grow or come back after chemotherapy. Mesothelioma is linked to asbestos, with Helen possibly exposed to the material whilst at school as a child, and working at local hospitals as an advanced critical care practitioner since she was 17.
Helen's case has since been picked up by Thompsons Solicitors, a law firm which brought the first ever asbestos disease claim to the House of Lords 50 years ago. They are currently investigating if asbestos was present at her Brambles Primary School, Keldholme Secondary School and Teesside Tertiary College for Health and Social Care, where she later studied.
The firm is also looking into whether asbestos was present at the former Middlesbrough General Hospital and the James Cook University Hospital, where Helen has been employed since she was 17. She said: "I absolutely loved my job. I studied hard and worked in my dream career – knowing I will never return to that is really hard to come to terms with.
“As a mother of two teenage daughters and a younger stepdaughter, this diagnosis has been devastating. You always think of asbestos as a disease from decades ago – affecting men who worked in heavy industry – so to be diagnosed in my 30s is shocking.
“Naturally I want to see my children grow up but now I have to come to terms with the thought that this might not happen.”
The use of asbestos in construction was banned in the UK on November 24 1999, but is still present in 1.5 million of public buildings across the country. A total of 2,544 mesothelioma deaths were recorded in Great Britain in 2020, a rise of six per cent compared with 2019.
In 2020, there were 459 female mesothelioma deaths in the UK, a rise of seven percent compared to the year before and higher than the average of 416 deaths per year over the last eight years. Helen added: "It is shocking when you look at the stats, I think people need to start asking themselves, is my environment, home and workplace safe?
"It is still so difficult to accept that my school, and later workplace, could have left me with this disease, despite the fact that the dangers of asbestos have been known for decades.”
Since her diagnosis, Helen has set up her own blog called 'It is what it is’ to document her cancer journey. She hopes her posts will be a comfort for her children to read back on and also help raise awareness of more young people and women like herself having an asbestos disease.
This Thursday marks 23 years since the sale of asbestos was officially prohibited in the UK. Charlie Bradley, from Thompsons Solicitors, said: “I have worked on asbestos disease cases for over nine years, and never have I come across such a tragic case where a woman as young as Helen has been diagnosed with mesothelioma.
"She has not been on construction sites, or worked in the shipyard, but has simply gone to school as a child and worked in a healthcare environment as an adult, yet this has led her to have an incurable asbestos cancer. I would urge anyone who worked with, or who went to school with Helen, and can corroborate that asbestos was present in these areas, to contact us as soon as possible.
"Helen’s case acts as a reminder that just because asbestos use was banned in 1999, the impact of the substance is far from a thing of the past. Those responsible need to increase their efforts for the proper identification, containment and removal of all asbestos in buildings across the UK.”
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