It was a devastating blow when Jill Lucas was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
She’d just finished her shift at the job she loved in a care home when she got the call in the car park outside her work.
Still, 51-year-old Jill and her husband Mike thought the mum-of-three would have at least six months left to live.
Days later the couple were on a plane heading from their Orkney home to Aberdeen for further tests when Jill realised she would not live much longer.
“She said to me on the plane ‘Mike, I’m not coming back’,” her husband explained.
“She was looking out the window, and I said ‘Of course you are’.
“And Jill said ‘I don’t think you really realise how serious this is’.”
‘She was in terrible pain’
Jill, who was originally from Ellon, was booked in for a procedure to get tissue samples extracted at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.
Doctors hoped to prolong her life for as long as possible.
She was also keen for the extracted samples to be used for research to help others with the same type of cancer.
“We got there on the Monday and I sat with her most of the day,” Mike said. “Her family came along to see her and she looked very radiant, looked happy.
“But on the Tuesday she was due to go into theatre and she was in terrible pain. They gave her some morphine; she was terribly sick.”
‘She was fading fast’
When Jill’s condition began to deteriorate, she was taken through to a ward instead.
“The doctors and medics were doing their best but she was fading very, very fast,” Mike said.
Kidney failure set in overnight and Mike held on to his much-loved wife’s hand to comfort her.
He could see that she was slipping away when he saw her blood pressure drop on the bedside monitor and called her family so they could be with her too.
“She woke up at one stage and asked ‘Are things improving?’ And I told her, ‘Yes love, they are’,” Mike said.
Jill, a talented pianist and clarinettist who trained at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, died peacefully in hospital at 9 o’clock that morning.
It was only two-and-a-half weeks after she was given the terrible news on the phone.
‘Doctors need to think of pancreatic cancer first’
Not a day goes by when Mike doesn’t feel bad he didn’t do more for his wife – although he realises he did all he could.
But the pensioner, a former nurse in the Royal Army Medical Corps, has been left frustrated that his wife was not diagnosed much sooner.
There were still special trips left they’d planned, such as meeting Jill’s first grandchild who had been born on the mainland earlier in the year.
The former Ellon Academy pupil started feeling ill in January 2019 but Mike says she was initially diagnosed with lactose intolerance and IBS.
In the last few months of her life she suffered with mid-back pain, occasional indigestion and vomiting.
Tests later revealed she had pancreatic cancer and she was diagnosed with this two weeks before she died on October 23 that year.
Mike says there needs to be more awareness of the symptoms of pancreatic cancer and hopes more GPs carry out tests for this first.
“She started having some stool tests but they were just looking for an infection and not anything sinister,” he says.
“I’m not blaming the GPs, I just want the GPs to rule pancreatic cancer out at an early stage.”
The little touches that made Jill so special…
Mike has been left with many fond memories of his wife, a caring woman who did “wonderful things” for other people.
While studying at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Jill became aware of a fellow student who had broken his musical instrument.
So she organised busking sessions with other students on the streets of Glasgow, raising more than £2,000 for the repairs.
She thoroughly enjoyed working with dementia residents at the Smiddybrae care home in Dounby and would go out of her way to make their lives special.
She brought sheets of music in to play the piano with one of the residents and, through role-play sessions, helped farmers get their flock in before they went to bed.
“Little touches like this are what made Jill so special,” Mike said.
“Everybody saw this lovely smiley person who went out of her way to help everybody else.
“She always put everybody else first.”
Mike completed a Kiltwalk fundraiser on May 29 in memory of Jill and also her step-dad Mike Pickens, who also lost his life several years ago with pancreatic cancer.
It is an illness that not many people survive.
He smashed his target raising more than £2,600.
You can visit his fundraising page here https://bit.ly/3ahAJiJ
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