‘I have survivor’s guilt after my husband died of cancer while I was undergoing chemo’
As Shona Maclaren was diagnosed with cervical cancer her husband William got his diagnosis for advanced stage 4 bowel cancer
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Your support makes all the difference.A widow says she feels “survivor’s guilt” after her husband died of cancer while she was undergoing chemotherapy that helped save her life.
Shona Maclaren, 34, was diagnosed with cervical cancer after bleeding she said doctors had dismissed as postpartum symptoms.
But as she underwent treatment, husband William, 41, was diagnosed with advanced stage four bowel cancer.
And just nine days later he died in a hospice on what would have been his wife’s last chemotherapy session of her first of two stretches of the treatment.
Mr Maclaren had been suffering abdominal pain and inflammation, but thought it was due to his pre-existing ulcerative colitis.
But a test just days before he died revealed he also had bowel cancer.
Ms Maclaren is now in remission but worries about what she’ll tell her children Thea, six, and Mason, two.
The accountant, from Stevenson, Ayrshire, Scotland, said: “He was in and out of consciousness and I talked to him that whole day he died.
“I don’t know if he heard me. I hope he did because I hadn’t had a chance to tell him that my treatment was working.
“This is where the survivor’s guilt comes in,” she continued. “I can’t sit here and tell you ‘oh my treatment is working, but you’re dying.’ “It’s heart-breaking and I don’t think that it will ever not be heart-breaking.
“When Thea and Mason get older it’s going to be tough to try and explain, ‘why did Mummy live and Daddy die?’ - and I’ll never be able to answer that.
“Nobody saw this happening as fast as it did. That’s just one thing you’re never guaranteed is time. It angers me that I got a chance to fight and he never even got a chance to start.”
The mother of two’s first symptoms were abnormal vaginal bleeding in the form of blood clots when she had been going to the toilet, and she became anaemic. She believes her symptoms were “downplayed” by doctors due to being five months postpartum.
“I had high blood pressure during my pregnancy so I contacted my doctor and one of the things that I asked him was, ‘Is this normal?’ - because I didn’t have this with my first born,” she said.
“He said ‘that will just be your body normalising after birth’. I was on the phone with the doctor and I remember it so vividly, there was blood just pouring out of me.
“I was shouting down the phone saying: ‘If I was a man and I was bleeding this much you would be doing something about it - this is not normal.”
Ms Maclaren had a colposcopy and a biopsy, and two weeks later was diagnosed with stage 2B cervical cancer, on May 20, 2022.
She began chemotherapy on June 30 2022 and William and Thea supported her by shaving off her hair.
Her husband had been screened previously for bowel cancer, but these came back as negative. But while his wife was undergoing treatment for cancer, his own pain became more severe, and he was retested for cancer.
He was diagnosed with advanced stage four on August 23, 2002, and was unable to receive treatment.
By August 29 2022 he started to deteriorate and was taken to a local hospice where he fell in and out of consciousness. He died on September 1 2022.
It would have been the day of Ms Maclaren’s last chemotherapy session in stint one of her treatment, before she began the second phase of chemotherapy, using different medicine.
She said: “Everything had happened so fast. He got home Monday, deteriorated on Tuesday, put up in the hospice Wednesday and died Thursday morning.
“I think the day he passed, the overriding feeling was ‘he’s not in pain anymore.’ “I could see how much pain he was in and it wasn’t fair.
“All that mattered to me at the time was that he didn’t need to suffer anymore.”
She had her last treatment on September 13, and her husband’s funeral was held seven days later.
Ms Maclaren lost her own mother, Winnie Brown, 45, to cancer when she was aged 11.
She now encourages young girls to get the cervical cancer vaccination in the hope of saving others lives.
“Who knows, if I had gotten this vaccine it may have never happened,” she said. On the loss of her husband, she added: “I just wish we had more time - I thought we had more time. I didn’t get a proper goodbye.”
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