WHEN Alexandra Dolphin found out she was pregnant with her first baby it was a bittersweet moment.
Just days earlier her husband Stuart, 30, had suffered a seizure and died as they made their way to meet friends for a pub lunch.
The project manager, from Preston, Lancs, had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer nine months earlier and the pair were desperate to start a family.
They were going through IVF and had been for an embryo transfer just two days before Stuart tragically died.
Alexandra said: “I found out between Stuart passing and the funeral, that I was pregnant.”
The pregnancy had given her hope in the weeks after losing the man she had vowed to spend the rest of her life with.
I found out between Stuart passing and the funeral, that I was pregnant
Alexandra Dolphin
But in another cruel twist of events, the 30-year-old was left devastated when she found out at her 12-week scan she had miscarried.
“It was very upsetting,” she says. “I tried again later, which wasn’t successful.”
She added: “Stuart was a brilliant husband and he would have been an incredible father.
“He always used to say he couldn’t wait, and that he wanted four kids altogether – which I told him was pretty ambitious.
“He said he didn’t care what order they came in, but that he’d love a boy to play football with. He’d have loved being a dad. We’d have loved being a family.”
The couple both grew up in Preston and knew each other to see around town, but it wasn’t until they met properly at a friend’s party in 2015 that they became an item.
In 2017, they decided to get married as Stuart’s job in defence and security at BAE Systems had offered them the opportunity to live in Texas, US.
“It was quite quick,” says Alexandra. “But initially the plan was to go for a year and for me to stay longer than six months we had to be married.”
But Stuart was desperately homesick, missing his parents, Laura and Peter, sister Heather, his close-knit group of friends and watching his beloved football team – Preston North End.
They moved home after three months but decided to still go ahead with the wedding and in December 2017, they married at Armathwaite Hall in Keswick, Cumbria.
Alexandra said: “It was perfect. We said afterwards there wasn’t a thing we’d have changed.”
But in the months after their dream honeymoon to Dubai and Mauritius in April 2018, Alexandra noticed Stuart was having trouble remembering things.
“It was strange, but Stuart was getting forgetful,” she said.
“It’s only in hindsight – I know it should have been an alarm bell – but at the time I thought he wasn’t listening to me.
“I would say, ‘Stu, we’ve only been married a few months and we’re already like an old married couple ignoring each other’.”
She soon started to grow more concerned by his “muddled thoughts” and decided to book him in to see his GP, who prescribed Stuart with antidepressants.
“I could sort of see why they did that,” Alexandra said.
“He wasn’t in any pain or discomfort, and after the whirlwind and excitement of America, the wedding and our honeymoon he could have been a bit low with things settling down.
“But I knew Stuart, and his mood wasn’t low so at the time I thought, ‘No, that’s not it’.”
Just two days later things quickly took a turn when Stuart started being sick.
Alexandra said: “I called 111 and they came out to see him, did the basic observations which were normal, but said to get him to hospital because something obviously wasn’t right.”
Medics at the local hospital carried out a CT scan and discovered an abnormality on the brain, so he was rushed to see specialists at Preston hospital.
An MRI scan that day – August 13, 2018 – confirmed it was a tumour.
By the Friday of that week, Stuart was in surgery for six hours as doctors worked to remove as much of the mass as possible – and 10 days later the couple got the news they were dreading.
“They told us Stu had an aggressive, incurable, grade 4 glioblastoma multiforme,” says Alexandra.
Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), also called glioblastoma, is a fast-growing type tumour that develops from star-shaped glial cells within the brain.
These are the most invasive type of glial tumors, rapidly growing and commonly spreading into nearby brain tissue.
In adults, GBM occurs most often in the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain.
It is an extremely rare but devastating brain cancer that typically results in death in the first 15 months after diagnosis.
Symptoms vary depending on the location of the brain tumour, but may include any of the following:
It is can be diagnosed through CT and MRI scans.
The first treatment is typically surgery, followed by radiation and chemotherapy.
The primary objective of surgery is to remove as much of the tumour as possible without injuring the surrounding normal brain tissue needed for normal neurological function.
Source: American Association of Neurological Surgeons
“An aggressive form of brain cancer that couldn’t be cured. It was horrendous.
“The doctor was explaining that it wasn’t Stuart’s fault. He said he hadn’t made any bad lifestyle choices that had led to this type of cancer and said, ‘You’re just very unlucky’.
“For Stuart, that was just the worst thing. He was always a lucky guy, one of those people things go well for.
“If he got a scratch card, nine times out of 10 he’d have won something, and he thought of himself as a lucky guy.
“When the doctor said that he said, ‘So that’s it, my luck’s run out’. He was devastated.”
Despite that, Alexandra says Stuart coped heroically with his treatment – he never complained or panicked.
“His appearance changed dramatically through the treatment, and from someone who was always athletic and slim, he gained weight quickly because of the steroids and lost a lot of his hair,” she said.
“It was just another cruel thing for him to deal with, but again he just got on with it.”
Stuart endured six gruelling weeks of radiotherapy and chemotherapy after his operation, which ended the day after his 30th birthday, on November 7, 2018.
“After the treatment ended we were able to take a short break to Budapest that I’d booked before all this started, and we made some lovely memories,” says Alexandra.
Sadly just a month later, Stuart was experiencing headaches once again, and a further MRI in January 2019 revealed the tumour had grown.
At the end of that month, doctors performed a second debulking operation, and Stuart had a second round of chemotherapy.
He spent another few weeks in hospital before being allowed home but had to be readmitted 24 hours later and was there until the end of March.
“When he eventually got home, we did our best to enjoy our time,” says Alexandra.
From someone who was always athletic and slim, he gained weight quickly because of the steroids and lost a lot of his hair
Alexandra Dolphin
“We would take our little dog Hooper, a Cavapoo, for walks and right through it all Stuart was up and at it every day before 7am, showered and dressed, asking me, ‘Right, what are we doing today?’”.
The couple were on their way to meet friends for a pub lunch when tragically Stuart suffered a seizure and died on May 19, 2019.
“He’d had seizures for months, and we were told if one lasted more than five minutes to call an ambulance,” Alexandra said.
“We got in the car on the driveway, but before we left Stu didn’t look well. I called his parents, who were nearby, and they headed our way.
“When they arrived he had a seizure, and we called an ambulance.
“Heather and her fiancé Chris were with them, and Chris and some of the neighbours did CPR, but they couldn’t save him.
“It was devastating, but in a way, I’m relieved for him that it ended like that because Stuart’s biggest fear was being bedbound and not being able to do things for himself.”
Speaking out on the first anniversary of Stuart’s death with the support of Brain Tumour Research, Alexandra – who has taken a break from work – says that more funding is desperately needed for research.
“Before Stuart’s diagnosis, I had no idea about all this,” she says. “I was a carer so I had some experience of these things, but when it came to Stuart’s particular illness, we were clueless.
“When we first realised it was a brain tumour, the positive stories came to mind, people like Russell Watson and Nicki Chapman who have told their amazing stories of survival.
“But for people like Stuart, the ones who don’t make it, their stories disappear.
“We were told his illness was rare, but the more we looked into it, we realised brain tumours actually kill more children and adults under 40 than any other cancer.
“And yet research into brain tumours receives just 1% of the national spend on cancer research. It’s astonishing, and I can’t understand why that’s the case.
“It’s such a cruel disease, and people going through it are desperate for some new treatment, for some miracle that could make them the exception to the rule. But in our case, it was all too quick. There was no time to find a miracle.
“Moving on is incredibly difficult. But telling Stuart’s story, and raising awareness of this terrible disease is giving me a focus, and if what we’ve been through can help boost the work going into all this and give other people more of a chance than Stuart had, then we’ve achieved something from it all.”
