A widow has spoken out five years after doctors dismissed her husband’s cancer symptoms because he was “too young.”
Anita Williams, 43, a police officer from Gloucestershire, UK, is still processing the loss of Ben Williams, who died at 38 in July 2021 from small cell lung cancer. The father of three had been fit and healthy throughout his life, but in 2020 he developed a nagging pain above one hip that would not subside.
Ben, then 37, visited his GP and went through standard testing of blood and urine samples. When those results came back without answers, Anita said, doctors told him: “You’re too young for cancer.” He was steered toward physiotherapy instead, which failed to relieve his symptoms.
Frustrated by the lack of progress, Anita used health insurance through her employer to arrange a private scan. “They said they could see something on his liver, but they didn’t think it was anything to worry about,” she recalled. “We didn’t really think anything of it. We just thought, ‘Oh, well, at least we’re going to know what’s going on’.”
The scan findings led to a CT scan that revealed something in Ben’s lung. Medics called him back for a second CT scan in January 2021, which showed masses on both his lung and liver. A biopsy confirmed small cell lung cancer, a type neither Ben nor Anita had ever heard of.
“I remember sitting down and I said, ‘What stage is it?’ and he said, ‘It’s stage four because we’ve found it in his liver and his adrenal glands,'” Anita said. “Then he said, ‘I’m really sorry, but it’s terminal. There’s nothing we can do to treat this’, and I just screamed. Ben was holding me and I was wailing.”
The terminal diagnosis came just six months after doctors had dismissed cancer as a possibility due to Ben’s age. Anita, who has little memory of the period immediately following the news, faced the task of telling their three children: Kieran, now 22, Ella, now 19, and Emilie, now seven. “I just thought, ‘This can’t be happening to us. You’ve got to do something. Surely, you’ve got to save him’,” she said.
Ben began chemotherapy, which initially helped manage his pain. But by June 2021 his condition worsened. The couple, together since age 19, renewed their wedding vows that August as Ben’s health declined rapidly. The Manchester United supporter lost his ability to walk, urinate, speak and swallow, requiring transfer to Sue Ryder Leckhampton Court Hospice.
At the hospice, doctors diagnosed leptomeningeal cancer, meaning the cancer had spread to the thin tissue layers covering his brain and spinal cord. “It shut down his central nervous system from the inside, bit by bit, and those last four weeks were horrific,” Anita shared. “It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever had to watch somebody so big and strong go through.”
Ben died four weeks after entering the hospice and exactly six months after his diagnosis, with Anita at his side.
Anita has since described her ongoing grief as like “wearing a 20-kilo backpack” every day. She added that while the loss remains part of who she is, she finds herself “getting stronger and stronger as time goes on.”