Rick Irving 2024

Do you know what this is like? Have you experienced the deep, stabbing pain that occurs when a loved one tells you that he or she had just been diagnosed with Lung Cancer? It is devastating!

I lost my wife to Lung Cancer in 2022, but initially this deep, stabbing pain did not “hit” me, the realization I had lost my wife and I would never see her, talk to her, kiss or hug her, or have here with me in any way ever again. 

This is how my wife found out that she had been diagnosed with Lung Cancer - “I was about to leave home to take my granddaughter to playgroup when the telephone rang. It was my GP. “It’s not emphysema, its cancer,” she said. I was stunned. How could I have lung cancer when I’d never smoked even one cigarette? My enjoyable retirement life had suddenly crashed.” This was on the 29th of August.

My wife recorded at this time that she “felt numb and then sick. This couldn’t be right. I’d presumed I’d inherited a longevity gene. Upon hearing the news, our two adult sons rushed over to our place, and as a family we discussed the diagnosis and its consequences. Our extended family and friends were similarly shocked and in disbelief.”

For just over ten years, my wife’s cancer was under control, but then came the last few months.

She went, gradually to begin with, to rapidly at the end, from a healthy, active woman to one completely bed-ridden and completely dependent on me. Then on the 14th of January 2021, she said to me that as we “had done all that we could”, it was time to go to the Laurel Hospice at the Flinders Medical Centre, so this is what we did the next day.

We had indeed done all that we could, as six days later, very early in the morning, my lovely wife died.

At first, the realization did not “hit” me that our marriage of 52 years had just ended, and that I would never see my lovely wife again. When it finally did, I felt a void in my heart that will never leave me, it will continue to “stab me in my heart with the most intense violence”, which has reduced me to abject tears repeatedly.

For your sake, I very sincerely hope that this does not happen to you.

Research into Lung Cancer is urgently needed, and as I unfortunately know the “gut-wrenching” aftermath, I have set up this page. Please think about this, it is devastating to lose a loved one to Lung Cancer. With research, we can stop Lung Cancer.

Richard Irving.