Emma died last Friday night. I don’t know if she was in hospital or at home, but I do know that Ed was with her and holding her hand till the end. He emailed and said that Emma ‘just slipped away, no pain, no fuss’.
Emma had had a stroke the weekend before and was in hospital. She had lost her sight and the movement of her arms. Ed had emailed me to say Emma was in hospital and I think I took this as a sign that she was coming to the end of her journey although he didn’t explicitly say this.
The downturn happened quite quickly. Just before Christmas Emma started to feel ill and she went for a scan and they found out that her body had become resistant to the treatment she was taking. This was expected – but they hoped it would be years off. The plan had been that as new developments in the treatment she was taking were made, she would move with it – but it all happened too quickly.
She was offered another experimental treatment – but this one caused side effects which the first didn’t. And she had arranged to be off work for 6 weeks to get used to the new treatment. Putting the pieces together I am guessing the new treatment either didn’t work or the side effects were too bad.
The photo above is of Emma when they went on a barge holiday last summer and shows how effective her first treatment was. Six months prior to this, she was too ill to walk upstairs.
In our last correspondence we were working out how long we’d been friends for – whether this year was 30 or 29 years. Unfortunately we didn’t reach a conclusion.