'He could hardly walk, they gave him a stick. What must the boss have thought of him? He was just like a human skeleton, a pregnant skeleton.'
His mum said “he just wanted to live an ordinary life" and he continued working even when he didn't have to.
Shelagh said: "He was elated. He'd stopped drinking and stopped smoking for six months and, due to the change in lifestyle, it improved something. But at the end of that year, he was having problems swallowing and he actually got something stuck, they had to bang his back. They also often don't appear until the later stages of the disease, when the cancer is obstructing the food pipe and the one-year survival rate falls to 20%. Hence, it is a cancer known as a 'silent killer'.
He insisted on driving an hour to pick up and drop off his daughter, Iris, at her mum's house, and would take her to school, while going through chemotherapy. He continued caring for her even when he was bedbound from the condition. James, who was scared of needles, never lost his "lovely curly hair" during two rounds of chemotherapy. But the oesophageal cancer wore away at him, making him "thinner and thinner, and weaker and weaker" until he was barely able to eat or stay awake.
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