“I keep going back to that day when I found out. I thought everything was sorted, I thought I’d done the right thing… I don’t have to exaggerate, my wife will end up on her own with nothing.” In the early months of last year, dad-of-four and granddad-of-six Shaun Pinkney started suffering horrific symptoms.
Shaun would going about his job at the hotel bar he’d worked at for years, and the pain would be excruciating. On one fateful occasion, Shaun went to sleep on the couch to try and stem the pain.
He woke up unable to move, ‘paralysed’. “Eventually I phoned 999 and eventually I was taken to hospital,” he said. “That’s where I found out I had a tumour on my spine.
It just turned my life upside down.” Shaun was diagnosed with terminal multiple myeloma – a type of bone marrow cancer – in April 2023.