Dad who died from brain tumour wrote cards for his twins for next 30 years
A dad who died from a brain tumour has written birthday cards for his twin daughters for the next 30 years of their lives.
Nick Keenan, from Lindfield, West Sussex was diagnosed with an astrocytoma, the size of a tennis ball, in 2015 after weeks experiencing shooting pins and needles down his right arm.
He underwent two debulking surgeries (when part of the tumour is removed), radiotherapy, infusion and oral chemotherapy, prescription cannabinoids and a number of natural remedies, but sadly died aged 34 in November 2020. This was nine months after being told his tumour had developed into a glioblastoma (GBM).
Nick decided to write the cards for his daughters Rose and Sophia when they were just 17 months old, as he wanted the girls to have a birthday message from him every year.
They recently open their fourth birthday card from him, in which he told them they'd start school soon and should look after each other.
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"Nick was everyone’s rock, and very much mine," Nick's wife, Victoria, 35, explains. "He was incredibly strong and went to work every day of his radiotherapy and chemotherapy, which I was inspired by.
“He also managed to support me going through IVF, like any good husband would, even though he was going through much bigger things. It was never about him."
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Commenting on Nick's decision to write their daughters cards, Victoria says: "He wanted to be with them in spirit as they celebrated their birthdays without him.
“Hopefully, it will give them a better idea of where he was at that stage in his life.”
Victoria, who owns Stanton Miller Recruitment, was at the gym when Nick returned from a business trip early and said he was going to hospital.
“When I walked in the room and saw Nick had been crying, I knew that something was wrong," she says. "I was told they’d found a lesion the size of a tennis ball on the left side of his brain, in the middle of his frontal lobe.
"They said it was slow-growing and had probably been there since he was born.”
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Nick’s surgery and subsequent radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatment went so well that he and Victoria decided to move forward with their plans to start a family.
“We just carried on with life as normal and thought we were winning, which is when we decided to go ahead with IVF," she explains. "Then, in December 2019, when our girls were just six months old, Nick noticed his speech had become slurred.
“We contacted the doctor and ended up going back in after Christmas. I’d had a really weird gut feeling that it was going to be our last Christmas and so organised the biggest celebration by inviting everybody to come and stay with us.
“In March 2020 we found out his tumour had developed into a glioblastoma (GBM) and were told he probably had less than a year to live. Nick lasted nine months from that GBM diagnosis.”
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After becoming unconscious at home one night in November 2020, Nick was taken into a local hospice where he died the following morning.
“I believe the last thing he remembered was being at home with his family," Victoria says. "He never really knew he went into the hospice and died at 4am the next morning.
“I came home at 6am, washed and carried on being mummy to our 17-month-old daughters, knowing that daddy wasn’t with us anymore.”
Campaign to increase brain tumour research funding
Victoria is now campaigning alongside Brain Tumour Research to help its petition to increase research funding reach 100,000 signatures, in the hope of prompting a parliamentary debate.
The charity is calling on the government to ring-fence £110 million of current and new funding to kick-start an increase in the national investment in brain tumour research to £35 million a year by 2028.
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It wants the government to recognise brain tumour research as a critical priority and says the increase in research investment would put brain tumours in line with the spend on breast, bowel and lung cancer, as well as leukaemia.
“Brain tumours are the biggest cancer killer of children and young people under the age of 40, yet they have received just 1% of the national spend on cancer research since records began in 2002," Victoria explains.
"This is tragic and has to change. Brain cancer is such a complex and difficult cancer to treat and the only way to improve treatment options, or to find a cure, is through research.
"We, therefore, owe it to our loved ones to sign this petition.”
To sign and share the petition before it closes at the end of October 2023, go to www.braintumourresearch.org/petition
Additional reporting SWNS.
