Shannon Matthews case almost cost me life: Detective
Jan 23 2009 by Andrew Hirst, Huddersfield Daily Examiner
Putting the job first almost cost my life!
He said he was coming home from long days working on the Matthews case absolutely shattered, falling asleep almost immediately.
At the time he thought it was just the demanding hours, but in hindsight it was caused by anaemia brought on by the cancer.
He said that at first his GP thought he had irritable bowel syndrome. As concerns grew he was given a hospital appointment for internal investigations on November 17 last year.
But he postponed it for a week because he was due to give evidence that day at the Matthews trial at Leeds Crown Court.
He pushed the date on a further week – and now regrets that decision as, in the end, he wasn’t even called to give evidence that day.
“If I hadn’t cancelled that appointment I’d have known about the cancer a week earlier and I now bitterly regret that,” he said. “I’d had symptoms for two years of stomach pains on the left side, bleeding and needing to go to the toilet along with a burning sensation in my stomach. After I’d been to the toilet the symptoms went away and so I put it to the back of my mind.”
But while the symptoms persisted, the demands of his job meant it was hard to get back to the doctor’s.
When he was eventually referred to Huddersfield Royal Infirmary late last November, it was a terrifying experience.
A camera was put into his body and the doctor immediately turned to John and said “is your wife with you?”
John – whose 86-year-old father, Bernard, has also had bowel cancer – said: “I knew from that moment it was bad news. He could see the cancer – even I could see it – and he said, fingers crossed, they could contain it within the bowel unless it had spread elsewhere.
“He told me I’d need a CT scan to see if it had spread and I expected to go down the corridor to the scanner – but that wasn’t the case.
“I had to wait for an appointment and the scan was 10 days later. That waiting, as every cancer patient will tell you, is the worst time of all.”
