Fiona Middleton is dying from melanoma which has spread to her brain – but as her time ebbs away she wants to warn of the dangers of the sun.

Fiona, 57, of Scotstounhill, Glasgow, spent her formative years holidaying with her grandparents on Skye.

And she admitted: “I didn’t have any protection whatsoever.”

Decades later, the sun exposure came home to roost when a mole on her ankle turned out to be a malignant melanoma.

Poignantly, she said: “I want people to learn from my mistakes. It is something which means the world to me.”

Fiona has battled the cancer for seven years with a variety of groundbreaking treatments.

Through her involvement with MASScot (Melanoma Action and Support Scotland) had meetings with the Scottish Medicines Consortium to persuade them to licence some immunotherapy drugs for use in Scotland – a campaign which was very successful.

Her husband Graeme, 51, an advocate, said: “The mole was excised. They did a wide excision to hopefully get rid of it.

“It was biopsied and was malignant but they were sure they had caught it.

“However, a year later she woke up and felt a lymph node in her groin was enlarged.”

Tests revealed the cancer had spread first to her lymph nodes and later to her liver and spleen.

Graeme said: “Fiona was told the cancer was incurable but not terminal.”

She began on a targeted oral therapy for the abdominal cancers and they resolved the tumours in her liver and spleen – which remains the case.

But three years ago her health took a turn for the worse. Graeme said: “She had a routine head scan which found a brain metastasis.

“Her medication was changed at that point because the targeted therapy was not working and she was put on various types of immunotherapy.”

But further brain scans found the tumour had continued to grow and there were five others. Her latest scan shows “multiple” metastases. Throughout her ordeal, Fiona, who also has Parkinson’s disease, has remained “pretty optimistic but realistic as well”.

Graeme said: “She always thought her role was to keep alive long enough to find a cure. But that hasn’t happened.”

Recently she had a near fatal diabetic ketoacidosis (a severe loss of insulin) thought to be a side-effect of her treatment. As she recovered from that, she suffered a ruptured bowel. Graeme was called at 4am to get to the hospital with their daughter Hannah, 18, to say their goodbyes.

But she rallied again and was discharged from hospital with a morphine driver last Friday.

Graeme said: “She is made of amazingly strong stuff. At the time of the rupture she was given hours or days but by the time of her discharge we were told weeks. But I can see her weakening. We know where this is going.”

Fiona wants to make people aware of the dangers of being in the sun without protection and from using sunbeds.

She said: “It makes me so angry. But it makes me realise how naive we all are.

“We are all taking a risk by being out in the sun and we start from a very young age.”

Fiona added: “I think parents should be prosecuted for allowing children to get sunburnt.

“If they are responsible for othet aspects of keeping them safe they are equally responsible for that.”

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