Doctor who ignored own symptoms dies from rare cancer three weeks later

Thelma Ainsworth, from London, was left devastated when her husband Jonathan - who was a doctor - complained of pain for months before receiving a tragic diagnosis

She hopes that by sharing her story, others experiencing symptoms will be encouraged to get "checked out as soon as possible". "Jonathan, even though he was a doctor, he didn't get checked immediately, he waited until it was too late," Thelma shared. "(The book) is about perseverance – how much can you take? How do we carry on when we're dealing with our own internal trauma and external trauma? How do we keep all the balls in the air?"

"I developed this harsh persona where I was just driving through life – and that's where the title, I Am A Wolf Tonight, comes from. I had to tap into my inner wolf in order to deal with all these challenges."

After earning her degree from the University of Cambridge, working as a lawyer and serving in the RAF, Thelma found love with Jonathan, an "intelligent and talented" doctor, through a Lonely Hearts ad in The Guardian. The pair tied the knot in March 2011 and later welcomed their two sons, Dominic and Richard.

In 2019, after Thelma had completed a decade of service with the RAF, her husband Jonathan, an HIV and infectious diseases specialist, began experiencing stomach pain. Despite the discomfort, he didn't seek medical help for several months. As his weight dropped and the pain continued, he consulted another doctor who recommended a scan due to inflammation in his liver.

While waiting for the referral, Jonathan decided to run his own blood tests. This led to his devastating diagnosis of bile duct cancer in October of that year. "He was a doctor, so he decided to do his own bloods, and then one day he came back home and said it wasn't right," Thelma shared.

"So, he went off to St Mary's Hospital and they said that he had cancer – and then, three weeks later, he was gone. It turned out to be bile duct cancer, which is very rare, and it had spread everywhere."

The NHS has stated that bile duct cancer may not show any symptoms, or they can be difficult to spot, which was the case for Jonathan. Liver Cancer UK reports that approximately 2,200 people in England are diagnosed with bile duct cancer each year.

Thelma revealed that her husband's symptoms "presented very late" and they never suspected it could be cancer. "It was more advanced than we could possibly imagine ... we were always five steps behind what was going on," Thelma expressed. "Go get yourself checked out."

When Jonathan passed away on October 25 2019, at the age of 59, Thelma had already been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following a "difficult birth" with her second son, Richard.

She confessed she was "on the cusp" of returning to her legal career and admitted that her relationship with Jonathan was strained before his death, with the couple undergoing marriage counselling. Struggling to balance her grief, children, career, family relationships and mental health issues, Thelma said she used her RAF skills and "bunker mentality" to help her "plough on". "I had hurdle after hurdle after hurdle," she shared.

"I just carried on like that Duracell Bunny in that advert – you just carry on until, at the end, it becomes too much." Just three months after Jonathan's death, Thelma started a new job at a law firm and found solace in reading books about grief and watching programmes like After Life, starring Ricky Gervais.

However, she found herself shouldering the blame, convinced that she was somehow responsible for Jonathan's death. "Since the diagnosis and for many months, maybe years afterwards, I blamed myself, that it was somehow my fault because of our marriage difficulties because I didn't get him to check himself out," Thelma confessed.

In 2022, everything "all came to a head" while she attempted to pen a children's book – a dream she had nurtured for years. She realised her grief was acting as a "blockage" to her creative writing, prompting her to start journaling – these "raw" entries would later inspire her first memoir, I Am A Wolf Tonight.

"I realised that it was all playing out like a drama and it would actually do well to write it as a proper memoir, so I started to write it in that vein," she elaborated. "It was this blockage inside me that I felt I needed to release."

The book, described by Thelma as "raw, unflinching and honest", delves into themes of cancer loss, complex grief, love, resilience and perseverance. Thelma emphasised there is "no right or wrong way to do grief", but she hopes her words will offer hope and encourage others to be patient and kind to themselves.

She stated: "At some point you will reach a stage where you're able to process that grief, but it will take years, and I'm not unusual in that. I hope that my book is helpful for anyone who's been in that circumstance where they've had to go out of their way to reveal their inner animal in order to survive."

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