Like all good stories this one starts on a bright, sunny, ordinary day. The phone rang and I found our GP was on the other end telling me that my husband’s latest routine blood tests indicated there was “something going on in his chest”. As a former medic I knew this was doctor-speak, and, a little frustrated by the euphemism, I said, “Please tell me what you mean,” or words to that effect. What he meant was the possibility of lung cancer.

Nothing can prepare you for that kind of shock nor can words describe it. Nor is there ever a good time to have it thrown at you, but this timing was particularly bad. Our first grandchild had just been born and grandpa was happily besotted. Our son had become a father. If ever there was a wrong moment to drop this bombshell on the family, it was now. My husband, Rab, is one of life’s worriers, and I decided there was no point in telling him everything until we knew for sure. The same went for my son: it would be cruel to dampen his happiness.

So I told my husband that he should have had a routine chest x-ray but it had somehow slipped through the net — nothing to worry about.

The next few weeks were difficult. I don’t panic easily, but despite trying not to, I ran every scenario through my head, none of them pleasant or encouraging. I also tried not to put together symptoms I had noticed; that dry little cough he had developed over recent years, his slight breathlessness sometimes when he exerted himself, which he had put down to “getting on”.

Recently we were involved in a car crash and, when he was routinely breathalysed, he couldn’t blow into the machine. He simply didn’t have the puff, and kept saying to the young policewoman in a mystified tone, “You’ll be thinking I’m deliberately not doing this . . .”

A couple of weeks passed until the date for the x-ray, then a couple more to get the result. “There’s no cancer,” said the GP, “but there are areas of calcification. Has he ever been exposed to asbestos?” Funny he should say that.

At the end of the 1950s, Rab worked in the shipyards on the River Clyde, serving his time as an electrician at John Brown’s in Clydebank, and also in Fairfield’s in Govan. Mostly he worked in the engine rooms of boats under construction, putting in junction boxes, points and lighting as the trades went about their business around him. The pipe-laggers applied wet asbestos — the men called it “monkey dung” — to water pipes, exhausts pipes, anything where heat had to be conserved or contained. When the wet asbestos was dry it was smoothed, then asbestos cloth was cut by hand and sewn on top. While other areas were sprayed with more wet asbestos, men went around, sweeping up the debris and the dust, innocently distributing it everywhere.

Rab worked around, below and on top of the pipes, in air so thick with asbestos dust that when the sun shone through gaps in the half-built boats it was “like trying to shine a torch through smoke”. Toilet facilities in the yards were below basic and they had nowhere to wash their hands, so the men brushed the dust off as best they could, but it was just a fact of life that everyone was covered. They had no canteen either, they ate their sandwiches wherever they happened to be working — breathing and eating the deadly dust at the same time.

The riveters and welders were the kings of shipyard workers. They spent their working days bent over torches that gave off fumes, so to prove that the employers were kind and caring, they gave these men a pint of milk a day on health grounds.

At the same time they were poisoning them and all the others with asbestos dust. The manufacturers knew they were doing it — the effects of exposure to asbestos had been known since the late 19th century, but symptoms could take 20 to 40 years to show up, so it seems that they just decided to cross their fingers and deal with the problem if and when it arose.

Over the years Rab knew many men who died of the effects of the dust, and each time he would shake his head and wonder aloud how he had managed to escape. But he hasn’t, of course. I would doubt if any yard worker doesn’t carry a little something, somewhere. We now know his lungs are scarred — it’s called pleural plaques — though at the moment we don’t know the extent of the damage, so one minute I was grateful that he didn’t have lung cancer, the next I was thinking ahead and realising that it was only temporary relief. We don’t have the immediate worry, now it’s long-term worry.

And it changes everything — the entire dynamic of our family has altered. I am now aware of having to look after him, he is too. I have to make sure he avoids colds because chest infections are a real concern. I make him eat regularly instead of when he feels like it, because he must stay healthy and, for the same reason I make sure the house is warm at times when we wouldn’t normally put on the heating. I keep reminding him he mustn’t get wet — he loves hill-walking — and to rest when he’s a bit breathless or tired.

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