241 Pizza

“I wish the government had given more money at the time that could have facilitated me staying at the hospice the night Monica died.”

Noel Barnes, 65, was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 1991. Though surgeons removed the affected kidney, the cancer had spread.

“He asked the doctor straight, ‘How long do I have to live?’,” said his wife, Nesta, 78, who now lives in Middlesbrough. “He was told six months and that he should take me on a round-the-world cruise. He would have hated that. He said he just wanted to live his life as normally as possible.”

Noel was able to stay at home thanks to a combination of care provided by his wife, Macmillan nurses and a private nurse. Nesta was unsure at first whether she could cope with watching her husband die slowly. “I was apprehensive of what might happen, and whether there would be a lot of pain. I was reassured that with morphine and medicine that there wouldn’t be.”

“His greatest wish was to die at home because he was terrified of hospitals. When he found out, he was frightened of dying alone.” He died in his sleep in November 1991, his wife at his side.

Ali Rainback, 36 when he died, and a ski instructor, hoped be to be getting married this week. But in November 2007 he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. Despite receiving radiotherapy for six weeks, the tumour became more aggressive, and he declined chemotherapy after being told that it was unlikely to help cure his loss of balance and failing vision.

He wrote a blog about his experiences coping with his illness, and spent his final weeks completing a “bucket list” of things he wanted to do before he died, such as visiting Annecy in France, where he had once lived.

Hi mother, Diana, 64, from Kimpton near St Albans, at first tried to care for Ali at home.

“Ali had been an athletic man, around 11 stone and was over 6ft tall. But he put on a couple of stone, and we couldn’t deal with him physically.” she said.

“He started getting considerably worse, and was falling around a lot. We couldn’t pick him up. It started to become obvious that our flat was not the right place for him.”

He went to a hospice, and though he had initially wanted to return home to die, he decided in the end that he was more comfortable at the hospice, where he died. Diana believes that the hospice provided a quality of care towards the end that she would not have been able to provide herself: “All we had to do was ring a bell, and the nurses would be there. That could never happen at home.”

Explore Health News

• Swine flu

Times Recommends

• How I lost the gift of joy for a while
• Why Ann Widdecombe has got it wrong
• Alas, it’s the end of the road for petrolheads