Ian Sutton

After losing his beloved wife Carol to ovarian cancer Ian is determined to help raise awareness of the disease.

“Carol, we called her Caz. We met on a blind date.

I was on leave from the navy and I didn’t have a date for a party so my friends arranged it. She was lovely. She always was and always will be.

We’d only known each other seven months and I had to go Singapore for more than a year. I came back and we got married.

For over six months she was going back and forth to the GP telling them that she couldn’t go to the toilet and they treated her for constipation. She felt tired very quickly and was full up all the time.

She kept telling them that she could feel something pressing on her bowel but they wouldn’t have it.

When she was admitted to hospital she looked almost six months pregnant.

The GP apologised to us when she was she diagnosed and it was stage three ovarian cancer.

We were very angry. She’d never been sent for a CA125 test, nothing.

I think women over fifty who visit their GP with bowel problems should be sent for a CA125 test and a scan straight away. By the time the bloating starts, it’s almost too late.

They brought her home from the hospital and six days later she died. She was pretty weak and her speech had gone.

I’d say keep on fighting and hope for the best. They call ovarian cancer the silent killer but it’s not silent, it’s just that people don’t listen.

Ovarian cancer needs the same profile as breast cancer. I can walk around the shops and you never see anything about ovarian cancer – but everywhere you go there are collection boxes for other cancers.  

Carol was very fun loving and liked a laugh.

We would have been married fifty years. I had planned for us to renew our wedding vows, I was going to surprise her as the church we married in isn’t that far away.

She was a lovely lady and very, very brave.”

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