Christine Hanslip reveals her ‘heartbreak’ after she survived cancer but her daughter didn’t

A mother has told of her heartbreak after she survived cancer, but had to watch her daughter die from the cruel disease, aged 46. 

Christine Hanslip, 72, from Bradford, was diagnosed with uterine cancer in 2013, and tragically, exactly a year on, in May 2014, Charlotte was diagnosed with peritoneal cancer, a rare condition that affects the thin layer of tissue that lines the abdomen.

Unlike her mum, Charlotte couldn’t be saved by surgery and at just 41-years-old, Charlotte was told her condition was incurable. 

Tragically, Christine was forced to watch her only daughter die, just five years after the shock diagnosis. 

Now, Christine and her husband Brian have become the faces of a heartbreaking TV advert that will be shown nationally throughout March promoting Marie Curie’s Great Daffodil Appeal. 

Christine explained: ‘Following her diagnosis, Charlotte said: ‘Mum, I’ve been trying to tell you that it’s terminal. We don’t know how long yet but I’m not going to be an old lady.”

‘She told me she was just really glad she wouldn’t ever have to lose me or her dad. But that’s just not the way of things is it?’ 

‘She had bad knees and trouble with indigestion,’ explained Christine. ‘One night it got so bad she couldn’t eat a meal a friend had cooked for her. She wasn’t the poorly type.’

‘She told me she couldn’t stand it and explained the pain was horrendous, so she made a GP appointment.’ 

Charlotte’s father Brian took her to the doctors, who then asked her to come back in half-an-hour to have her bloods taken. But the next morning, Christine received a phone call from her daughter, who was crying.

‘I asked her what was wrong and she said the doctor’s had just rung and thought she had cancer,’ explained Christine. ‘Then we had to go for further tests, and they found out it was primary peritoneal cancer, and it was stage four.’ 

Charlotte asked for genetic testing as she thought she could have got it from her mother Christine, because of her cancer. 

‘I had tumours on the lining of my womb,’ explained Christine. ‘I had eight tumours that I had removed with keyhole surgery. But Charlotte’s cancer was different. She couldn’t have the same.’

‘She had this testing done, and it showed she had the BRCA1 gene which had been passed down from her paternal side.’

‘My youngest son Jamie has it, but my oldest son Toby doesn’t. But the good thing is we were forewarned for the grandchildren.’

When Charlotte was first diagnosed, Christine says the doctor took her in, she had a full hysterectomy, and she was told the cancer was ‘all gone’. 

‘What he meant was it was gone for now,’ said Christine. ‘But once it came back there was nothing more they could take.’

‘They said it could be weeks or months until it came back. They didn’t know. ‘

Charlotte had to have six separate rounds of chemotherapy before she could try the new PARP inhibitors in the middle of 2017. 

‘We set our hopes on them,’ said Christine. ‘It seemed to work for a bit. And then I was in the dentist’s chair at the beginning of 2018 when she rang me and told me it hadn’t worked. I knew there was nothing else.’

Despite the devastating odds, her family did everything they could to battle her cancer. But four years and 300 trips to the hospital later, Charlotte ran out of treatment options. 

In 2018, she was admitted to the Marie Curie hospice in Bradford for palliative care. Over the next year, her mother watched on helplessly as her daughter’s cancer took hold.

‘Charlotte confided in me mostly,’ said Christine. ‘Some things she’d talk about, like what she wanted at the end, but she never talked about dying.

‘That upset her. She said she didn’t want to die. She used to cry over it. I was there when the solicitor came to see her, and she talked about who should have what and what she wanted after she died, like being cremated.’

‘She said at the end: ‘When I’m gone, just don’t buy me a b****y bench.’ I couldn’t help laughing. That was our Charlotte, a wicked sense of humour right to the end.’ 

Charlotte died on 23 January 2019, aged 46, leaving Christine and Brian devastated. They’d lived on the same street as their daughter, and hadn’t gone a day without seeing her in 46 years.

‘I was with her,’ said Christine. ‘I stopped in the room with her for the last three weeks. I just pulled up one of the big chairs by her side. I didn’t leave her side. I held her hand all night. If our hands got parted Charlotte’s would feel for mine.’

She continued: ‘I look back on my messages from the time, things I sent to people and I can trace her decline from what I was telling them.’ 

‘She spent her last birthday at home on 3 December. She wanted a Chinese for tea, so we ordered in her favourites. Charlotte had all of it and she loved it.’

‘We had a lovely day and enjoyed looking at all the presents people had bought for her. But it was just for a day. And the next morning she went back into Room 3 at the hospice, which is where she died.

‘The nurses said she stopped asking about going home afterwards, and that’s how they knew this was the last. 

She continued: ‘It was the saddest, most heart-breaking moment of my life. It wasn’t how I expected it would be. You know what death is. You see enough of it on TV. But it was just, I don’t know, it just happened, and then everything was different.’

Christine says she started going for bereavement counselling at the hospice following her daughter’s tragic death. 

‘Initially I wasn’t sure, but it’s really helping me now,’ explained Christine. ‘I don’t think things will ever get better.’

‘There won’t ever be a time where I feel like I used to, but it’s learning to cope with it. Because the truth is we miss our gorgeous girl every single day.

‘Every night I say a little prayer for her. It was the same thing I used to say as I left her room at the hospice in the evenings, looking through the glass of the window in the door before I came home. ‘Good night Charlotte. God bless. We love you.”

Determined to help other families like them, the couple have since agreed to star in a national TV advert detailing Charlotte’s tragic story for Marie Curie.    

‘It affected a lot of the nurses when Charlotte passed at Marie Curie,’ explained Christine. ‘She was so highly thought of.’

‘Even now, if you talked to some of the nurses at Marie Curie they say she always had a smile on her face. The amount of pain she was in, and she never complained, always thanked them for what they did.’

‘They’re all so brilliant up in Marie Curie – everyone, from the doctors to the nurses and the housekeepers. There’s not one person you could say a bad word against. 

‘It was a family, and that’s how it felt when I first went back up after Charlotte had gone. And so many people said to me, that must have been horrible for you.’

‘And I said no it wasn’t. I felt more at home there than at home. I felt closer to her there because during her last year she spent more time there than she did at home.’

‘Every five minutes someone in the UK dies without getting the care and support they need. Marie Curie’s Great Daffodil Appeal aims to change this. By donating and wearing a daffodil, Marie Curie can provide more care and support for people with terminal illnesses, and their families. www.mariecurie.org.uk/daffodil’