I’m stuck in here with nowhere to sit outside as I can’t walk to the park anymore. I need my mum staying with me and she’s on the couch – there’s no spare bedroom. I just feel trapped up here. Every morning they have the diggers digging the road. I’ve got three brain tumours. I need to move.
Less than a year from her death, Stacey, aged 37, still did not look like someone who was dying. But, suffering from the rare genetic condition Li-Fraumeni syndrome, she was experiencing excruciating pain. By the time of her death, she had cancers in her leg, breast, lymph nodes, back, heart, liver and brain.
Cruelly, this final period of her life was made much more stressful by the conditions in which she was required to live. Home was a cramped, one-bed housing association flat on the sixth floor of a high-rise tower block in Glasgow, Scotland, which she shared with her husband, Joost, and her mother, Irene. Sometimes, Stacey had to miss hospital appointments because the lift was not working, and she was unable to make it down the stairs to meet her taxi.
