I’d been diagnosed with what was thought to be cancer. They were 95% sure it was. “....
“I thought I had a year, maybe three months to live"
Stewart said he didn’t initially tell Helen about his cancer scare.
“I thought I had a year, maybe three months to live, I made the decision not to tell anyone.”
Defence barrister Simon Russell Flint asks: “Why didn’t you want to tell Helen the person you loved?”
Stewart answers: “I wanted the rest of our time together just to be normal, and for everyone else to just treat me normally.
“Helen worked out it was more than that. She found out within weeks of my MRI scan. We agreed not to tell anyone it was cancer.”
“We were going to have two weeks in Tenerife, but the operation was going to be before the holiday, the doctor said I might just be able to travel.
“My first operation was cancelled because they didn’t have a critical care bed ready for me.
“I was in the bed ready to go for the operation and half an hour before I was told this.
“It seemed like it was postponed for a long time, maybe two or three weeks. The second operation was going to be right in the middle of a holiday we had planned, I was asking if we could postpone it further but Helen was not happy about that.
“So I went in the second time, and again the same thing happened.
“So we’d lost the holiday basically and I had to go home again. Helen was beside herself.
“The holiday was cancelled. We still had the hotel and the hotel said we could move it to another time in the year, and that was going to be for our honeymoon.”
“Wedding plans at this point were sort of fixed. In Helen’s mind we’d moved in, she’d write her book one year, then we could get married the next.
“We wanted to announce the engagement in January (2016), but I was told I had cancer.
“It slowly leaked out in interviews.
We were still going to go ahead and do it.”
