'It is heart-breaking to not be able to reach someone when they need you the most'

The heartbroken wife of a man who lost his battle to a rare form of cancer just weeks after getting the shock diagnosis is appealing for people to be vigilant in lockdown to protect others.

Fidellis Meany’s husband Sean was just 64 when he passed away in August from Systematic Amyloidosis, a cancer related to a group of diseases in which abnormal proteins, known as amyloid fibrils, build up in tissue.

Sean’s health went downhill devastatingly quick suffering two strokes, blood clots, fluid on the lungs followed by kidney and heart failure.

Due to restrictions, Fidellis a Moran originally from Rathmore in Athboy was unable to visit her husband in hospital during his illness and wants people to know the harrowing reality of losing a loved one during a pandemic.

In an agonising twist of events, Fidellis lost her husband to in 2012 to Pulmonary Fibrosis and says her life started again when she met “gentleman” Sean but sadly has had to grieve a second time for a cherished life partner. She said:

“It is heart-breaking to not be able to reach someone when they need you.

“All these people who are out don’t realise what they are doing to other people. The numbers could be down if people stayed in.

“When you see people breaking the rules you feel the world is going by you and nobody cares.

“Two men in my life that I loved and both of them were taken.

“If we don’t listen and don’t do it right this time, we will never get it right.”

The Rathmore woman who now lives in St Margaret’s in Co, Dublin describes the events leading up to her husband’s diagnosis.

“In September 2019 Sean had difficulty swallowing and we had tests done on him in the Bon Secours Hospital and they said that it was only reflux but in the end he couldn't breathe and six weeks later and he was admitted to Beaumont Hospital.

“Four weeks later they did tests and discovered that the muscles in his neck were weak and that was the start of the cancer.

“It is a very unusual kind of cancer. Only 1 in 4000 people are diagnosed every year.

“It was out of the blue and he was too far gone to get treatment.

“I was in a state of shock, looking back I don’t know how I got through it.

Fidellis admits that being unable to visit Sean while he was at his worst was “devastating.”

“In the early stages he used to ring me and when he got weaker, I had a neighbour who worked in the hospital and she used to go and spend time with him and she’d do FaceTime with him.

“He ended up getting kidney failure also in the end when his heart started getting weaker, I was allowed in on compassionate grounds.

“They let me in for two night for a half an hour that’s all the time I got with him. After that I took him home for five weeks but two weeks in his kidneys started failing.

“He was taken back into hospital and they told me his heart was failing.

“He had fluid on the lungs and a lot of complications with it.

“He was taken back in on the 5th of august and I think I was allowed back in to see him once.

“He was sent to ICU in Beaumont and a couple of days later I got a phone call to say that they were sending him to St Francis Hospice in Blanchardstown.

“I always thought he was coming home but when I heard that I knew that was it.”

Fidellis was born in Castletown before she moved to Rathmore in Athboy where she lived on her family’s farm and has siblings in Kells, Navan and Grennanstown.

“He passed away just 24 hours later but It was nice to spend time with him.

“I was after getting a musician to record his favourite song for him for his birthday so I lay on the bed and put my head on the pillow beside him and he fell off to sleep, he was smiling and he was nearly trying to sing with me, that was the last time I saw him alive.

“I just said to him he was going asleep, now Sean you can sleep.

“He had a lovely send off and a lovely funeral but that doesn’t make up for not seeing him and not being able to be there for him when he was so ill.”

Fidellis says Sean, an Armagh man turned her life around when she met him six years ago after losing her husband who she was married to for 38 years in 2012.

“It meant the world to me to meet someone I got on so well with. I thought that when my husband died my life was over and then I met Sean.

“We just clicked, we had so much stuff that we both liked doing together, we never had an argument.

“He was a gentleman, he’d open the door for you, he’d pour a drink for you, he had that manner.”