The bride who discovered she had cancer

The day before Milly Simmie’s wedding on July 11, just over four months ago, she gathered her six bridesmaids together and gave them some tough news. “I have just been told I have a rare cancer, and it’s probably terminal. Now, we’ve got Mojitos to make, and flowers to arrange.’’

Looking at some of the inevitably distressed faces, she added: ''You can’t be like this; we need to crack on with the wedding preparations, here and now.’’

And then, says Milly, a 29-year-old solicitor from Tonbridge, Kent, ''they set to, like troupers and did everything.’’

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Though the bridesmaids - a mixture of friends from Milly’s teens at Benenden School, and later the University of Durham - were in shock, they couldn’t blame her for withholding information. Indeed, Milly and her fiancée Alastair, a 30-year old equity broker, had only just received the grim diagnosis that day, themselves.

Milly’s disease - epithelioid hemangioendothelioma (EHE) - affects the vascular system, and is thought to be responsible for fewer than one per cent of cancers. Tumours can involve liver, lung, bone, lymph node, skin and other soft tissues, and can occur simultaneously at multiple sites.

There are rarely symptoms, or only minor ones, given the severity of the disease and a number of cases - as Milly’s was - are found by chance.

Today, sitting in the elegantly restored cottage Milly shares with Alastair, and their two dogs - a whippet called Olive, and Kiwi the lurcher, we leaf through wedding photos (the official album is not even back yet). She pours coffee into brand new, quirkily printed Alice-in-Wonderland mugs which were wedding presents. She must feel like she, too, has fallen down the rabbit hole into a strange and weird alternate reality.

''We had honestly felt so lucky,’’ she says of life, pre-diagnosis. ''Alastair and I had met at university, fallen in love, established our careers, and then he proposed with a ring in 2014, at the Brightling Park Horse Trials. We thought we had landed on our feet.’’

But three weeks before the wedding, Milly, a keen rider, fell from her horse and broke her collar bone. While being x-rayed in A&E in Tunbridge Wells Hospital, she mentioned to a consultant that her chest was sore too, almost as an afterthought, and he arranged a precautionary X-ray.

The following week, as she recovered from surgery to set the broken collar bone, Milly was surprised to get a phone call from one of the hospital’s senior radiologist, a friend of her mother’s. ''Nothing to worry about, but there’s something odd about your chest X-ray,’’ he said. ''We need to get a CT scan of your chest and abdomen taken.’’

A few days later, he called with the results. '’We’ve found 40 small tumours in your lungs and five in your liver. We don’t know what they are, it could be any number of illness; it could be cancer.’’

Milly admits: “Obviously I was upset, but I was also in shock. My wedding was just 10 days away by this point.

''Alastair just seemed to go into auto-pilot; he’d get up, go to work, come home, take me to a doctor’s appointment, and all the time be worrying about whether the right glasses had been ordered, and if we’d have enough Champagne. It was surreal.’’

Milly was sent for an MRI of her liver, then a needle biopsy, and told the results might not be back before the wedding. She was plunged into terrible doubts. ''I thought if I am not going to live, is it fair to get married? I was still holding it together in public, but desperately worried and uncertain inside.’’ The couple discussed putting the wedding on hold, but both decided they wanted to go ahead, with their parents’ support.

''I called some friends who were junior doctors, and asked them, 'If it is cancer, how long have I got?’ One told me, honestly: 'If it is liver and lung cancer, you’ll be lucky to see Christmas.’ It was hard to hear.’’

And then on the Friday - 24 hours before the wedding, Milly and Alastair were called to the hospital for provisional results. ''That was when they told me they thought it was EHE, and it was so rare, there had never been a case at Tunbridge Wells before. Survival, I was told, seemed to be between two and 10 years.’’

Remarkably, Milly’s reaction was positive: ''I thought, 'that’s better than six months’. Hopefully I would see Christmas and next summer.’’ Alistair, though shaken, took his cue from Milly and after they broke the news to her bridesmaids they pressed on with the rehearsal that afternoon. ''I remember thinking this wedding is going to be like a funeral, except I can be part of it. The next time I come down the aisle it will be in a coffin.

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