Brother's shock as cancer claims sister in 24 days

A Worcestershire man whose sister died just 24 days after being diagnosed with blood cancer, has spoken of how he went from planning her recovery to arranging her funeral in less than a month.

Jeff Farnes, from Redditch, said doctors initially believed his sister Helen Bryan's acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) had been caught early and could be treated.

But despite an encouraging prognosis and weeks of treatment that appeared to be going well, the 57-year-old died less than a month after receiving the diagnosis.

"We went into a room that had two doctors and three nurses in there," he said, adding: "So it was never going to be great news."

Farnes accompanied his sister to her appointment at Swindon Hospital on 12 September 2025.

That is when Bryan was told she had AML and needed to begin treatment immediately.

She began chemotherapy straight away and was admitted to a ward. Farnes said doctors initially believed the disease had been caught early.

"The prognosis at that time was good, they thought they caught it early, they thought they'd be able to treat her," he explained.

For the next 23 days, he said, her treatment appeared to be progressing well and she was expected to spend time recovering with family after her first round of chemotherapy.

But during a visit to hospital, Bryan complained of severe headaches and was taken for a CT scan.

"The faces they were pulling in the thing, they weren't very good poker faces," Farnes recalled.

"That was the beginning of the end."

Bryan died from a bleed on the brain caused by the disease.

"From prognosis to death it was 24 days," Farnes said.

To mark the first anniversary of her death, he ran a half marathon (13.1 miles) every day for 24 days, raising £5,000 for Blood Cancer UK and Macmillan Cancer Support.

"I wanted to do something positive during this difficult time this year," he said.

Another who understands Farnes' pain is Lee Williams from Kings Heath, Birmingham.

Williams knows three people to die from blood cancer, including his mum Tracy Tresidder, who died from AML when she was 58.

"She was the most selfless person you could imagine because she gave everything to everyone else," Williams explained.

His mum underwent chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, but died within weeks of her operation.

Discussing survival rates among AML sufferers, Williams said: "I was horrified, almost, to find out the survival rate for the deadliest forms of blood cancer were actually only one in three.

"For every three people that are diagnosed, only one of them lives longer than five years after diagnosis."

Farnes and Williams are now backing Blood Cancer UK's Trial Treat Beat campaign, which aims to improve survival rates for some of the deadliest blood cancers, including AML.

The charity hopes to raise £25m to fund a new generation of clinical trials designed to test multiple potential treatments at the same time, helping researchers identify effective drugs more quickly and bring them to patients sooner.

Follow BBC Hereford & Worcester on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.