Stewie Higginson
Stewie was always the loudest one in the room, with the best amount of energy for life.
He loved living.
His humour was mostly funny to him but that is what made him funny.
Stewie was always ready to meet and make anyone feel like they had known him for years. He put people at ease. He was a fountain of random knowledge, and he loved his music.
Stewie was happiest when he was in his man cave, his bar in the garden, surrounded by his girls (his wife Lisa (me) and our two girls Hollie and Maddie).
Stewie loved football through and through. Arsenal was his team, but would watch every game on and always had an opinion on it!!
He loved having people around him. He loved being the host.
Stewie’s dad Tony died at a young age of 42 of a heart attack that starved his brain of oxygen and his life support machine had to be turned off…. Stewie was always worried that history would repeat itself.
Then one day our world started to come crashing down….
Stewie started to act strange in small things he would do. We were out on a date night on the 31st May 2022 and he wet himself, we thought he had some small infection and he would get an appointment with his doctor soon, so we carried on our evening. The next few days passed, and things started to change, he looked vacant, then the left side of his mouth dropped. We panicked and thought stroke? But Stewie did not feel it, he noticed nothing but the next day we went to his doctors – at this point his mouth had gone back to normal, but we just had a bad feeling that something was not quite right.
The doctor checked him over and gave him some antibotics for a bladder infection and told us not to worry…. How wrong can someone be?…… That’s all we could do!!!!!
By the end of that week Stewie’s left side had started to get slower and he then started choking on his food. On Monday 13th June 2022 we went to A&E.
They sent him for a CT and we were taken into a room and shown a screen with a scan on it, “See this? This is a brain tumour”
As I said, our world had crashed!!!
One of the first questions we asked was can it be operated on? The answer was yes. This gave us a small amount of relief. Over the next few days, he was kept in hospital for more tests, these came back showing it was just one tumour, but what a tumour it was. The doctors started to explain that the specialist would get in touch and take his treatment from there and that it was going to start very quickly.
Stewie’s mindset on this and his own words were, “I am not going anywhere, it is not my time.”
But this tumour was one of the rarest kinds that only 1% of the world’s population will ever get. Right Thalamic Tumour.
Stewie waited for the call to find out when treatment was due to start. This call came on Tuesday 28th June 2022, it was a life changing call…
The appointment was planned for the Friday of that week the 1st July 2022, but they wanted us to understand that the meeting was not going to be an easy one, and that we may want to bring support.
I was confused as I thought we were going there to talk about treatments. So, I asked them the one question I knew Stewie wanted the answer to, “Is he going to die?”
The answer came very quickly without any doubts that yes he was.
Having to tell my husband that he was going to die and for us to tell our children was as painful as you can imagine. Within a couple of hours of this call, Stewie collapsed at home twice, the ambulance was called, and he was then taken in. Later that evening they released Stewie home. I just managed to get him home before he collapsed again and this time there was nothing anyone could do, he had a seizure that caused an Intracranial Haemorrhage.
Stewie’s life support machine was switched off on Thursday 30Th June 2022
How quickly this Tumour took him was unbelievable, he wanted to fight it, it did not fight fair.
For the first sign of anything it took 28 days to take him.
Stewie was 46 years old when he died.
