One study found that 88 per cent of 2,000 recently deceased cancer patients in the UK experienced chronic pain in the months before they died, and much of it was severe. Throughout Europe the number suffering in this way at any one time is probably more than one million.
The most shocking thing about this pain is that practically all of it could be eliminated – and no expensive, hi-tech or invasive therapy would be required to do it. “I adored him – but that night I went into the garden and screamed out to God to finish him off. The pain was just too much for him to bear.”

Suffering like this is not unusual. A less well-placed person would have been in a hopeless position.”Patients can help themselves by finding out about pain relief, and they should feel confident to ask for changes when they see things are not working. And they must realise that morphine is not some evil substance that will leave them like zombies – it can be their best friend.”.

There is no good reason why any but a tiny fraction of cancer sufferers should end their days in agony Yet they do. “Jonathan was literally crawling across the floor, sobbing, a couple of days before he died,” says one woman who witnessed her husband’s cruel end. He was suffering from cancer of the pancreas which had spread to the spine. It was awful to see, here was a strong, highly intelligent man reduced to a frightened wreck.”In the morning my mother and I got him into hospital, and they promised us that he would be given morphine That was about lunchtime We waited until 4pm – no morphine.

It was only the next day that they began to sort out the pain.”Herself a cancer sufferer, Becky Miles is founder and chair of the National Cancer Alliance, a lobbying group for better oncology services.”I had to make an enormous fuss to get my father the care and drugs he needed, both then and later on. I am privileged because I have got both expertise and a lot of highly placed contacts. Becky Miles’s father, Mike, went through periods of terrible pain before dying of cancer last May. “He had leukemia and it triggered all sorts of other problems,” she recalls.