My husband's sister could have saved him from leukaemia ... instead she sentenced him to death

Standing on her estranged sister-in-law's doorstep, Jackie Fenton forced herself to remember that no matter how high tensions ran during the ensuing conversation she must keep her cool.



For the outcome could be a matter of life and death; however hateful she found the woman in front of her, she was the best chance of a cure for her dying husband.



'We need to talk about Simon,' Jackie said to Helen Pretty through a chink in the door. 'He's just been handed a death sentence.'



Tragic: Simon and Jackie Fenton in 2007 before he died of leukaemia. His only hope of survival was a bone marrow transplant which his sister refused him



Helen's brother Simon, father to Jackie's four young children, had been fighting a rare and aggressive form of leukaemia for 18 months. His only hope was a bone marrow transplant.



And Helen, as his sister, was a near-perfect match. She had previously agreed to be a donor, but by the time of this confrontation, in January 2007, she had changed her mind after a family quarrel.



Now, though, the situation had suddenly become critical. Simon's doctors had told him that a trawl of the UK register of potential donors had failed to find a match to his rare tissue-type.

Without a transplant, there could be only one outcome: the 46-year-old business consultant was going to die.



Jackie admits that she felt only disgust for Helen, and hated the fact that she had such power over her family's future.



But she had just left her husband at home weeping with fear after learning he was probably going to die, and however much she despised her sister-in-law, she was prepared to beg her for help if she had to.



But although Helen eventually opened the door, allowing Jackie to explain her brother's plight, she remained outwardly impassive. 'Helen,' Jackie pleaded. 'You can save your brother. Talk to his doctors if you can't bear to speak to me.'



There was still no response. Jackie finally threw the last of her dignity aside and broke down. 'My children are going to lose their father,' she pleaded. 'Don't you care if your own brother dies?'



I wish I could say that I forgive Helen



According to Jackie, Helen shrugged her shoulders and raised her eyebrows. It was a gesture of such indifference that it made this normally mild-mannered wife and mother see red.



With all hope clearly lost, she uncharacteristically found herself lunging at her husband's sister.



'Helen was two steps up from me so she had the advantage,' says Jackie. 'She overpowered me before marching me down the drive.'



Back home, a distraught Jackie told Simon what had happened. 'He put his arms round me as I wept,' she says. 'He wasn't angry, just terribly sad.'



Within seven months, Simon had died in Jackie's arms, leaving her and their children utterly bereft.



The only comfort to Jackie and the children in all of this is that Simon didn't suffer any physical symptoms, beyond extreme tiredness, or any pain in his final weeks. The leukaemia caused internal bleeding, which eventually caused his major organs to shut down.



He went to his grave having not spoken to Helen, and unable to forgive her.



Sibling rivalry: Helen Pretty was a near perfect bone marrow match but wouldn't help her dying brother after the family quarrelled over a lift to a pantomime



Since then, Jackie has been left to bear the pain of bringing up their children alone.



'Simon left us financially secure, so I don't have any money worries,' says Jackie. 'But nothing could have prepared me for the loneliness.



'There's no one to talk my day over with, whether it was good or bad; he isn't there to chat to about the children or advise me when I'm not sure which way to turn. I didn't just lose my partner - I lost my dearest friend.



'The children miss him desperately. There's a hole in their lives that I must try to fill, even though I know I never can, for the rest of my life.



'I wish I could say that I forgive Helen for not helping her brother, but when I think of her I feel only disgust. I hope one day the burden of that, at least, will go away.'

Jackie and Simon had met 16 years earlier. Simon was a senior manager and Jackie was his secretary at a manufacturing firm. She soon realised he was to be the love of her life.



'He was very prim and proper,' confesses Jackie, 43. 'But I quickly discovered he had a wicked sense of humour.'



Simon's strong sense of morality showed itself when they started dating. Concerned that their relationship would mark him as unprofessional, but determined not to give Jackie up, he sought work elsewhere.



When they met, Jackie was a young divorcee, with a three-year-old daughter. She'd married her childhood sweetheart, but parenthood had driven them apart. Simon now stepped into the breach.



'He took his role in my daughter Claire's life very seriously,' says Jackie. 'It made me love him even more.'



Simon felt she spent most of her life jealous of him

From the start, however, there were tensions with Simon's family. The couple had been together for six months when he took Jackie home to meet his mother, Rosalie, a retired secretary. His father, Geoffrey, a company director, had died of a heart attack when Simon was 21.



Rosalie made it clear with her opening gambit that she didn't think Jackie was good enough for Simon.



'She asked me what my interests were, apart from her son, in a really condescending way,' says Jackie. 'She looked down her nose at me, yet I came from a good family - my father was a senior manager for a drugs company. All she saw was a single mother who simply wasn't good enough for her son.'



Jackie says that Rosalie called Simon, warning him that Jackie only wanted him as a meal ticket. Simon laughed it off, but Jackie felt wounded.



Helen Pretty, pictured here age 16 with her brother Simon at 18. Simon eventually requested neither his sister nor his mother attend his funeral



She met Simon's younger sister Helen, now 46, a few months later. 'She was friendly enough,' says Jackie. 'But I sensed some unspoken friction between her and Simon.'



The root of this seemed to lie in the family's past. Simon had been very close to his father. Jackie says that he believed his mother and sister were jealous of the bond the two men shared.



Geoffrey had been fiercely proud of his son, especially when he passed the entrance exam for the private King's School in Macclesfield.



Meanwhile, Helen had failed her 11 plus. 'Simon was such a clever man - he had two Master's degrees and was studying for a PhD in industrial relations when he fell ill,' says Jackie.



Meanwhile, Helen worked as a company fleet manager, and later as a tutor. 'All his life he was ahead of Helen. He had the better jobs, bigger salaries and the brighter future. Simon felt that she spent most of her life jealous of him.'



But these unspoken tensions didn't stop brother and sister from having an apparently cordial relationship.



'We were never all going to be best friends,' says Jackie. 'But we got together for family barbecues and birthdays and could comfortably spend a Sunday afternoon together.'



By the time Simon first became ill, he and Jackie had built a happy family life for themselves in their four-bedroom detached home in the heart of the Cheshire countryside.



As well as Claire, now 22, they had a daughter Rebecca, ten, and sons Jack, eight, and Benjamin, five.



Simon's career was flourishing and he had been offered a senior job with a company in Manchester, with a six-figure salary. Then, in 2004, Simon's health suddenly deteriorated over a six-week period.



He starting having night sweats, became unnaturally tired and suffered from awful nosebleeds. Simon's GP also found bleeding behind his eyes and blood in his urine.



He told Simon to go straight home and wait for an ambulance. Their nightmare was compounded by the fact that this was Rebecca's sixth birthday.



Jackie went with him in the ambulance while her parents stayed with the children.



During the next 24 hours, blood tests showed how desperately ill Simon was. He was diagnosed with a rare cancer - acute promyelocytic leukaemia - and given just a 45 per cent chance of survival.



She grinned and told him: "I'm your only chance now"



It was then that Simon's sister Helen made her vow to help if a transplant came necessary.



Jackie says: 'She was distraught and said that whatever part of her he needed she would gladly give. My respect for Helen rocketed. I didn't doubt she would be there for him.'



Helen also gave Jackie a mobile phone and said she should use it to call her for help whenever she needed it. It was a small gesture, but of great comfort to Jackie.



Yet within weeks, Simon's illness had caused a deep rift between the women in his life. As he underwent gruelling chemotherapy in hospital, Simon asked Jackie to co-ordinate visits.



She explains: 'The chemotherapy made Simon feel lousy, and he didn't want his mum turning up unannounced if he wanted to sleep. He asked me to get her to call me first and check he was up to a visit.



'Rosalie misinterpreted this. She immediately phoned Helen and said I was stopping her from seeing Simon.'



Jackie says Helen phoned and said she should not stop a mother from seeing her son. She said they would make their own arrangements to visit now, and that blood was thicker than water.



'She didn't believe me when I said that I was acting on Simon's instructions,' says Jackie. 'She accused me of trying to shut them out of his life.



'It was crazy - Simon was fighting for his life and they were turning it into a power struggle.'



Meanwhile, after four months of gruelling chemotherapy, Simon's doctors advised that his best chance was a transplant. Helen was found to be a near perfect match.



Jackie says: 'Simon said that when Helen arrived at his bedside to tell him the news she grinned and told him: "I'm your only chance now."



'He said he felt as though she was getting a kick out of the power she now had over him, but I said he was being silly and paranoid.



'Now I think he was right, after a lifetime of living in her brother's shadow she finally had the upper hand.'



Meanwhile, Simon's doctors used experimental drugs in a last-ditch attempt to destroy the leukaemia. It worked for a time, sending him into remission in December 2004.



She said she'd the right to choose what to do with her body



But then, in November 2006, a routine test showed the cancer would return. All that could stop it was a bone marrow transplant, the sooner the better.



All hopes were pinned on Helen. But by then - fatally - Simon's sister had changed her mind.



The thing that had finally destroyed his relationship with Helen had been petty enough: a row over a trip to a pantomime and who was going to travel in which car.



'Somehow, this erupted into a huge argument on the phone between me and Rosalie, who said I was deliberately trying to ruin things,' says Jackie.



'Suddenly, Helen came on the phone and started hurling abuse. She said my kids were scruffy and that I'd turned Simon into a glorified housewife, leaving him at home to look after the children while he was ill, when I went out to work.



'I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Simon was too sick to work, and I was trying to keep a roof over our heads.'



Simon was, understandably, livid. He told Helen he wouldn't speak to her again until she apologised to Jackie.



His mother, meanwhile, who continued to visit him when Jackie was at work, asked whether he had any plans to leave his wife.



On November 15, 2006, having been told a transplant was his only hope, Simon and Jackie went to Helen's house to ask for her help.



Jackie claims that Helen refused to speak to them, and that her husband told them to telephone and make an appointment.



Even so, the couple presumed that once Helen knew how dire the prognosis was, all disagreements would be forgotten. So Simon asked his mother to step in and speak to Helen on his behalf.



Jackie says his mother came back and said Helen didn't feel able to be a donor because of her two young children, and didn't want to risk her health when they needed her.



Simon explained that when cells are harvested from a donor's bone marrow, it can leave the donor feeling unwell for up to a week, but there aren't usually any long-term implications.



He pleaded with Rosalie to try to change Helen's mind and point out that she would be back on her feet in days. But apparently Rosalie refused, saying this was Helen's decision and she had the right to choose what to do with her own body.



'He was desperate,' says Jackie. 'He implored her to impress upon Helen that it was a matter of life and death.'



Simon told Jackie that his mother's response to his fate was: 'Some people die sooner than others, and sometimes that just has to be accepted.'



Simon was so upset he told his mother to leave and never come back. Jackie returned home from work to to find Simon distraught, declaring he had disowned his mother and sister.



I had to tell the children their Daddy had gone



Which brings us back to January 2007, and the day Simon was told that a national search via the Anthony Nolan transplant register had failed to produce any other potential donor.



Says Jackie: 'Simon was terrified. He knew that this meant he was going to die. He was crying with fear. Meanwhile, the children didn't know how ill their daddy was and were playing in the garden in blissful ignorance. I had to do something.'



When that last-ditch attempt at reconciliation failed, Simon made a desperate public appeal for a donor.



His plight touched the hearts of thousands who read his story, and the Anthony Nolan Trust was inundated with people wanting to be tested.



'Simon took great comfort from the fact that even if he didn't get a donor, perhaps someone else would be saved by all these people coming forward,' says Jackie.



In the meantime, the couple had the wretched task of telling their children how sick their father really was.



In February 2007, the cancer did indeed return, and the doctors broke the devastating news that there was nothing more they could do.



'I was hysterical, yet Simon was so calm,' says Jackie. 'He accepted it. There was no fight left in him. I asked how long he had, thinking his consultant would say six months. When she said weeks I ran off down a corridor in tears.'



The end came less than three weeks later. Simon spent his final days at home with his family as he put his affairs in order, stating in his will that he didn't want his mother and sister at his funeral.



Jackie asked Simon if he wanted her to let Rosalie know when he had died, but he was adamant she should not be informed. Simon died in Jackie's arms in a hospice.



'It was the most heartbreaking moment of my life, matched only by the one that followed when I had to tell the children their Daddy had gone,' says Jackie.



In the days after Simon died, Jackie wrestled with her conscience.



'I hated the sight of the woman, but not telling her that her child was dead went against every instinct I had as a mother myself.'



So Jackie turned to Simon's oldest friend, who wrote to Rosalie with the awful news, asking her and Helen to respect Simon's final wishes, which they did. She hasn't heard from either of them since.



Of course, there are two sides to every story. We can be sure that Rosalie and Helen see things very differently to Jackie - and have their own version of events. They have, however, declined to share it.



Meanwhile, life goes on for Jackie and the children. This week they learned that Rebecca has won a place at a private school, though Jackie is unsure whether to take it.

She wishes Simon was there to talk it through with her. In normal circumstances, she might have turned to his sister for advice.



But then, Helen Pretty knew exactly what Simon wanted from her when it mattered most. What support could she possibly offer his grieving widow now?