Pamela Cook from Lincoln was a loving wife, mother, and grandmother who was still running her family’s private hire business when she began feeling unwell in autumn 2023. After weeks of dizziness, headaches, and forgetfulness, scans revealed she had a glioblastoma, an aggressive and fast-growing brain tumour. Despite surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy, Pamela’s condition worsened. She died in March 2024, aged 65, just five months after her diagnosis.
Here is Pamela’s story, as told by her daughter, Clair...
My mum, Pamela, was everything you would want a mum to be: full of life, funny, and the soul of every party. She was young at heart and always said: “I’m nineteen in my brain and that’s where I’m staying.” She loved her friends, her family, and her Motown music. She was a wife, a mother of three girls – Nicola, Lauren, and me – and a grandmother to five beautiful grandchildren. The day after she was diagnosed, our youngest family member, little Olivia, was born. Everyone says she is the image of Mum, and it is like a piece of Mum lives on.
Mum was due to retire in February 2024, but she never got the chance.
Before her diagnosis, life felt full of joy. In March 2023, I turned 40 and had planned a big birthday party, but at the last minute my husband, Ben, and I decided to get married instead. We arranged everything in secret, told only our closest family, and surprised everyone by walking into my birthday party as husband and wife. Mum helped plan it all and was so proud. She always said she wanted to see one of us get married, and I am so grateful that she did. None of us knew that just seven months later, she would be diagnosed with a brain tumour.
There were no clear signs that anything was wrong at first. Mum had always been a bit forgetful. We used to laugh when she called everyone’s names before finally getting to the right one. But by September 2023, she began to feel dizzy, tired, and low in confidence. She went to the doctor, who said it was depression and prescribed antidepressants. When she didn’t improve, she went back, but they told her to give the tablets more time.
Not long after that she followed my stepdad, Dave, downstairs one evening and forgot why she was there. She was frightened, and that was when he realised something wasn’t right. He took her to A&E at Lincoln Hospital, where she was given an MRI scan.
In the early hours of the morning, I got a call to say they had found a tumour in Mum’s brain.
She was put on steroids to reduce the swelling, and for a little while it felt like we had her back. But the diagnosis that followed confirmed our worst fears: glioblastoma, an aggressive and incurable brain cancer which carries a prognosis of 12 to 18 months.
Mum had surgery at Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham in November 2023. The surgeons managed to remove a large part of the tumour but not all of it. She started six weeks of combined radiotherapy and chemotherapy over Christmas and into the new year. It was brutal. She became weak, developed infections, and was admitted to hospital several times.
Even then we never gave up hope. Mum had always been so strong. She loved walking the dog, never sat still, and was always full of energy. We thought she would pull through.
By February 2024, scans showed that another tumour had already grown back in the same place. Doctors told us there was nothing more they could do.
The treatment had taken so much out of her, and further rounds would only cause more suffering. We made the decision to bring her home, where she wanted to be, surrounded by her family and her beloved dog, Frankie.
Mum managed to celebrate her birthday with us all by her side. But her health deteriorated quickly after that. She began having seizures and gradually lost her speech and movement. Carers came in to help us, and as a family we did everything we could: washing, turning, and comforting her. I remember one day she cried and said, “You shouldn’t be doing this for me,” and I told her, “You did it for me, so now I’m doing it for you.”
Mum stayed strong in her own way until the end. She refused to be seen in a wheelchair, saying, “Over my dead body,” and she meant it.
Mum died peacefully at home on 24 March 2024, 10 days after my birthday.
It is so hard to make sense of how fast it all happened. She went on a cruise in August 2023, looking perfectly well, and by March she was gone. Glioblastoma is such a cruel and invasive disease. It strips a person of everything: their movement, speech, and independence, piece by piece.
Mum lost her own parents young, but she built everything around her family. She worked hard all her life and did not get to enjoy the retirement she deserved. That is why I am determined to keep her memory alive and to raise awareness of brain tumours.
I’m now taking on the 99 Miles in November challenge in support of Nottingham Brain Tumour Research Centre of Excellence – launching next year
My goal is to get the whole of Lincoln involved. My husband Ben, my son Marley, and my sisters are all joining in. We will walk together for Mum, remembering her the way she would want to be remembered, full of life and laughter.
Hearing about the new Brain Tumour Research Centre of Excellence in Nottingham has given me real hope. The centre will focus on glioblastoma, the same type of tumour Mum had, and aims to find ways to detect when a tumour is returning sooner. If research like this had been available when Mum was diagnosed, things might have been different for her. Knowing that the money we raise will go towards this kind of research makes every step feel worthwhile.
I want to do whatever I can to help fund better treatments for glioblastoma and stop these aggressive tumours from coming back. Mum’s tumour regrew within weeks of surgery, and if there had been a way to prevent that, maybe the outcome would have been different.
If sharing Mum’s story can help even one other family avoid what we went through, then it will have been worth it.
Clair Bowkett
November 2025
One in three people in the UK knows someone affected by a brain tumour. This disease is indiscriminate; it can affect anyone at any age. What’s more, brain tumours continue to kill more children and adults under the age of 40 than any other cancer yet, to date, just 1% of the national spend on cancer research has been allocated to this devastating disease since records began in 2002.
Brain Tumour Research is determined to change this.
If you have been touched by Pamela’s story, you may like to make a donation via www.braintumourresearch.org/donate or leave a gift in your will via www.braintumourresearch.org/legacy
Together we will find a cure.
