My 42-year-old wife went on the run and never came back after a rare aneurysm

I picked up the phone and tried to process what the doctor was telling me.

Only a few sentences came to mind: “Your wife … go to the hospital … now …”

I left our 30-year-old home in Chester and hurried there, not believing what I had heard.

My wife Kath had gone for a jog that morning as usual. She loved to keep fit – when she ran, she was usually only out for about 40 minutes.

That day, however, she hadn’t come home and she didn’t answer the phone. After asking our neighbors if they had seen her for about an hour, I called her number again and this time a doctor from the hospital answered.

The doctor told me that my wife was very sick and I should immediately go to the hospital – a passerby found her and called an ambulance.

When I arrived I was greeted at the front desk by a nurse who escorted me to a small, private waiting room.

What followed was a blur. I remember being told that Kath was very ill and the doctors thought she had a brain hemorrhage because her blood pressure was so low.

She asked if someone could be with me while they ran more tests on Kath and in a blur I called our daughters Rachael, 40, and Stephanie, 36, to come in.

The doctors explained that they needed an MRI scan and after what felt like an eternity, the doctor entered the claustrophobic waiting room to give us the verdict.

Kath suffered a type A Stamford aortic dissection—a ruptured heart artery—while jogging. We were told it was a catastrophic event.

An aortic dissection can occur after an abdominal aortic aneurysm — a bulge in the main blood vessel that runs from your heart to your abdomen — goes untreated.

According to the NHS, aortic dissection is most commonly found in people aged 65 and over and six times more common in men than women. Kath was only 62.

“So what can you do? What now?” I asked desperately, but my expression turned grim, speechless.

There was nothing to do.

Kath would die.

Kath and I were together for 42 years: we had met as young lovers in our twenties. We’d traveled the world together, had kids, and been to Disney World, her favorite place, six times, and planned to go back for her 65th birthday.

We were about to spend our retirement together.

I remember shaking my head and thinking, “This can’t be true” – it just wasn’t right.

Kath was super fit, but clearly had been suffering from an abdominal aortic aneurysm for some time – but no one knew.

She had always seemed healthy, but this had been a ticking time bomb all along.

I went to her bed and was shocked to see she was on a ventilator and watch the machine breathe in front of her.

We sat down with Kath and told her how much we love her. Then we made the most impossible decision of our lives: to turn off her life support machine.

It was a painful decision, but Kath would never recover. Nobody could do anything.

She slipped away with us by her side.

After that it was unbearable to go home from the hospital without Kath. I was in pain but also felt an endless sense of anger – we had no idea she suffered from this condition. As far as we’re concerned, her heart was fine.

In the days following Kath’s death, I watched this “catastrophic event” in which she died and was shocked to realize that aortic dissections are often thought of as a “male” condition.

I learned that aortic dissections are called the “silent killer” because the symptoms often don’t become apparent until the aorta ruptures and it’s too late.

At the age of 65, all men in the UK are offered an AAA test – a scan that looks for aortic aneurysms and can also help detect a hanging aortic dissection.

This test is not offered to women.

It made me so angry – why weren’t they offered this test? While she would have been too young to get a scan if they spread to women, Kath was proof that women can get aortic dissections, too.

I want women to be able to have this aortic aneurysm scan when they are offered their first mammogram – it could save lives. That could have saved Kath.

What annoys me the most is that in most cases this can be fixed if caught early. But 65 is still too late for men, too.

In May, Depeche Mode keyboardist Andrew Fletcher died of the disease at the age of 60.

Pauline Latham, MP for Central Derbyshire, has been raising awareness through the Aortic Dissection Charitable Trust after she lost her son to the same illness in 2018 – he was just 44.

Now I’ve moved from where we used to live – it’s too much to face the memories of where we spent our lives for 30 years.

I can’t bring Kath back. Now I deal with my family and remember the happy times we spent together.

But if this story helps other families avoid what we went through, then Kath’s death will not have been in vain.