A bride who was diagnosed with an incurable brain tumour has claimed her fiancé dumped her over Facebook Messenger just days before their wedding. Emily Nicholson, 24, was working as bar manager and club promoter before she was diagnosed with astrocytoma brain cancer in February 2016. When she was told she only had a year to live she and her then-boyfriend Jamie Smith, also 24, decided to tie the knot but had to wait until the following March while she had treatment.
The steroids she was put on to combat the disease caused her to gain five stone in six weeks – something she says played a part in his decision to ditch her on the morning of his stag do. Emily, who is originally from York and now lives in Perth, Australia, said: ‘Jamie messaged me and said he didn’t want to be with me and he hadn’t loved me for a long time.
‘It was horrendous. He made it very clear that he didn’t love me. I felt it was because of the way I looked and what had happened. ‘Now I don’t feel anything about him, he hurt me but there’s no point getting upset over it, I’ve just had to be strong about it all. ‘For months he’d been going out with his friends but obviously I couldn’t do that.
‘We were looking to build our lives together in the time we had left.’ But Jamie has refuted her story and says it was actually Emily who left him.
He said: ‘It was the other way around, she actually left me, I never left her. And, secondly, I never left her for anything to do with her weight gain. ‘If that was the case I would have left her months before we split up, because she started putting weight on before that. It had nothing to do with that at all.’ Emily’s mum and full-time carer Joanne Nicholson, 51, said Jamie still went on his stag do despite calling the wedding off that morning.
She said: ‘I was angry at him, but as time has gone on I’m not anymore. ‘He was lovely, he was a really nice lad and it got to the point where she couldn’t go out and she was getting bigger.
‘When you go through something like this, life is too short to hate anyone – he did his best but I don’t blame him, it got too much for him.’ Following her diagnosis, Emily’s family decided to return to the UK in July 2017. She has already defied her life expectancy given to her by doctor’s but no one knows how long she’ll have left.