A CANCER patient whose family home had to be sold to raise funds for her treatment has lost her brave battle for life.

Charity worker Debbie Munro, 45, passed away peacefully just days after best-selling author Patricia Cornwell gave her and her family a luxury weekend in London.

Debbie's husband John, their three children, her identical twin sister Bridget de Grey and her three eldest children were at her bedside in the Royal Bournemouth Hospital when she died.

"It probably wasn't so much the cancer as malnutrition," said Bridget. "She had got so thin and her heart couldn't keep up.

"Because she was diabetic, she wasn't able to have steroids to put the weight on. The staff tried everything. They were absolutely fantastic.

"We were all quite surprised because she had been doing so well. We always knew it was going to be hard and there was a chance she wasn't going to make it, but she had hope right until the end. My main worry was that she would appear scared, but she wasn't at all. It was just like going to sleep."

Hampshire-born Debbie was diagnosed with colon cancer in March last year, when she was living in Norfolk. By then, the disease had spread to her liver, and after a single course of chemotherapy, doctors told her there was nothing more they could do.

But after carrying out research on the internet, John found that treatment was available in the United States. Friends, family and well-wishers started fundraising and the couple travelled to California with their nine-year-old son, Callum.

Debbie was put on a new "wonder drug" called Avastin to try and shrink her tumours before removing part of her colon.

Surgeons hoped to carry out a world-first transplant operation eventually, replacing Debbie's diseased liver with part of Bridget's healthy liver.

After Avastin became licensed for use in the UK, Debbie and John decided to return to England to continue the treatment, moving in with Bridget at New Milton. Because the drug has not been approved by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, it is not widely available on the NHS. The family was having to find £2,200 every three weeks to pay for it privately.

Last week, Debbie and John were contacted by US crime writer Patricia Cornwell, who pledged them £30,000 after reading about their plight.

Ms Cornwell also treated the family to two nights in London, putting them up in a pair of riverside suites at the Savoy Hotel, giving them a limousine and driver for the weekend and £1,000 "pocket money".

John said at the time of Ms Cornwell's gesture: "We've still got to scrimp and save, but it's nice not to worry about anything else. All I worry about is Deb. I don't care about not having a house or a car."

First published: August 11