28 November 2023 , 07:59
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Jade Goody's proudest achievement was her two sons, and her love for them was never more apparent then when she left her bed just hours from death to perform the impossible for them.
Drifting in and out of consciousness with just 48 hours to live, when she heard her son Bobby, then five, crying in his sleep, she defied the doctors by using the last of her last strength to get out of bed, climb the stairs and put Bobby on her back. "She wasn't eating and the doctor said her health was deteriorating rapidly. But that night Jade got up, walked upstairs and pulled [Bobby] up onto her back and brought him to her hospital bed," her close friend Kevin Adams told The Sun.
"The next day I told the doctor what had happened and she said, 'no Jade doesn't have the strength to do that because everything in her body is failing'. "I told her that I saw it with my own eyes. She was able to do it because those kids meant everything to her. That memory will live with me forever, it is so special to me."
Bobby Brazier on Strictly Come Dancing with Dianne Buswell (BBC)Jade fought valiantly, undergoing painful procedure after painful procedure in a bid to stay alive for her sons. But on Valentine's Day 2009, her world collapsed when doctors told the cancer had spread to her liver, bowel and groin and was now terminal. Given just months to live, she was admitted to a hospice after the drugs made her hallucinate but was allowed to return to her house in Essex, where her dining room was fitted with a hospital bed.
On February 22 she married her 19-year-old boyfriend Jack Tweed at Down Hall Country House Hotel in Harfield Heath, Essex, in front of 200 guests including Richard Madeley, Paul O'Grady and Judy Finnigan. Despite her rapidly failing health, she astounded everyone by not only finding the strength to walk down the aisle but also to dance on the tables
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Her grandfather John Craddock told the Daily Mirror: "You should have seen her dancing with all those dolly birds. She was jumping up and down dancing like a jive bunny. It was brilliant. She had a wild time." But while the day left her drained and exhausted, for Jade it helped her find peace in the tragedy that was to come.
"I've had the happiest day of my life. Now I'm ready to go to heaven," she told OK! magazine. After undergoing another operation to remove a bowel blockage she went home and began slipping in and out of consciousness. Husband Jack slept on the floor next to her hospital bed, and recalled how Jade would wake up singing or thinking "she was nursing a baby in her arms."
Jade Goody with her two sons"She'd tell me to be quiet so I didn't wake the baby. I used to go along with it and pretend to take the baby and call Jackiey (Budden, Goody's mother) in and pretend to give the baby to her,'" he told OK!. "I'd then ask Jade whether she was OK and she'd say: 'Yes that's fine, now I can sleep.'"
Worried that she'd no longer recognise him and her sons, Jack would show her pictures and get her to say who each person was. But despite her exhaustion, she never lost her sass. “She said, ‘You, Bobby, Freddy, me ... I’m not a f***ing idiot Jack!’” he revealed to OK! “So she was still having a go at me right until the end, but that made me happy, because that was Jade being Jade."
As the cancer cruelly marched on, she lost her sight in one eye and became unable to eat and eventually speak. Her last words were about pineapples - the only food she was still able to stomach. And on the night doctors warned would be her last, Jack stayed in the front room, unable to listen to his wife fight for breath.
“It’s horrible to watch someone you love struggling to breathe when there’s nothing you can do to help," he said. “I kept going in to kiss her and check that she was breathing. But I knew it was going to happen that night. I just couldn’t stay in the room.” “I wasn’t asleep. I was just lying there waiting. I heard [her mum] Jackiey crying and I knew.
“I walked into the room, stroked her face, kissed her and broke down.” Jade was just 27 when she died on March 22, 2009 - Mother's Day. But before she went, she made sure her sons would know where to find her if they needed her. “I’m not sure they know what dying means, and in a way I don’t want them to know the full ins and outs,” she told OK! magazine at the March 14 baptism ceremony for herself and Bobby, then five, and Freddie, four.“I will be the brightest star in the sky for them, always looking over them and protecting them,” she said.