Kieran dies at 26

When my nose started running, accompanied by a sore throat and headache, he immediately thought of a virus, after all, it was winter and we were still in the Covid period. When the test for the disease came back negative, he had then retraced everything to a flu state but those symptoms had not disappeared at all, becoming instead more and more severe until the terrible diagnosis of brain tumor. It is the terrible story of Kieran Shingler, a young British man died at just 26 years old in recent days, before Christmas, after a three-year battle with the disease.

The first symptoms in January 2022 which seemed entirely compatible with a seasonal illness. Cold, headache, general dizziness and tiredness that didn’t seem to go away. “He was fit, he was doing triathlons and training so we understood that something was wrong: it wasn’t Kieran” said his girlfriend.

His GP then advised him to go to Warrington Hospital, where doctors initially suspected he had meningitis but a CT scan revealed a mass on his brain. Kieran was then transferred to the Walton Center in Liverpool, where he underwent four surgeries. Four days after Christmas 2022, an hour before Kieran underwent surgery for a permanent shunt, his family was told that had a third degree astrocytoma, a fast-growing cancerous tumor.

Thanks to various cycles of radiotherapy and chemotherapy, the cancer then progressively regressed until last summer when, after new medical checks, the cold shower arrived. The mass had begun to grow again. This time the disease gave him no escape and unfortunately, despite the surgeries and cycles of exhausting radiotherapy and chemotherapy, the 26-year-old died in a hospice on December 14th, just over a week before Christmas.