In March last year, 68-year-old Ronnie Haston was making plans to retire when he started feeling constipated.

The fit and active business owner had no underlying health conditions, so his GP ordered blood tests and prescribed laxatives to ease his digestion.

But when the symptoms didn’t let up – and he started experiencing muscle pain and fatigue – Ronnie’s wife, Anne, took him to A&E.

There, he was diagnosed with myeloma, a form of blood cancer affecting around 33,000 people across the UK.

And two weeks after being admitted to hospital, he was dead.

‘It was a complete shock to us all,’ said his devastated stepdaughter, Beth Hunt, 42. ‘He didn’t get to enjoy one day of retirement with my mum or do any of the future they had planned together.’

The nurse, from East Calder, recalled that in the weeks before his scheduled blood tests, Ronnie ‘just didn’t look right’.

When her mum insisted on a visit to A&E, tests showed his kidney function had plummeted to just 14%, and he had extremely high calcium levels.

Doctors drew up a treatment plan, telling Ronnie’s family he could be a good candidate for a stem cell transplant.

However, Beth said: ‘He ended up having two lots of chemo while very unwell with pneumonia and then two days later he died.

‘He pretty much went into multi-organ failure. It’s shocking, completely shocking.’

Although she doesn’t blame any of the medical professionals who treated Ronnie, she feels ‘the system’ – which caused long waits and a ‘catalogue of errors’ – is at fault for what happened to him.

‘We kept saying, “He needs a blood test”, but he couldn’t get a blood test for two weeks,’ she said. ‘In this day and age how is that acceptable? If somebody is unwell, you need the blood test now. Even in hospital, it was all too little too late.’

Beth believes GPs should receive additional education on the symptoms of myeloma, which can be ‘non-descript and not obvious.’

She explained: ‘You could put them down to muscle ache and being tired, but these should be red flags for a GP, especially in someone with no underlying conditions and having never been to a GP apart from with cellulitis from mosquito bites.

‘If Ronnie hadn’t been so unwell by the time he got into hospital, he would have been in a better position to fight it.”

On the night of her beloved stepfather’s funeral, the mum-of-two signed up to run the Edinburgh Marathon in his honour.

‘When I ran a 10-mile eight years ago, mum and Ronnie were my biggest supporters,’ said Beth. ‘They ran across Edinburgh to meet me at as many points as they could.’

While it’s her first ever marathon, she’s spurred on by thinking of Ronnie and her mum.

‘The last year without him has been awful for her,’ she added. ‘If she can wake up without him and can put one foot in front of the other, then I can take it one step at a time too.’

So far, she has raised over £2,900 for Myeloma UK, which she hopes will help prevent other families from going through what she did.

‘I’d had Ronnie in my life since I was 19,’ Beth said ‘You don’t realise the impact someone had until you lose them.’

She added: ‘He was a gentle man. He was always someone you could lean on. He’d never judge, he’d always support you and just show up.

‘Life will never be the same without him. It is so cliché, but the reality is, life is short and so precious.’

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