Dad-of-three 'couldn't swallow a piece of ham' - it was the first sign of a lethal condition

“It was just a perfectly normal Wednesday afternoon, I was working from home and became a bit peckish, so I went down to the fridge. I took out a packet of ham and as soon as I swallowed some, it just wasn’t going down.”

This was the moment, on an average weekday afternoon, that a dad-of-three made a life-changing discovery. After following a hunch about his strange experience, David Jones-Stanley, from Atherton, uncovered that he had cancer of the oesophagus.

Often only showing up with symptoms when it’s too late, oesophageal cancer can be hard to treat and hard to survive. David says he was ‘lucky’ on that Wednesday afternoon, which kickstarted months of gruelling treatment – and eventually ended in him being declared cancer-free.

Now, he wants to raise awareness and urge people to get checked out if they know they don’t feel right.

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David was 47-years-old when he first experienced difficulty being unable to swallow, two years ago. He didn’t have a lot of the traditional symptoms like heartburn or acid reflux, but knew something was wrong when he went to get some ham from the fridge while working from home and couldn’t swallow it.

“I could breathe, but it was sitting just below my throat. I wasn’t choking or panicking but the food was just sitting there and wasn’t shifting,” David told the Manchester Evening News.

“I was pacing around, I went to the toilet, had been forcing myself to cough but nothing was really helping because it wasn’t stuck in my throat, it was like it was just beyond that. It took about 20 minutes for it to shift. I thought ‘that wasn’t great’.

“I went to take a drink of water and the same thing happened. I thought ‘that’s not