Shocking Royal Cancer News Revealed After Charles & Kate’s Diagnoses—’The Verdict Was Inoperable’
Cancer is one of those things that, once someone in a family is diagnosed, everyone else should be extra vigilant. That’s why, when King Charles announced his cancer diagnosis, speculating about his parents possibly also having had cancer started swirling. And Kate Middleton’s diagnosis put even more of a spotlight on the royal family and the things we learn and don’t about their medical history, even though family history isn’t applicable there.
Now, a new book is claiming that Prince Philip went through a private journey with pancreatic cancer at the end of his life. According to historian Hugo Vickers’s new book, Queen Elizabeth II: A Personal History, Prince Philip was diagnosed in 2013, eight years before his death. Buckingham Palace has not announced what type of cancer King Charles has, only specifying it is not prostate cancer.
Related: Here’s what each royal inherited from Prince Philip
“Doctors had detected a shadow on his pancreas, and had cut him right across his stomach,” Vickers wrote in the book, which is being serialized in the Daily Mail. “The verdict was inoperable pancreatic cancer.”
At the time, according to Vickers, it was believed he would not make any more public appearances. But the Duke of Edinburgh ended up living eight more years after the diagnosis. He passed away in April 2021. “But, as ever, the Duke outwitted the pessimists,” Vickers said.
He stayed briefly at Wood Farm, ironically, where the former Prince Andrew has been living since he was stripped of his titles and evicted from Royal Lodge. But he returned to public duties that same year, 2013. Four years later, in 2017, he retired from public duties and spent the rest of his years mostly living at Wood Farm.
The husband of Queen Elizabeth II died at Windsor Castle on April 9, 2021. He was 99 at the time, and the cause of death given was simply “old age.”
According to Vickers, Philip had no interest in reaching 100, with the biographer writing that he “did not want to reach his 100th birthday” because he “disliked the fuss attendant at such events.”
“On the last night of his life, he gave his nurses the slip, shuffled along the corridor on his Zimmer frame, helped himself to a beer and drank it in the Oak Room,” Vickers wrote. “The following morning, he got up, had a bath, said he did not feel well, and quietly slipped away. By this point, he had lived with pancreatic cancer for nearly eight years — far longer than the usual survival time from diagnosis.”
Was Queen Elizabeth with him? According to Vickers, the answer was no. “The Queen was not there when he died. There had often been times in earlier days when she had asked the staff to let her know when Philip was leaving, only to be told, ‘His Royal Highness left 20 minutes ago.’”
Ironically, this seemed to be the case for his final goodbye, too. Vickers was told that she “was ‘absolutely furious that, as so often in life, [Philip] left without saying goodbye.’”
