Hello and thank you for downloading this podcast, which is a conversation between my pal and I, Reverend Ruth Scott, which we recorded at her bedside at Southampton General Hospital last week. And Ruth is undergoing end-of-life care. And I've worked with Ruth now for 10 years, I think it is. Yeah, I think this would be our 10th year of definitely knowing each other,

let alone working together. And Ruth has been a missionary. She is a reverend. She's Reverend Ruth

Scott. She's been a nurse. She's been a midwife. She's been a mentor. And she's been a shoulder

to cry on a hand to hold for literally, probably thousands of people in her life. And now, because

she has only a few weeks left to live, she is in a situation which she's helped other people

through, as I say, many times before. And so I said to it, would you, is this something you'd like

to say, shall we, shall we record something that you might want to tell the world and we'll play it out on this breakfast show? And she, and she said,

yes. And then when we arrived with the tape recorder, her husband, Chris, a lovely husband, Chris,

he said, why don't you just have a chat? So we had a chat. And here it is in its entirety. One two, one two. You sure you want to do this? You

sure? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, of course I am. Yeah. Well, I might not be coherent, Chris, in which

case we can ditch it. So, Ruth, where are we and what's going on? So we're in Southampton General Hospital and essentially

I'm in the process of dying Chris which isn't the place that we expected to be having this

conversation. Not at all. So what's happened when did it begin to happen? So as you know about two

years ago I went became ill with a lymphoma, which was a rather

aggressive one, and had two years of amazing treatment.

And then, unfortunately, that didn't work.

And we just discovered that about two weeks ago. And I thought I was going to have a donor stem cell transplant

but that's not possible to have. So now I guess I've probably just got a few weeks to live and

it's okay. I've got a few, probably two or three weeks to live at most.

So we're in the middle of saying goodbyes with the family and thinking about how it is to be separating from one another.

Now death is something you've dealt with all your life. You've helped people with

their grief before. You've, you know, you've worked with people overseas who've had to have

...