'I couldn't believe it had struck again'

Nikki and Michelle lost their sister Tracey to breast cancer. Here, they tell new about the days they too were diagnosed with the disease

- LUCY ROBINSON

As she glanced at her phone, Nikki Ratcliffe saw her brother-in-law was desperately trying to call her.

While it wasn't unusual for him to ring to see how her day was going, this phone call felt different. As soon as she said, "Hello," her whole world turned upside down.

"It all happened really quickly," she tells us.

"After my sister, Tracey, was diagnosed with breast cancer two years before, she'd often spend time in hospital, but she'd always say that it would all be fine, they were just going to stabilise her and then she'd be back home." "Then I got that devastating call from my brother-in-law to say she had just hours left to live.

She wanted to die at home, but they didn't get her there in time. Even though I knew it was going to happen, I got angry and broke down. She was 49 with two young children."

Despite Tracey living in New Zealand with her husband and 10 and nine-year-old daughters, she and her younger sister Nikki, now 52, had remained close. With their shared love of clothes, the pair could spend hours in London shopping until they dropped and even managed to rope in their "tomboy" sister Michelle Blackburn, 55, occasionally.

But when Tracey found a pea-sized lump in her breast while having a shower and was subsequently diagnosed with stage four breast cancer in 2014, the trio became even closer.

"As soon as we found out it had spread, we dropped everything and went to New Zealand to be with her," explains Michelle.

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"Tracey never spoke about her diagnosis so we didn't really know the full extent of it. She was in denial almost. She wanted to protect her children as she didn't want them to see their mum dying. It was really, really hard," adds Nikki. It was Tracey's husband who revealed her diagnosis was terminal.