Popular journalist dies

6:04pm Monday 13th October 2008

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By Nigel Burton »

Journalist Jill Neill, who worked for The Northern Echo and the Darlington and Stockton Times, has died after a long battle with cancer.

Doctors told Jill, 50, that she had ovarian cancer in December 2006.

When I felt at my most miserable in the clutches of the horrible side effects, I reminded myself that I would feel fit and well again and go jogging round the park on a summer day in the company of thousands of others.

Journalist Jill Neill about why she took part in the Race For Life

Despite the devastating diagnosis Jill, who lived in Melsonby and worked in Richmond, refused to let the disease get the better of her.

After chemotherapy she signed up for Cancer Research's Race For Life, partly as a way to regain her fitness but also to give something back to the doctors and nurses who cared for her.

At the time she said: "When I felt at my most miserable in the clutches of the horrible side effects, I reminded myself that I would feel fit and well again and go jogging round the park on a summer day in the company of thousands of others."

Between them, Jill and her friend raised £500.

Jill's determination to make the best of a bad situation shone through in everything she did.

Last year she wrote a moving account of how it felt to lose her hair as a side-effect of chemotherapy.

She also agreed to "before" and "after" pictures of her wig.

But behind the sunny disposition and the ever present smile, Jill was struggling through difficult chemotherapy treatment.

Later she admitted: "Each blast of chemo sentences me to ten days of sickness and nausea, severe joint pains, abdominal cramps, fatigue and a general feeling of my whole system having been poisoned - which, of course, it has. And that's without the weight gain caused by the accompanying steroids and the hair loss."

It's a great tribute to her stoicism that many of the people who knew her through her work had no idea she was even ill.

Jill was a Methodist. She had no fear of death and accepted her lot in the same way she embraced everything else in her life.

Although she was too modest to think so, Jill's tremendous courage in the face of such a terrible illness made her an inspiration to her many friends and colleagues.