TODAY marks the first anniversary since campaigner Stephen Dallison lost his fight against kidney cancer.

Mr Dallison passed away on Saturday May 23, 2009, just hours after marrying his fiancee, Olivia Glover.

The 35-year-old, from Iffley Road, Oxford, was one of many activists who fought against the frugal NHS budget which leaves hundreds of Oxfordshire cancer patients begging for life-prolonging drugs every year.

Almost exactly 12 months before Mr Dallison passed away, another campaigner, Jim Wheeler, from Kidlington, also died hoping the NHS would have a change of heart and give him the kidney cancer drug he needed.

Last night, their widows told Oxford Mail readers ‘they may be gone, but they are not forgotten’ and vowed to fight on in their name.

Olivia, 28, met Stephen, a scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, in the Angel and Greyhound pub, in St Clements, Oxford, when they were introduced by friends.

Mrs Dallison told the Oxford Mail about her year and how she remembers her husband.

She said: “I’ll carry on doing anything I can to help in Stephen’s name. Stephen died trying to live.

“We never rushed around doing things for the last time, because Stephen never believed it would be for the last time.

“He was always fighting and fighting to get the drugs he wanted so he could carry on living.

“I think he believed if he could keep extending his life, then eventually they could find something which would cure him.

“On Sunday, we will probably just have a quiet dinner. I have some friends travelling up from London to spend the weekend with me. I don’t know how I will feel. In a way it’s just another day.

“I’m going to a wedding in America with some friends of ours soon.

“In fact, they were there the night Steve and I met. That is the day I will remember Steve.”

Jenny Wheeler, 56, of Kidlington met her husband in her father’s bike shop, Harper’s of Cowley, when she was 19.

Just seven days later, Mr Wheeler proposed, and the couple spent the next 37 years as in love as the day they met.

Mrs Wheeler said she will now never forgive the NHS for refusing her husband a few more months of life, time which would have allowed him to see his youngest granddaughter.

To mark the two-year anniversary of Mr Wheeler’s death, the family will go to Burnham-on-Sea, to the holiday spots he visited as a child and the last place he saw his dancer daughter Janine perform.

Mrs Wheeler said: “I will be thinking about Stephen’s family on Sunday because I know what they’re going through.

“And that’s why I’ll carry on speaking out about it – for Jim and for everyone who has ever been told they can’t have the drugs they need and have already paid for, to live that bit longer.

“The kids say to me ‘Mum you need to take it easy’, but I can’t. I won’t let Jim down.”

Sainsbury’s is preparing to sell cut-price cancer drugs at its Oxfordshire stores.

The supermarket is planning to sell leukaemia, kidney and liver cancer drugs on a not-for-profit basis from May 24.

They will be available from all stores with a pharmacy, including the Heyford Hill store.