by Sam Lennon

slennon@thekmgroup.co.uk

A cancer victim is making a desperate appeal to be reunited with her natural parents before she dies.

Karen Adams, who turned 40 on Friday, has just six to 12 months to live.

She has now launched a public appeal for help in tracing her mum and dad.

Cancer-stricken Miss Adams, of Canterbury Road, South Willesborough, lost all contact with both soon after she was adopted as a baby.

She has been searching for them for 16 years.

Miss Adams, a mother-of-three, said: "Since I became ill my need to find them has intensified.

"I would love to meet them and I've run 100 times through my head what I would like to say to them."

She has had recent messages offering new leads in her poignant search, including one from a woman who had been in the same materinity ward as her mother.

She said: "Not all of these calls have come to anything. A woman called Carol Cooper said she remembered my mother as they had been having their babies in the same hospital.

"But she could not help as to where my mother is now.

"Another lady called saying she thought her dad might be mine, but names and details didn't match up."

She had struggled to find her parents through social services and also gone back to addresses where her mum previously lived, in Brighton.

She said: "I would call on these addresses and found the present occupants didn't know who my mother was and could not tell me where she might have gone."

Miss Adams has three children, Damion, 19, Jasmine, 17 and Caleb, 12, from a previous relationship, and an 11-month-old grandaughter.

She has a new partner, Paul Randall, 34, who is now the children's stepfather and who she has been with since February 2010.

In April she was diagnosed with cervical cancer and two months ago it was confirmed it was terminal because chemotherapy and radiotherapy hadn't worked.

She had been a painter and decorator until she had been taken ill.

• Anyone who can help in tracing Karen Adams' birth parents should contact senior reporter Sam Lennon on 01233 623232 or email slennon@thekmgroup.co.uk