by John Askill
By Saturday he was very ill, vomiting and sleeping a lot, and doctors warned his parents that, if he didn’t improve, they would have to send him to the Queen’s Medical Centre, in Nottingham, just as they had done with Kayley Desmond a few days before. It was a normal precaution for the more seriously ill youngster because Grantham hospital did not have the special facilities to care for critically ill children. The Q.M.C., less than an hour away by ambulance, had a reputation for being one of the finest hospitals in the country.
By Easter Sunday Henry was worse and started having fits. He had such a high temperature that a fan was placed by his side and he was put on a drip to keep him hydrated.
One of the nurses on duty remembered the moment when little Henry suffered a cardiac arrest. His pulse was high and he had the arrest soon afterwards. Henry was rushed to Nottingham by ambulance. His parents went too, desperately worried at what might happen. Jenny said: ‘He was conscious, he knew I was his mum, and he seemed slightly improved when he got there. He had a scan that night and the doctors said they found a blood clot in his head which they reassured us wasn’t a problem.’
Henry recovered so quickly that, by the following Friday, he was well enough to go home. For weeks Jenny and Eddie thought it was the fall that had nearly killed their son.
It had been a dreadful month for Ward Four as crisis after crisis hit each family.
In the world outside attention was focused on more pressing events. The Gulf War was over, though the fires in the desert were still burning. Tennis star Steffi Graf’s father Peter had denied he was the father of a model’s love child, the giant Intersun and Air Europe holiday firm had crashed, hitting 500,000 holidays, new Prime Minister John Major announced the end of the failed Poll Tax and Chancellor Norman Lamont had increased VAT to 17.5% in his Budget.
In America Eric Clapton’s son Conor had plunged 750 feet to his death through a window in his skyscraper home and Mark Phillips was accused of fathering a secret love child in New Zealand, a claim he angrily denied.
But for more and more parents, nothing was more important to them than what was happening to their children at the Grantham and Kesteven General Hospital.
Without doubt the luckiest baby to survive on Ward Four was five-months-old Paul Crampton.
Much later, his escape from the brink of death was to provide the first conclusive evidence that what was happening was no cruel accident, no fluke of nature, no ‘bad run’.
Blood samples would reveal that Paul, who was not diabetic, had a massive amount of insulin in his body; this had sent his sugar level plummeting. The human body needs sugar, mainly in the form of glucose, to feed the brain. In a normal, healthy child, the glucose level runs between 4 and 6 millimoles per litre of blood. The critical balance is controlled naturally by the body using insulin produced by the pancreas.
In the case of baby Paul, on three separate occasions in the space of eight days his insulin level suddenly, and with no apparent reason, soared so high that he collapsed with hypoglycemia, a critical lack of sugar in the body. His lips turned blue, he broke out in a sweat and rolled his eyes alarmingly. Luckily, doctors reacted quickly to the emergency and saved his life by pumping glucose into his body in such vast amounts that they countered the effects of the insulin.
Paul hadn’t been seriously ill when he arrived on Ward Four on 20 March suffering from a heavy cold which had led to bronchiolitis, a severe chest infection. His mother, Kath, told other parents she only expected him to be there for a couple of days. In the ward’s playroom, where her other two youngsters were letting off steam, she announced that Paul was doing so well he would soon be home.
For three days all was well, then, to everyone’s surprise, other parents found Kath crying by the door to Cubicle Two where Paul had been lying but which was now empty. Sue Phillips, who was in the hospital with her twins Becky and Katie, tried to console Kath and asked what was wrong. Kath told her: ‘It’s Paul. He’s taken a turn for the worse. They have got him in the treatment room.’ Doctors were battling to save his life. Inside, Sue could see paediatrician Dr Nanayakkara and the blue uniforms of two nurses, one of them Nurse Allitt.
Sue said: ‘I heard Bev Allitt say: “I think I know what’s wrong with him. He is hypoglycemic.”’
Paul was put on a glucose drip to counteract the shortage of sugar and quickly he showed signs of recovery.
Sue later said: ‘When it was over, I thought how clever the nurse was to have realised what was wrong with him so quickly.’
Another nurse on the ward said: ‘He had been fine apart from a slight temperature, which was reported, but then he arrested. Afterwards, when I saw him, he was surrounded by drips.’
It was several hours before Paul had recovered sufficiently to be wheeled back from the treatment room to his cubicle, attached to a resuscitaire. The previously healthy little boy suffered two more identical attacks in the next few days. Nobody could explain why Paul had suddenly become hypoglycemic. Kath and husband David, a chartered builder, were left feeling that the medical staff were confused.
‘We asked questions, but the answers they gave us didn’t seem to make sense. We felt the staff didn’t know why Paul had become hypoglycemic,’ recalled David.
Finally, Paul was transferred to Nottingham ‘as a precaution’.
Sue Phillips recalled: ‘His mum was in tears. One minute she had been told Paul was fine, then he was so ill. He had only gone into hospital for something simple and they only expected him to be there for a couple of days.’
Paul was taken to the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham where he, like the others, made a full recovery.
Doctors took a sample of his blood to send away to a laboratory at Cardiff University for analysis, hoping for a clue that might explain what had happened to him. The results were to be shocking.
4. Becky and Katie
Twins Becky and Katie Phillips, who had been kept in hospital for observation after their premature birth, put on weight quickly and finally came home on 4 March when they were almost five weeks old. It was an exciting time and friends and neighbours poured in to welcome the girls.
Sue brought them home in identical pink and white dresses, pink cardigans and frilly white socks.
They were already showing their individual characters – Katie was always ‘a bit faddy’, as Sue put it, often playing up a little, while Becky was always very calm and placid. They wondered if it would continue that way for the rest of their lives.
As they peered dotingly at the two, near-identical babies both asleep in their separate cots in the new back-bedroom nursery, proud father Peter remembers how he turned, smiling, to Sue and beamed: ‘They’re beautiful. They’re going to break a few hearts when they grow up.’
But hearts were to be broken much quicker than that.
Just nine days later Katie went back into hospital. She had had a tummy bug and, after twenty-four hours, the family doctor decided she should go into hospital to be monitored, just as a precaution, though he suspected it was nothing more than gastro-enteritis.
As she walked on to Ward Four Sue recognised Nurse Beverley Allitt whom she hadn’t seen since they were students together.
Sue recalls: ‘I spotted her straight away. I hadn’t seen her for about five years, since we were at the Grantham College of Further Education together. I didn’t know her really well and I didn’t know she had actually become a nurse until I saw her there in the ward.
‘She wore two badges – one for the Lincolnshire School of Nursing and the other for the Royal College of Nursing.
‘But, while I recognised her, she made no sign of acknowledging that she knew me. She just carried on working and I was more worried about seeing how Katie was. I didn’t even stop to speak to her.’
Sue also recognised Sister Barbara Barker who had been on the ward so long that she had nursed Sue herself twice as a child – once, at age six, when she swallowed a chocolate Brazil nut which had stuck in her throat and ano
ther, at the age of nine, when she had an ‘abscess on my bum the size of an orange’.
Katie was in the hospital for four days and was then allowed home. Then both girls were sick and the doctor sent them both back to Ward Four.
Two days later brother James, then aged four, went down with a bug and he, too, was admitted, so that all three of the Phillips’s children were patients in the same children’s ward.
On her visits to the children Sue again saw Nurse Allitt several times, always busy working, but, again, the two women didn’t speak or acknowledge each other. Twice Sue noticed the chubby, blonde nurse attending to either her twins or to James, but nothing was said.
After five days the twins were sent home but doctors still couldn’t explain why they had been ill. James came home two days later. Then Becky became ill again; frantic, Sue was getting to the end of her tether.
She said: ‘I took her back to the hospital. What else could I do? She was throwing up all over the place.’ It was ‘projectile vomiting’ which, Sue said, two-month-old Becky could send flying almost three feet.
‘But they made me feel paranoid. The doctor who came said: “What is it this time, Mrs Phillips?”
‘I suppose you couldn’t blame him, but Becky was ill and there was nothing I could do about that.’
Doctors finally discovered that the type of milk being given to the twins was the cause of the problem. The hospital used ready-mixed baby’s milk but Sue mixed her own from powder.
Relieved that the problem had been identified Sue went to bring Becky home from the hospital on 4 April and was pleased to hear that she had just been fed. She was surprised, however, when Nurse Allitt told her that it was not a good idea for Becky to go home, and tried to persuade her to leave her in the hospital.
Sue said: ‘She didn’t want her to go home. She said she didn’t like the look of her and thought she should stay in. The Sister on duty had a good look at her and said Becky seemed fine to her and told me I could take her. The decision seemed to annoy Nurse Allitt.’
Sue, happy to have the babies together again at home, put them both straight into their baby chairs in the lounge so they could sleep and, with Peter still not home from work, she sat down in front of the TV at 7.30pm to enjoy the start of her favourite programme, ‘EastEnders’.
She thought the nightmare was finally over. But it was only about to begin.
Becky started to scream. Sue rushed over to pick her up. Surely she couldn’t need feeding again so soon? She must be still full from the hospital.
Sue said: ‘The screams stopped as I held her. I was looking into her face, watching for a sign of what might be wrong, when I saw her eyeballs just drop down to the bottom of their sockets. I was just looking at the whites of her eyes, nothing more.
‘I thought I was seeing things. It was awful and I didn’t know what it was. Then, just as quickly as it had started, it was over.
‘I had to feed Katie and James was playing up, then Katie started crying and I was literally tearing my hair out wondering what to do next when Peter finally came home from work at about 8 o’clock.’
Sue was holding Becky, who was crying in her arms, and Peter took her. He was still holding her when she let out another awful scream. She was not yet nine weeks old but the sound was ear-piercing.
Sue said: It was as if someone had stabbed her. It was a pitiful scream that will haunt me for the rest of my life.’
Frantically they wondered what could be wrong with her. Sue thought it must be wind. Peter said: ‘That’s the cry of a kid in pain.’
Sue remembers snapping back at him: ‘Don’t be ridiculous. She only came out of hospital four hours ago.’
Peter suggested calling the doctor but Sue would have none of it because she didn’t want to be seen as a nuisance. She said afterwards: ‘I should have let him. I should have listened to him then, but I didn’t.’
She convinced herself that Becky must have wind because, if it had been anything more serious, the hospital would have found it.
They put Jamie to bed and Katie fell asleep downstairs. Becky was awake but quiet and seemed happy.
Then at 10.30pm it started again. She was screaming and crying and contorting her face. ‘She was doing weird things with her face, twisting it up,’ said Sue. ‘It looked as though she could be having an epileptic fit. We began to panic because we didn’t know what was happening.’
Peter telephoned for the emergency doctor and a local GP arrived at about 11pm. He watched Becky’s face contort and heard her screams. It could be severe colic, he thought, and suggested feeding her. He had another patient to see and he would return. Sue gave Becky a feed and, when the GP came back, he winded her. She seemed better. Yes, it must be colic. Becky fell sound asleep.
Reassuring the now exhausted couple, he told them the best advice to them was to go to bed and get some sleep themselves.
At 2.30am Katie awoke as expected, ready for her night feed. Sue noticed that Becky, too, was stirring. She picked Becky up in her arms, holding her as always, with her bottom in one hand and the other hand supporting her head, when Becky suddenly went into spasms again. Her little face contorted and her eyes started rolling. It didn’t last long and then she dropped off to sleep again.
We were so worried, we took her into our double bed and put her between us, thinking that she would wake up in another quarter of an hour for her feed anyway.’
Becky normally breathed quite heavily when she slept. You could hear the little sighs made by her breathing across the room. Peter was to hear first the awful sound of silence. As he looked down at Becky, he was filled with a sense of panic and shouted: ‘She’s stopped breathing.’
Sue, still half asleep, told him: Oh, Peter! Don’t be silly.’
But, as she turned, she could see her husband holding Becky in his arms and trying to blow into her mouth. She was lying limp and lifeless, like a rag doll. He began massaging her chest, battling to get her back to life, and shouting through tears for Sue to phone for an ambulance.
They didn’t wait for the ambulance to arrive. They raced instead to their car and drove to the hospital, half a mile away, dashing straight up to the doors of the Accident and Emergency Department where they pressed the emergency doorbell, virtually kicking the door down. In the middle of the night the door was locked for security reasons. A nurse quickly opened it and Sue, who had been holding Becky, thrust the limp, lifeless body into her arms.
The nurse ran off shouting: ‘Resus. Resus.’
But it was too late. Becky was already dead. She had died at home as she lay in their bed after her last outburst of screams. The hospital did what it could but Becky was pronounced dead at 3.55am on 5 April 1991.
Sue remembers that every nurse at the hospital seemed to be in tears and doctors couldn’t explain what had happened. Genuine words of love and comfort poured out from the staff.
But why had she died so soon after being discharged from hospital? Becky had been in hospital for two days and been home less than twelve hours. Now she was dead, without any apparent reason. Sue’s thoughts flashed back to the moment when Nurse Allitt had said she should not take her daughter home.
Now she turned to the doctor on duty and demanded: ‘I want to know what has killed Becky.’ But he couldn’t tell her.
He feared it could be meningitis. And Sue was sent hurrying back home to bring in Katie for urgent checks. Whatever it was that had tragically killed Becky might strike down her twin sister too. Katie was taken back to Ward Four for observation.
It was to be her turn next. Later that same day Katie was fighting for her own little life.
It was 7.30am when Nurse Bev Allitt arrived to start the day shift on Ward Four. Becky had been dead less than five hours and now she was told to monitor her tiny twin sister, Katie.
Sue Phillips remembers that, from the start of that day, the nurse was a different person. For the first time she spoke to Sue. Her words, warm and comforting, still stick clear in Su
e’s memory. Nurse Allitt whispered: ‘I am ever so sorry, Sue, that Becky died. But don’t worry about Katie. She will be fine.’
She hadn’t spoken to Sue for three years and now she was genuinely concerned. It was the first indication to Sue that Nurse Allitt even remembered her.
Sue couldn’t control her anger at the hospital and snapped back: ‘I find it very strange how the staff on this ward have treated me while I have been bringing my babies in here, and now that Becky has died it’s all so different.’
It was the forgivable outburst of an angry mother whose little baby had just died. Calmly defusing the confrontation, the nurse told her softly: ‘That sometimes happens when someone dies, Sue.’
The police arrived – called by the hospital as a matter of routine to make enquiries into Becky’s ‘sudden death’. Peter, who had broken down, crying uncontrollably when he was told Becky was dead, still couldn’t bring himself to identify Becky’s body, and the job was left to Sue. She was led quietly into a room where she identified the body of Becky Grace Phillips to the waiting police officer. Her baby, born just nine weeks earlier, was at peace, looking as though she was fast asleep.
For strength, she returned to Ward Four where Katie was perfectly healthy. She was in the hospital just as a precaution, to be monitored, they said, after the death of Becky.
Desperately tired, they wanted to go home for a break at lunchtime. It had been an awful night and Katie was asleep. Sue remembers Nurse Allitt saying: ‘You go. I will look after her. She will be all right with me.’ They had been home just half an hour when the phone rang. A man’s voice from the hospital told Peter that Katie was having trouble breathing – and they wanted one of them to go back to the hospital.
It didn’t sound like an emergency. Sue and her father had already steeled themselves emotionally to go to the undertakers that afternoon to begin arranging Becky’s funeral, a job they were dreading but one that had to be done. Peter decided to return to the hospital alone to see Katie. When he arrived he realised it was more serious than he’d expected. Katie had been placed on a resuscitaire, to help her breathing, and Sister Jean Saville was caring for her.