Jean, 73, was bright as a button ... two days later she was dead
JEAN Stevens had entered Gosport War Memorial Hospital for rehab after a stroke at the age of 73.
She was ‘bright as a button’ when she entered the now notorious Daedalus Ward in 1999. Yet she was quickly put on a cocktail of painkillers and sedatives and within two days was dead.
And her husband Ernest has been waiting for the truth about her death for nearly twenty years.
The Second World War veteran, now 92, said: ‘We had been planning a party for when she came home.
‘But the next day I went in and she was just laid out. I asked a nurse what the matter with her was and she just said: “I can’t really tell you”.
‘They had put her on a [drugs] pump straight away and she only opened her eyes once after that, just before she died. I truly believe my wife had quite a lot of time to go before she was put on those drugs.’
Mr Stevens is now in failing health. He suffered a serious stroke followed by a heart attack in 2012.
The great-great-grandfather, who served in the Royal Engineers and also worked as an ambulance driver, blames his fragile state on the stress of fighting for answers over his wife’s death.
‘I am past being angry now’, he continued: ‘The hospital admitted they had given her an overdose, a cocktail of drugs. But I still keep going over and over it in my mind. The GMC told me it would be sorted but it has never been. This report really is the last hope. I don’t feel I am going to be here much longer, and I want some answers. It has been such a long 20 years.
‘So many people like me... have died without knowing the truth about what happened. It is so sad.
‘My wife Jean was perfect in every way. And I know she is looking down on me.’