I carried my little girl away to die...
Mother was told to take 4-year-old home with paracetamol – then she died of meningitis
A GIRL of four died from a rare form of meningitis hours after being sent home from hospital without being examined properly, her mother said yesterday.
Michelle Foster, 34, added that doctors had told her that her daughter Gracie simply had a virus and should be given paracetamol.
They failed to take her temperature for hours and discharged her without a full examination, she told an inquest.
Recalling how she carried her daughter out of the hospital, Mrs Foster sobbed as she said: ‘I had full trust in what the doctor said. In hindsight, I feel really stupid that I trusted him.
‘When I carried her away from hospital I thought she must be all right. But I took her away to die. I feel so stupid.’
Gracie died after a cardiac arrest when she was taken back to hospital.
She had been due to undergo surgery to remove her tonsils at Chesterfield Royal Hospital on October 21, 2015.
Her mother said she ‘skipped’ on to the ward just after 7am and had been excited to see her name on the board above her bed. Later in the morning, she became unwell, feeling sleepy and hot. A nurse took her temperature and recorded it at 40.1C (104.2F). An anaesthetist cancelled her operation, saying she was too poorly for it to go ahead.
Mrs Foster told Chesterfield Coroners Court that when Gracie was discharged no one had checked her temperature for at least three hours.
Just before leaving, consultant paediatrician Dr Tim Ubhi came to see them but he did not fully examine her daughter, she said.
He looked ‘ down her throat’ at her tonsils, then told Mrs Foster her daughter had a viral infection and she should go home and take painkillers.
‘I thought she was not that poorly,’ she said. ‘As I dressed her she did not want to sit up. She could not walk out of the hospital.
‘As I carried her she said, “Hold me tighter”. She was flopping. There was no way she was skipping out like she’d skipped in.
‘When I was carrying her out I was annoyed that she would not say goodbye to anyone. I thought she was being mardy.’
Mrs Foster carried her daughter from the hospital just after 12.30pm and took her to her grandmother Susan Ann Rayner’s house.
She was given paracetamol and ibuprofen as instructed by the doctor and, thinking she would respond, Mrs Foster went out to a school disco with her son and left Gracie in Mrs Rayner’s care. Mrs Rayner later contacted her to say the little girl was very unwell but she said she was convinced her mother was ‘overly worrying’.
Then just before 7pm she took a call saying Gracie had been rushed to Sheffield Children’s Hospital, where, struggling to breathe, she was put into intensive care.
Mrs Foster told the inquest: ‘I drove to Sheffield. It was the biggest shock of my life to see her like that, covered in tubes, with ten people all around her.
‘She was absolutely covered in a purple rash. She just did not look like Gracie at all. But I fully trusted them to make her better.’ Medical staff did stabilise Gracie for a time but later in the evening her condition deteriorated.
Mrs Foster, from Old Whittington, near Chesterfield, Derbyshire, said she watched medics battling to save her daughter as she went into cardiac arrest.
‘Her heart beat came back and we got to say goodbye, then it happened again and she wasn’t surviving anymore,’ she said. Gracie died at 10.36pm. ‘I did not find out until after that there was really nothing they could have done for her by the time she had got to hospital,’ Mrs Foster said. A post-mortem examination found Gracie died from Waterhouse-Friderichsen syndrome – an adrenal gland failure – caused by a severe meningococcal infection.
The court heard that three weeks earlier a letter was sent home to Gracie’s parents after a pupil at Lenthall Nursery and Infant School in Dronfield, Derbyshire, was struck down by meningitis.
Staff nurse Shereen MacDonald told the inquest that earlier in the day Gracie had vomited up medication and she took her temperature twice.
A thermometer on her forehead gave a reading of 40.1C, while one in her ear was lower, although she did not record this. Miss MacDonald called the anaesthetist and told him about the higher reading and Gracie vomiting.
Derbyshire senior coroner Dr Robert Hunter asked why had she not mentioned the second reading. The nurse said she did not know.
‘I suggest that second temperature never took place,’ he said. Miss MacDonald did not reply.
A reading taken minutes later gave a temperature of 37.8C and Gracie’s mother was told the surgery was unlikely to go ahead.
The inquest, which is due to last four days, continues.
‘I feel stupid that I trusted the doctor’