Grieving mother tells coroner ‘I took my daughter home to die’
THE MOTHER of a four-year-old girl who died from a meningococcal infection hours after she was sent home from hospital has told a coroner: “I took her away to die.”
Gracie Foster went to Chesterfield Royal Hospital for a tonsil removal operation which was cancelled when she became unwell, her mother Michelle Foster told an inquest yesterday.
Miss Foster described how a consultant paediatrician told her Gracie had a viral infection and sent her home.
Within hours, her daughter became much worse and was taken to Sheffield Children’s Hospital where she died the same day.
At an inquest in Chesterfield, Miss Foster said Gracie seemed well before the planned operation on October 21, 2015.
But she then complained of a sore throat, vomited and was found to have a temperature of 40.1 degrees.
Miss Foster said she was told to take her daughter home but she was “flopping” so much she had to carry her out of the hospital.
She said: “I thought she must be all right. I took her away to die.”
After Miss Foster left Gracie at her mother’s house, still thinking she had a minor virus, she later got a call saying her mother was taking her to A&E. Miss Foster said that the next call she got said “she’d crashed” at Sheffield Children’s Hospital.
A post-mortem examination found that Gracie died of Water-house-Friderichsen syndrome caused by a meningococcal infection. The inquest heard that Gracie had brought a letter home from school three weeks earlier informing parents that a pupil had meningitis.
Miss Foster, of Old Whittington, near Chesterfield, said she was not worried for her daughter as she had little contact with the child. She told the coroner that the boy’s condition was nothing like what happened to Gracie.
The coroner heard how pupils at Lenthall Nursery and Infant School, in Dronfield, had made a card ready for their friend’s return from her operation.
The inquest is due to run until on Friday.