Killed by gastric bypass
Mum who lost 20st in a year starves after surgery left her unable to eat
A MOTHER starved to death after her NHS-funded gastric bypass left her unable to eat, her family claimed yesterday.
Angela Jones lost 20st in a year after the weight-loss operation as she could not keep food down.
She suffered a ‘ slow and agonising death’, passing away four years later, aged 42, weighing just five stone.
Gastric bypass surgery is one of the most common weight-loss procedures and leaves patients needing only small amounts of food before they feel full. Mrs Jones weighed 26st when she decided to have the operation after doctors warned she would die without it.
But her youngest daughter, Chantel Graf, 19, said the risks of severe side effects were not properly explained.
She said: ‘ Mum was always overweight. She tried every diet going. But she couldn’t maintain her weight loss.
‘ She thought the bypass would be the start of a new life. By the end she was a living skeleton, confined to a wheelchair.
‘She just faded away in front of my eyes. We believe my mum would still be alive if she hadn’t had this done.’
Mrs Jones had the £10,000 bypass at the private Spire Southampton Hospital in March 2010. Because her BMI of 79 classed her as morbidly obese, the NHS paid for the operation and she lost 2st through dieting before the procedure.
During a gastric bypass operation surgeons create a small pouch at the top of the stomach that connects to the small intestine, bypassing the rest of the stomach so patients need very little food to feel full.
But within days of the operation the mother-of-two, who also had diabetes, felt sick and could not keep food down. Her meals had to be liquidised.
By March 2011, weighing just 4st, she was readmitted to hospital and given a feeding tube. On her return to her Portsmouth home she had to be hooked up to a feeding machine for ten hours a day.
She put on some weight but by September 2011 the stress of her condition led to the breakdown of her marriage.
As Mrs Jones went in and out of hospital, doctors warned that her internal organs were shutting down because of the lack of food. She died in March 2014 at Portsmouth’s Queen Alexandra Hospital.
Her daughter said: ‘I begged Mum to eat. I even tried spoonfeeding her. It broke our hearts. Doctors would put her on a drip and Mum would get slightly better, only to slip back again.
‘ The gastric bypass had starved her to death. She was just skin and bone when she went. It put her through hell.’
Her weight-loss surgery was listed among the causes on her death certificate along with included multi- organ failure, protein malnutrition and diabetes.
Portsmouth coroner David Horsley found she died from a combination of natural disease and complications arising from gastric bypass surgery.
Spire Southampton Hospital declined to comment.
‘She just faded away’