Paul Gascoigne: Former England footballer taken to hospital after collapse at home
The Sun reported on Sunday evening that the former Tottenham Hotspur, Newcastle and Rangers midfielder was found semi-conscious in the bedroom of his home in Poole.
The 58-year-old is said to now be in an acute medical ward in a stable condition, and is expected to remain in hospital for several days for treatment.
Former Brighton defender Steve Foster, who reportedly found Gascoigne, told the outlet that he thanks "everyone for the support he's received so far from so many old friends who wish him well and want to see him back to his best".
Gascoigne, who played for England 57 times, has endured a decades-long public battle with drink and mental health problems which started during his playing career and worsened after his retirement from football in 2004.
In 2020, he said he had been able to turn his life around after having anti-alcohol pellets sewn in his stomach, which would make him sick if he had a drink.
Last March, he told the High Performance podcast that he was a "sad drunk" living in a spare room at the Dorset home of his agent Katie Davies.
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Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Strike-hit appointments will take two weeks to rearrange, says NHS chief
Appointments that are cancelled because of strikes will take two weeks to rearrange, according to an NHS chief. Prof Meghana Pandit, NHS England's co-national medical director (secondary care), claimed on Saturday that hospitals would 'trust their best to get appointments rescheduled within two weeks'. Up to 50,000 junior doctors, now known as resident doctors, joined a five-day walkout from 7am on Friday, in a fight for a 29 per cent pay rise. More than 1.5 million appointments and operations have been postponed because of NHS walkouts since 2022. Prof Pandit told BBC Breakfast on Saturday morning: 'If there's any rescheduling or postponement of surgery or appointments then the hospitals try their upmost best to get that appointment rescheduled within two weeks. 'I know it is distressing and even two weeks is too long for somebody to wait and actually that has an impact on the people who who are then displaced at that two week period.' Prof Pandit said there were three 'derogations' granted on Friday, a process which allows hospitals to request striking doctors return to work if there is a risk to patient safety. Nottingham City Hospital reached an agreement with the British Medical Association (BMA) to exempt one doctor from the strike to work on the neonatal intensive care unit. A derogation was agreed for one doctor in the emergency department and another doctor in the ISGM at the Northern General Hospital. The BMA said it had also agreed a derogation for two anaesthetists to work at University Hospital Lewisham on Saturday to ensure patient safety. It comes as Wes Streeting said 'we are doing everything we can to minimise' patient harm. The Health Secretary condemned the strike as 'reckless' and said the Government would not allow the BMA to 'hold the country to ransom'. Sir Keir Starmer made a last-minute appeal to resident doctors, saying the strikes would 'cause real damage'. He added: ' Most people do not support these strikes. They know they will cause real damage. 'These strikes threaten to turn back the clock on progress we have made in rebuilding the NHS over the last year, choking off the recovery.' The BMA has argued that real-terms pay has fallen by around 20 per cent since 2008, and is pushing for full 'pay restoration'. Dr Tom Dolphin, the BMA council chairman, said he was 'disappointed' to see the Government 'taking such a hard line against unions', after The Telegraph revealed Mr Streeting told NHS Leaders strikes should not be 'pain free' for doctors. The BMA claimed the Health Secretary's remarks indicated the Government could be 'intent on breaking blacklisting laws by stopping resident doctors who take part in industrial action from picking up shifts afterwards'. In previous strikes, junior doctors, who now go by the name of resident doctors, have been able to earn large sums by getting overtime rates to clear backlogs, while others have worked as locums during walkouts. Medics have also been able to continue up the ranks despite missing training during strikes. But the NHS will now change stance on both, with hospitals requiring more doctors to work during strikes in order to protect patient safety. Doctors will also be warned that repeated absence from the front line could slow their career progression. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme, Dr Dolphin said: 'It's very disappointing to see a Labour government taking such a hard line against trade unions. 'The settlement last year was a good move by the Labour Government. The problem is they've gone back on their position since then. They're talking about punishing the trade union, talking about punishing doctors, holding them back in their training, making sure that they don't get locum shifts, that kind of thing. 'People are talking about that – which, of course, is not legal. And if we find cases of people being held to detriment for having taken part in strikes, we'll be fighting their case for them. It's just disappointing to hear that kind of rhetoric coming from a Labour administration.' A spokesman for the Department for Health and Social Care said the Government supported NHS workers' right to strike, saying: 'The Government is committed to upholding the legal rights of all workers, including NHS staff, to take industrial action. 'The BMA's choice to pursue five days of strike action will cause harm for patients and staff having to cover absent resident doctors. It is irresponsible to walk out after the largest pay increase in the public sector, while talks were ongoing about conditions that would have had a material financial benefit to their members.'
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
The year after my son died in childbirth
Everything was golden in the weeks after my son died. Glimmering threads of light spooled through my kitchen window and illuminated the most mundane objects, making them look sacred. Sunlight danced on the concrete in my garden and dappled the laundry drying on the line. On a walk, I remember all the grass as wispy strands of ochre and burned yellow. I was having an extended golden hour, pumped full of maternal love with no baby to hold. Hormones, I suspect – which I was surprised to find that you get, even if your baby dies during delivery. 'Will I still get the baby blues?' I asked one of the midwives who sat beside me on my sickbed. 'A bit more than that I think, babe,' she said. I had taken an antenatal class with her, back when I was still sure of myself: specific about what I would need during labour, encouraged by what had been a healthy pregnancy. And now, we were here. My son Mo Ibrahim Lingwood-Noor was born on 15 July 2023. There is an old adage that this date will set the tone for the rest of summer: if it rains that day, the whole season will follow suit. I cannot remember if it was glum or sunny outside on Mo's birthday. From my aseptic hospital bed, I didn't notice the weather. But weirdly, I remember that whole summer as warm, hazy, almost shimmering. I was in the middle of labour when I found out Mo had died. Perhaps I should have known when the nurse started making comments about my baby 'hiding' while I was having contractions, or when she called doctors to get a second and third opinion. But it did not make sense to me: I had braced myself for something to go wrong for me this far along. I never thought it would happen to him. I had gone into the hospital frequently in the weeks preceding Mo's birth in the way that first mothers often do: to check on a leak, to enquire whether a lack of movement indicates something awry. None of these visits had flagged anything to be nervous about. In fact, my pregnancy seemed so routine that often I suspected the midwives wondered why I had come in at all. About two weeks before Mo was born, a midwife recommended I get checked at the hospital. I had been leaking clear fluid she said would be worth looking into. 'You'll be OK,' she giddily told me and my husband, Louis. We headed up the pale blue staircase into the stuffy waiting room for the emergency obstetric unit, which was always too hot and too full with expectant parents sitting sullenly on their phones, waiting to be called in. 'Something is definitely happening!' the midwife shouted as we disappeared around the corner. All the signs pointed to a successful labour – days, if not hours, away. But the experience that followed was deeply unpleasant. The emergency unit's midwife, a nun whose headgear made her appear even more strict than she already was, chastised me for coming in for something so trivial. 'If you're so sure your waters have broken, I'll just induce you!' she threatened. Her tone felt disbelieving and calculated, like she was trying to catch me out for being over the top. I tried to explain that I wasn't sure of anything, and that I had just been sent here by her colleague. I required pain relief during cervical checks, because (unusually, for me) examinations had become unbearably uncomfortable – to the point of tears. But when I told her this, it was like I had crossed a line. 'Fine,' she said. 'I'll give you a paracetamol, and you can wait three hours in the waiting room for it to kick in.' Her response angered me, and I asked to see another midwife. My request was granted, and the rest of the visit was lovely. I left safe in the knowledge that the baby and I were fine. So you can imagine my horror when I arrived at the hospital on the night of Mo's birth, only to be greeted by the same dismissive midwife. I had been awoken that night by a pain so preoccupying I could not see or speak. I walked into a wall on my way in and pushed it away, thinking it was my husband. I could not sit in the car. I could not pee. I could not be examined. I have gone over the following events so many times that I know them better than almost any other detail from that night, including the actual birth. My first instinct when faced with the midwife was to get away from her by any means possible. But then she started asking questions, all of which seemed, to me, like they would lead to more time under her care. 'How are your son's movements? Have you felt him in the last few hours?' she asked. 'I don't know, I'm in labour,' I said. 'If you can't feel him you're going to have to go to the ward,' she told me. She was gentler this time, but I still found her punitive. I felt scared, feral and alone. I wanted to go to the natural birthing suite, where you could lie in a double bed with your partner, and have your baby in a pool. I was terrified of being dragged through one procedure after another, of having my body needlessly decimated – only to greet my son as a shell of myself in a noisy ward where everyone was screaming. But in my state, I had little means to communicate. And I felt so certain that he was going to be OK. So I lied. 'Sure, I can feel him,' I said. Sometime later – maybe hours, but probably less – I ended up going to the ward anyway. That is when we found out Mo had died. They traced a wand over my gelled-up tummy, trying to will a different answer into existence. When they turned the screen towards me, it was like Mo had gone floppy: no longer the animate, sturdy, little figure that responded to prods and presses. Instead he swayed lifelessly at each prompt like an idle jellyfish. 'I'm very sorry,' said the senior doctor who had come in to look at the screen. I do not remember his words after that, just that our baby had died. I did not let out an anguished scream. I did not cry. I just felt sluggish and unavailable. I can still recall the exact feeling: like hot concrete was being poured down me, leaving me stuck in place. 'How can you tell me that?' I repeated blankly for the next few hours. When the clumsy anaesthetist came in around 3am – he looked about 24, with glasses that magnified his terrified expression and long limbs that accentuated the sense that he was out of his depth – I asked him to knock me out and cut me open. He concurred that I had chosen the best course of action. So I went to sleep. At some point between early morning and dawn, I turned sheepishly to Louis to ask: 'Lou, what will happen when he comes out? Will you look?' 'I don't know,' he said, conveying, in one expression, all the confusion and bewilderment that I felt. 'You have no good options here,' our consultant told us. 'But some options will be less bad than others.' It was around three in the morning, several hours after we had been admitted to the ward. I was still having contractions, with no pain relief other than gas and air. I tried to take in our options. The more involved we were in our son's birth, she explained, the more we would be able to process his death. No part of me wanted to deliver vaginally – the thought of Mo's limp body between my legs too much to bear – so I opted to have a C-section, but to stay awake. 'There is one more thing,' she said. 'You have to meet your baby. It is up to you how you do that, but you have to do it.' She gave us choices: they would bring Mo into our room in a crib, and we could hold him and dress him if we wanted. If we found that too hard, we could just look at him from a distance. The hospital had a special ward for babies who had died where we could go and visit him. We could keep doing so for as long as we liked; his crib would be temperature controlled, so he would continue to look alive, or somewhat alive, for a few days. To my great shame, just a few hours earlier, I had convinced myself that I could forgo meeting him. Perhaps I could go to sleep, have him disposed of, pretend like my entire pregnancy had never happened. 'You can't love somebody you've never met,' I told myself. I even told myself that, seeing as this pregnancy was a dud, I could do better on the next one – like my son's death was akin to a failed test. That the hospital gave us no choice about meeting him was a kindness I could not yet comprehend. I did not know it then, but if I had not met Mo, I would have found the experience of losing him all the more disembowelling. But I was also terrified. Horrified, even. I learned somewhere that smells trigger some of the most profound emotional responses. What if he smelled rotten? What if he looked weird? Contorted? Sick? There are so many incongruous things you have to hold side-by-side when your baby dies. Cradling him dead; carting him around in a temperature-controlled crib until you can comprehend that he was never truly alive; and trying to feel the tender, warm, totally accepting feelings you are meant to feel towards a baby towards a corpse instead. These conflicting realities were one hell of a thing to comprehend. Everything in your body tells you to run a mile from death. Yet here I was, being confronted with the decision of whether to hold, kiss and dress it. Meeting my son was, simultaneously, the worst and the best moment of my life. We had waited eight hours to go into surgery, constantly bumped to the bottom of the queue because the other people who needed emergency C-sections were most likely going to end up with living children. During this lull, I was so determined not to deliver vaginally that I convinced myself I had the will to keep Mo inside my tummy. If it was not so sad, it probably would have been funny: the sight of me, clenched in a permanent Kegel, a constipated look on my face, refusing to tell anyone whether or not my contractions were progressing. But I made it to the theatre. Around 10am, I was wheeled into a room where what seemed like a dozen doctors were waiting. They stuck a long needle in my back and sprayed a cold liquid on my body, checking if I could feel it to confirm my lower body was numb. I felt tugging, similar to when the dentist roots around your mouth to pull out a tooth while you are under a local anaesthetic – only in my abdomen. Next thing I knew, the doctor had Mo in her arms. 'Poppy, I can see him. He is gorgeous. I am going to clean him up, and then you'll get to meet him,' she said. Until that point, I still believed they might find him alive. Instead, Louis sat by me, holding my hand and crying. I stared blankly at the ceiling while the surgeons cleaned up underneath a tent they had created from the waist down, preventing us from seeing anything. We were taken into a private room, and Mo was carted over in a little see-through tank. 'He's very beautiful,' one of the midwives said. I found her words surprising: so gentle and accepting like a tonic, slowly bringing me back to life. I was afraid to look. But it was comforting to watch Louis, who did not hesitate, immediately hugging Mo as you would after a normal birth. He kissed him, put a nappy on him, and dressed him in dungarees and a dinosaur T-shirt meant for a six-month-old – because Mo, to our surprise, was quite tall. I fumbled when Louis passed him over, my mind and my body still disconnected. But then there he was. This perfect boy that I had grown from just a seed, his face arranged by our DNA; billions of pairs, prudently linked like figurines in a paper chain. He had this mouth just like mine: shaped like a wooden bow, full, rigid and curved. We wowed at his roman nose, far too adult-like for his soft baby face. And I softly opened the lids of his eyes to see his eye colour. We were with Mo for half an hour or so before family started coming in. And in that time, we somehow became more human. We passed our baby around and watched him being greeted with deep sorrow, but also curiosity and delight, by all the people who had waited so long to meet him. When everyone had left, Louis perked up with a cheeky grin, and asked: 'Do you want to see something funny?' I did not think that anything funny could happen at that moment. With a little chuckle, he lifted Mo's legs to reveal some unexpectedly huge testicles. 'Who do you think he got those from?' he asked. And we erupted into fits of laughter, if only for a short while. After meeting Mo, I emailed HR from the toilet cubicle next to my bed: the sort of thing a deranged person, mad from loss, does when her primal brain reminds her that some self-preservation is necessary to survive. I let them know I had lost my baby in delivery and asked them to make sure my maternity pay still came through. We stayed in the hospital for a few days while I healed, waiting and moving slowly. We visited Mo on what they called the angel ward – although he was the only baby in it – never staying too long in case we got too accustomed to the idea of him. His pretty little face. His wrinkly, too-long fingers. And then we got ready to leave. During my pregnancy, I spent a lot of time sitting in the waiting room, on the other side of where all the action takes place. It was always such a fun moment when families would burst through the double doors, triumphantly, baby in hand. I had been excited for the day we did the same. Instead we walked out empty-handed: me, Louis and the sweet midwife from the antenatal class trailing behind us, all of us weeping. Amid the paperwork were questions about what we wished to do with Mo's body. We felt too fragile to think about our son being picked at and jostled in his death to say yes to anything. So to begin with we said no to it all: photographs, postmortem, investigation. But we began to regret not getting a photograph. One of the hardest things about Mo dying before he was born is that I knew so little about him. I do not know what his smile would have been like, how his cry sounded, or whether his eyes would have stayed blue or turned brown in the end. I suddenly wanted to see him from every angle, to ensure against the fading of my already very finite memories. So a week after we got home, we called and asked if we still had time to have pictures done. A volunteer photographer called back. He was from a charity that handles the delicate work of taking photos of stillborn children, making portraits of them as precious as if they were born alive. He said he would have a look at Mo, who was still in his crib at the hospital, and see how much he had deteriorated to discern if it would be appropriate to take a picture. We received a little USB stick in the post just in time for his funeral. I knew it was coming and awaited it like the most exciting gift. I just could not wait to see Mo one more time. And when I did, I thought: There's our boy. He looked so cute: his cheeks all puckered up in rest; his head less cone-shaped than after delivery; his wavy, dark hair flicking up around his ears and at the top of his head like Angel Delight. I kept the photos on a computer and gave myself a daily allowance of time to look at them, before eventually putting them on my phone and looking at them whenever I wanted. I wanted to show everyone – as parents are wont to do after having a child. But I pained over how, exactly, to ascertain whether people wanted to see photos of him, or whether all they would see was a dead baby. Mo's body was too small for a coffin, so he went below ground in a Moses basket instead. We drove with him in a black cab to a cemetery a few miles down the road. Only Louis and I attended. We played a few songs, and I was surprised to find myself beset with grief listening to 'Father and Son' by Cat Stevens. It is not a happy song, but I guess I was most looking forward to the time in life where Mo had his own mind and disagreed with us. When they lowered him into the dirt, I watched until I could not any more. I had always marveled at how I had built Mo's spine: a structure so sturdy and yet so intricate. Now all I could imagine was it being crushed beneath the soil. Later people came around for the wake. I had rehearsed my speech so many times that I did not cry when I gave it, although everyone else did. I read out letters from friends who had watched us wonder at Mo while he was growing inside me; friends who felt like they knew Mo too. People signed a book that we left in his bedroom with goodbye messages. At the end of the night, I think we went to bed smiling. While working on this piece, I had to rework several sections because they were written in the second person. 'The reminders jump out at you, evil in all their mundanity,' I wrote about experiencing my home like a house of horrors, an assault course in which I would constantly have to duck and dive baby nostalgia to make it through a single day. But these things didn't jump out at you. They jumped out at me. Sleights of hand such as these reveal something: in my case, that I am still so dissociated from losing my baby that I cannot describe it as having happened to me. My mind does backbends to keep everything I went through at arm's length – even as the rational part of me makes all the right, therapised sounds of acceptance. This is one of the many layers of self-deception I have had to peel away since Mo died. It has been two years, and I still have not fully been able to take it all in. I had been proud of myself in pregnancy, feeling strong and functional. Something about reaching this rite of passage and passing all of the necessary milestones without concerns triggered all of my childlike impulses: the need to do well and be praised. So when I could not deliver Mo safely, it registered first as a grave failure of my body. I pictured all of the women throughout time, without medicine or hospitals, sometimes in war zones, crouching in bushes and on toilet seats, birthing babies. It's a ridiculous depiction, but next to it, I felt pathetic. In the following months, whether or not my body would fail me again became a constant preoccupation – as did finding out why it had done so in the first place. I spent time obsessively Googling things such as: If you have a stillbirth once, will you have one again? Why couldn't I birth my baby? Underlying conditions that cause stillbirth My body became a site of grief, a sad and empty space beset by the postpartum symptoms I still had to go through – without the salve of a child to go with them. As my uterus deflated over the course of the next few weeks, a pain similar to contractions ensued, landing me in a strange limbo where part of me believed Mo was still coming. Each fake contraction reminded me of being in labour, that forlorn resignation I felt when I knew he had died but had to continue anyway flooding back. I jacked myself up on morphine in the hospital and a concoction of other drugs at home, wanting to ward off any contraction-like feeling before it happened. I vomited and shook and had migraines that left me laying stationary with a towel over my face for hours on end. But I was also healing. I focused on walking and sitting up and getting stronger. It was all so preoccupying; I felt I was attending to my grief. And to some extent I was. But there was far more to reckon with than what had happened to my body. Once I was mobile enough to do anything other than lie around, the months ahead of me stretched out, long and unwinding. I felt the wind knocked out of me every time I remembered there was more than today to get through. Then I would remember that I would feel some version of this for the rest of my life, and I would feel my brain whirring around in my skull. 'Let's leave that for now,' I would have to tell myself. But the reminders were so quotidian. I sobbed at the sight of a bright purple yoga ball in our living room. I had incessantly bounced on it in late pregnancy, willing my baby out, and then during early labour to ease the pain. Now, it seemed to tease me. A jolt of sorrow hit me when my husband mentioned eating the food we had lovingly stocked in the freezer, back when we imagined this time would be spent bleary-eyed, cuddling with the baby, unable to cook for ourselves. The hospital bag we had so expectantly packed remained the same way for over a year – a museum of our hopes kept perfectly intact. We kept Mo's room as a shrine to all the things we had hoped to dress him in (as well as the many strange grieving gifts we got and could not bear to explain to new people). And although I unsubscribed from all the email reminders of what my baby's development should be at this stage, it took a long time for me to stop thinking of months in relation to how old Mo would have been. I entered a phase of monk-like piety ('I will never wear lipstick, like a normal person who hasn't lost her baby would, again; I will never sit on the rocking chair where I planned to feed him again; I will never watch Barbecue Showdown, which I watched before going to the hospital, ever again!'), followed by toxic positivity ('I will always love these stretch marks! They're the only thing of my son I have left!'). And although all this was bracketed by profound sorrow (a guttural scream in our little toilet by the kitchen that opens to the garden, door ajar, facing outside with abandon while I cry-peed), I still found it hard to come to terms with the depths of my aching. I managed to convince myself that my pain was somehow less torturous because Mo had not been born – that I couldn't possibly know the pain of losing a child, because I had not had one. I would surprise myself with slips of the tongue, when I would let out a wail, saying something like: 'I just want my baby' or 'I miss him' – before hastily rearranging myself, assuming I had reached for the closest, cliche expression that did not accurately reflect my own experience. But the truth of how I felt was all there in my dreams, where I would see babies coming back to life, only to wake up in that foggy gold glow, desperate to return to slumber. And each night, I would go to bed with my most desperate thought. Sometimes, I still do: We were so close. In the daytime, I was consumed with guilt. When I was pregnant, every decision I made haunted me. No pain relief except Tylenol – but only if necessary. Hot baths, but with my hands, feet and head lifted out. Running was accompanied by fastidious watch-watching, to ensure my heart rate never stayed consistently above 145bpm (all followed by a days-long panic that I had caused great harm). But even though I had tried so hard to follow the right rules – the rules that were backed by science! – I could not shake the idea after Mo died that I had killed him somehow. I would find myself raking over the past, searching for tiny clues amid the piles of innocuous memories. I became convinced I murdered Mo when I asked my husband to use a massage gun on my lower back during labour; that I was negligent for not noticing the peak in my hunger around weeks 38 and 39, which were a sure sign he was starving to death. I scrolled through photos on my phone like a maniac, searching for symptoms that I should have noticed: was my bump hanging too low? Was that the last time I felt him kick? Whenever I did this, I felt like I was watching a horror movie, wanting to scream at my past self: 'Get out! Make a different choice now before it's too late!' My body hurled itself out of bed in the middle of the night, awake with thoughts: I was five days overdue! Was he still alive when we got to the hospital? Two years later, I still spend whole days swimming through a list of possibilities – each one ending with a living Mo. What if I had gone in earlier? What if I had taken the epidural? Why didn't I just get induced? My decision to lie to the midwife is still part of the everyday flotsam I fish out of the 'Reasons I Killed My Baby' swamp in my brain. I replay endless scenarios where I told the truth, was whisked to the ward and met Mo in my arms – his eyes open instead of closed. My rational brain knows that I could not predict what happened. But in the place where my mind and my heart connect, I still believe that I killed him when I lied. For this, I cannot believe my husband does not hate me. This was not my first rodeo when it comes to unexpected, mind-bending, heart-wrenching life affairs; I have been around the block once or twice when it comes to the shock of early loss. And so when I lost Mo, one of the things I was most immediately furious about was that I had not seen it coming. What an idiot, I thought, for naming my child as if nothing might go wrong, for so naively bestowing him with a personality and tastes ('He loves raspberries! And the granola with the chocolate and honey clusters!' I told my friends, certain his love for sugar, inferred by his kicks, meant he was an extrovert). But at some point, things started to feel lighter. My friends arrived every evening with beers and takeout and anecdotes about the world outside that were more interesting than mine and Louis's slow-paced, unmoving days. People sent so many flowers that we could not sit at our dining table for a month. We received so many hampers it is a mystery we did not grow larger than we did. And all of these things gave me an appreciation of earnestness: a trait I had previously despised. One of the things I have learned since his death is that I can be a cynic as a defense mechanism: I am afraid to appear humorless, or to look like someone who believes good things will happen to them, because I will feel like an idiot when they ultimately do not. I complained often in my pregnancy about all the things I thought would ruin me – how I would be awful on no sleep; and how I did not want to go to the sing-song play groups that I found moronic; and how I was just maybe not the kind of woman who is that into being a parent – because I was scared of stating my hopes. I was afraid to admit that, actually, I had always been compelled by – and perhaps even well-suited to – parenthood. Losing Mo made me realize that all of my guardedness did not make the pain more bearable. If anything, I wish I had more openly loved him, that I had been even more vulnerable in my willingness to accept how much of it I thought I would love. I could have sat in that joy a little longer before he was gone. Don't get me wrong – I do not think all of motherhood is a breeze. My second son, Kamil, is a delight, but while it's not like I enjoy wiping his snot or pulling a piece of grass out of his poo, I have become a much more honest person about the glorious parts, much more willing to admit that I experience them. There was a point when I found it strange to listen to people share how they had been shaken by Mo's death, too. How they had taken the day off work or broken down into tears or spent a week feeling distraught after they heard of what happened. And then, one day, that changed too. I think I found it hard to see how upset people were at our loss, because it brought home how universally damning it was. Part of accepting that means being able to feel truly sorry for yourself, and that's something I've always struggled with. Soon, instead, I started to feel seen when people told me they loved Mo, and they mourned him too. 'Grief is just love with nowhere to go,' someone told me. And so I began to grieve him and love him more openly. To listen to people's stories about how sorry they were, without wanting to correct them, or feel angry at their pity. 'Mo's life would be full of whole worlds,' Louis said to me one day, talking about all of the people, places and moments that he would have known. It was such a tender thought. Such a specific thing to miss without ever having experienced it. It sort of sums up what it was like to miss our unborn child. I do believe Mo's life contained whole worlds. From the moment he existed, he changed us, and watching our elation changed other people, too. My friend wrote a letter that we read out at his funeral about how her love for my son grew in proportion to my ever-expanding tummy. She admitted how scared she was that we were going back to London to give birth and start a new chapter, and how that would put thousands of miles between us. But she also explained how, ultimately, that fear turned into admiration. 'I started to see you as someone who would expand, not shrink from me and the rest of the world. Sometimes, I could see glimpses of how you'd mother Mo: hugging him, telling him off, feeding him all kinds of different foods at six months,' she wrote, continuing: 'A baby at one day old hasn't done much, on paper … Another way to look at it, though, is that a baby at one day old – even if he never had the chance to take a breath – already changed everything.' It was Mo's second birthday this month. So on 15 July, we bumbled over to his grave with Kamil. After we first buried him, I found it overwhelming how quickly the cemetery got full: a reminder that this ever-so-delicate, unique experience we were going through was actually not very unique at all. I hated looking at the balloons by graves, marking third and 13th and 33rd birthdays. What a way to spend a birthday, I thought. But when I plopped Kamil down on the dirt, where his brother lay underneath, he laughed and smacked the ground in glee. He seemed to say: 'Actually, this is a great way to spend the day.' That evening, we went home, and played the songs from Mo's funeral. Our house, which one year ago had felt so empty, suddenly felt so full. And when it started raining outside, we scarcely even noticed.
The Sun
4 hours ago
- The Sun
Bizarre decision by hospital could PROVE killer nurse Lucy Letby was being used as scapegoat for failings, claims expert
A BIZARRE hospital decision could prove baby killer nurse Lucy Letby was being used as a scapegoat for overall failings, an expert has told The Sun. The neonatal ward at Countess of Chester Hospital (COCH) was experiencing a major spike in premature infant deaths in 2015, which tailed off dramatically when it was stopped from receiving the highest risk patients the following summer. 9 9 9 Monster Letby, 35, is serving a whole life order in prison for the murder of seven infants and the attempted murder of seven more at COCH between June 2015 and June 2016. Professor Richard Gill, a statistical misrepresentation consultant who has helped overturn the murder convictions of two other nurses, is convinced convicted murderer Letby was an unlucky scapegoat. He is among an increasing number of supporters who believe Letby to be innocent, and has been pushing for a retrial - although many others, including the victims' families, have blasted the campaign to free her. He believes the failure to move such patients to more suitable hospitals could prove vital in any potentially successful appeal against her convictions. And thinks clinical audits being undertaken could be a reason why Liverpool Women's Hospital did not take them, despite its neonatal unit being graded much higher. COCH's Neonatal Intensive Care Unit was graded at level 2 at the time. Guidelines generally advise any such facility treating the most seriously ill babies should be at level 3. In fact, COCH's neonatal unit was downgraded again to level 1 by hospital management in July 2016, 'due to concerns about increasing neonatal mortality', ahead of an inquiry by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH). The unit's lead neonatologist, Dr Stephen Brearey, had asked management to remove killer Letby from clinical duties the previous month, pending an investigation into her conduct. She wouldn't be arrested until 2018. Dr Breary was suspicious of the nurse in 2015 and accused the hospital of negligence for ignoring his concerns, according to reports in 2023. The downgrade limited the premature babies that it took into its care to those born at 32 weeks' gestation or over, an age where the medical complications and risks were much lower. And, as a result, the spike in baby deaths also tailed off - pointing to overall inability to provide complex care properly being a reason for deaths and not a single nurse, claims Prof Gill. Seven of the babies Letby was convicted of murdering or attempting to murder were either a twin or a triplet, all extremely ill and at higher risk of complications, and so ideally in need of complex level 3 care. Speaking to The Sun, Prof Gill said the babies should have been 'transferred immediately' to a more specialised environment, including that at Liverpool Women's Hospital (LWH), where some had initially been monitored during pregnancy. 'It was hopeless,' he said. 'Chester was receiving babies that should have been born at a level 3 hospital. The doctors there did not have the experience.' Prof Gill said it is not clear why the babies were admitted to or remained at COCH. Two of the seven babies Letby was convicted of murdering - Child O and Child P - were from a brood of extremely rare identical triplets whose mum had received at least some antenatal care at LWH before giving birth at COCH. According to medical summaries, released post-trial as part of an independent expert review, some appeared to be developing issues that only multiple babies sharing a single placenta experience, in that the blood was not being shared evenly to each sibling during the pregnancy, called twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS). 'It puts them at incredibly high risk,' said Prof Gill. He described LWH as 'one of the best places in the world to have twins and triplets', adding: 'Why did the doctors allow that mother to have those babies at Chester? They should not have been born there.' Last year, the Thirlwall Inquiry investigated issues at the hospital during the period of Letby's spree to determine if management could have done more to stop her crimes. In the lead up to the probe, reports of concerns about the alarming shortcomings at COCH included unusually high death rates on the neonatal unit, as well as understaffed and under skilled staff, and a unit "out of its depth", The Guardian reported as part of its own investigation. In a transcript from the Thirlwall Inquiry, led by senior court of appeal judge Lady Justice Thirlwall, a witness statement from the mum of triplets O and P, as well surviving brother R, said she was only told she was having triplets in the 12th week of her pregnancy. 9 9 9 She was scanned at COCH as it was "more convenient" for her, but was then referred to LWH by her consultant for a second scan - though they were happy to care for her at COCH long-term, adding: "They could refer back to LWH if there were any problems along the way." The mum went on say: "At LWH I was told that one of the triplets was a little smaller than the other two, and as all three triplets were sharing one placenta. "I was given the option of having the smaller triplet's heartbeat stopped to give the two others a better chance of survival. We decided against this and to let things be." She added: "I did not actually expect our babies to be born at COCH, I was explicitly told throughout my pregnancy that they would be born there only if there was a nurse and a bed for each baby. "I was told that for this reason, it was very unlikely that I would actually have them at the COCH. I was warned by consultants that it was likely that we would have to travel to another hospital. "We were told that this could be Birmingham or London, but we had to be ready to go anywhere." However, the mum said it was only when she went into labour that she was told she would be giving birth at COCH, being assured "there were enough nurses and beds" to deliver her babies. She said consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist Jim McCormack assured her she would be able to look around the hospital's neonatal unit, but "in the event" this was "put off and I was not given the opportunity to look around and see the unit". "We were told that the probability of us being there would be low. "That said, we had not experienced a Neonatal Unit before so we had nothing to compare it with anyway. The charges Letby has been convicted of in full Child A, allegation of murder. The Crown said Letby injected air intravenously into the bloodstream of the baby boy. COUNT 1 GUILTY. Child B, allegation of attempted murder. The Crown said Letby attempted to murder the baby girl, the twin sister of Child A, by injecting air into her bloodstream. COUNT 2 GUILTY. Child C, allegation of murder. Prosecutors said Letby forced air down a feeding tube and into the stomach of the baby boy. COUNT 3 GUILTY. Child D, allegation of murder. The Crown said air was injected intravenously into the baby girl. COUNT 4 GUILTY. Child E, allegation of murder. The Crown said Letby murdered the twin baby boy with an injection of air into the bloodstream and also deliberately caused bleeding to the infant. COUNT 5 GUILTY. Child F, allegation of attempted murder. Letby was said by prosecutors to have poisoned the twin brother of Child E with insulin. COUNT 6 GUILTY. Child I, allegation of murder. The prosecution said Letby killed the baby girl at the fourth attempt and had given her air and overfed her with milk. COUNT 12 GUILTY. Child K, allegation of attempted murder. The prosecution said Letby compromised the baby girl as she deliberately dislodged a breathing tube. COUNT 14 JURY COULD NOT REACH VERDICT AT ORIGINAL TRIAL, NOW GUILTY AFTER RETRIAL Child L, allegation of attempted murder. The Crown said the nurse poisoned the twin baby boy with insulin. COUNT 15 GUILTY. Child M, allegation of attempted murder. Prosecutors said Letby injected air into the bloodstream of Child L's twin brother. COUNT 16 GUILTY. Child N, three allegations of attempted murder. The Crown said Letby inflicted trauma in the baby boy's throat and also injected him with air in the bloodstream. COUNT 17 GUILTY, COUNT 18 JURY COULD NOT REACH VERDICT, COUNT 19 JURY COULD NOT REACH VERDICT. Child O, allegation of murder. Prosecutors say Letby attacked the triplet boy by injecting him with air, overfeeding him with milk and inflicting trauma to his liver with "severe force". COUNT 20 GUILTY. Child P, allegation of murder. Prosecutors said the nurse targeted the triplet brother of Child O by overfeeding him with milk, injecting air and dislodging his breathing tube. COUNT 21 GUILTY. Child Q, allegation of attempted murder. The Crown said Letby injected the baby boy with liquid, and possibly air, down his feeding tube. COUNT 22 JURY COULD NOT REACH VERDICT "I was given to understand throughout my pregnancy that on delivery the babies would need to go to the Neonatal Unit as a precaution due to the risk factors that come with a triplet pregnancy and them having to be born at 34 weeks." When she started having contractions at home she was rushed to COCH but described how, despite her condition, she had to walk from the observation room to the labour ward to theatre to undergo a cesarean section - even asked to climb into bed herself. The mum added it was "very disappointing" that Dr McCormack, who had performed all of her scans, was on holiday and unable to deliver her babies. She was awake during the delivery, which she described as feeling "very rushed", and at one stage, after being cut open, she could feel pain. She described how "blood and fluid splattered up" onto the screen, the wall behind her and "onto my face". At one stage, she said it was hurting but was told "I don't think that is hurting, it's pulling". Later in her statement, the mum described doctors initially had "no concerns" about the babies, despite being so premature, and recalls Letby looking after two of them and showing her partner how to feed all three triplets. "She told us how lucky we were and that their weights were great," she added. Letby also showed the mum how to "express milk", and added her babies were separated as there was a shortage of beds in the neonatal unit. While staying in the maternity ward, the mum was told by a doctor Child O needed breathing support and she was taken to neonatal unit to see him. "We were confronted with a scene of complete chaos. It was madness," she said. "Nurses were running around left and right grabbing medicines and IVs. 9 9 "As soon as I went in, I knew it was an issue with one of the boys. When Doctor U saw what was going on, it was obvious he didn't have any idea what was happening and I could see in his face that he was panicked and shocked." She added: "It was clear Child O's collapse was a complete shock to them." The mum said Letby was on the ward at the time and was handing doctors medicine. Child O died later that evening, and his brother Child P, died the following afternoon. During Letby's trial, it was heard the father of the triplets "begged" doctors to transfer his surviving son to LWH and they eventually agreed, and his health quickly recovered. Earlier this year, an international panel of neonatologists and paediatric specialists said Letby's convictions were "unsafe" and told reporters bad medical care and natural causes were the reasons for the collapses and deaths. Their evidence has been passed to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which investigates potential miscarriages of justice, and Letby's legal team hopes her case will be referred back to the Court of Appeal. Neena Modi, Professor of neonatal medicine at Imperial College London, was part of the panel and told The Guardian in February Chester's neonatal unit was 'not staffed or equipped to deal with the most seriously ill babies'. She went on to say: 'What transpired was that the consultants and other neonatal staff were faced with having to provide care for complex neonatal cases outside their experience. I watched arrogant Lucy Letby as she simmered in the dock & saw chilling evidence that proves she IS an evil baby killer By Nigel Bunyan IN the eyes of the law she's a cold-blooded serial killer who murdered seven babies and tried to kill seven others at the hospital where she worked during a year-long reign of terror. But doubts over Lucy Letby 's guilt have been slowly gaining traction, with her supporters - who include prominent politicians - expressing growing fears she was the victim of a miscarriage of justice. The killer nurse, 35, is serving 15 whole-life orders in prison for the murder of seven babies between 2015 and 2016 at Countess of Chester hospital. She was also found guilty in 2023 of trying to kill seven others, but has always maintained her innocence. Last week Reform leader Nigel Farage said there were 'serious questions' about the case which have left him with a 'horrible feeling' Letby might have been a 'very convenient scapegoat' and should be retried. Meanwhile Conservative MP David Davis is convinced her conviction is a 'clear miscarriage of justice'. But earlier this month it emerged Letby could be facing more charges over the deaths of babies at hospitals she worked in. Nigel Bunyan has been a journalist for more than four decades and covered the trials of GP Harold Shipman, the child killers of James Bulger, and the Rochdale grooming gang. He attended Lucy Letby's main trial and the retrial that followed. As her case attracts more scrutiny than ever before, here Nigel details why he believes "beyond doubt" that she IS guilty, and that justice prevailed... IN the make-believe, boxset world of Netflix, Disney+ and the like, Lucy Letby just HAS to be innocent! A prominent Tory MP has said so. So too has Letby's shiny new defence barrister and a group of international experts who've rallied, unbidden, to her cause, without having been anywhere near either trial. The only catch is that in the real world – the one not liberally sprinkled with fairy dust theories of perceived innocence – Letby is the real deal. She actually IS a nailed-on serial killer of tiny, defenceless babies. After attending her trial - and the retrial that followed it - I have no doubt whatsoever of her guilt. She is serving a whole life term for seven murders and seven attempted murders after being found guilty not just by one jury – but by TWO. Sadly, serial killers don't come with an identifying mark on their foreheads. And they don't always confess. But I watched every moment of her evidence at Manchester Crown Court, looking for some spark of authenticity, of humanity; something to make me doubt the prosecution case. I looked in vain. All I could see was a defendant standing behind a blank, unyielding wall of denials. She was a woman shielding herself with simmering resentment, sullen in the dock and equally so when giving evidence. Dr Harold Shipman had something of the same aura – arrogant to the end, content to simply deny all charges. By the time Letby was called to give evidence we'd already seen the now-infamous Post-it notes she scribbled in the bedroom of her house around the corner from the Countess of Chester hospital where she committed her crimes. 'I am evil. I did this,' she'd written. 'I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough to care for them (and) I am a horrible person.' Her supporters looked to other lines that could be interpreted as indicators of innocence. 'I haven't done anything wrong,' for example. And, 'Why me?' For all that the evidence against Letby was largely – and inevitably - circumstantial, taken as a whole it was totally convincing on all but a few of the charges. It's one thing to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but in her case that happened far too many times. Her colleagues who saw her as a friend didn't want to 'think the unthinkable' - that she was the enemy within - but eventually they had no option. It wasn't just the statistical oddities about her presence; it was an innate feeling of unease among those who had once trusted her without question. Far too many babies were collapsing on the unit for there to be any other explanation than sabotage by a member of staff. And there were no other suspects. For me, the case finally fell into place as I spent long nights compiling a 17,000-word timeline. Suddenly, for all the woolliness of the case as it unfolded in court, I could see how Letby had moved so deftly in the shadows, aided by her colleagues' understandable reluctance to believe ill of her. Many of them counted her as a friend, and when she broke down in apparent distress over the infants dying on her watch, they instinctively reached out in support. Letby's cynical manipulation is typified by the very first of her killings: one day volunteering to take group selfies during a colleague's hen-do in York, the next injecting Baby A with air 90 minutes after coming back on duty in Chester. Before the jury reached their verdict I knew what it should be. And the court of social media who protest her innocence may have taken a different view if they had seen all the evidence, as I have. During the trial a chilling image was shown to the jury: the X-ray of one of the dead babies, showing a line of what could only be air running parallel to his spine. And the only explanation for that air was for it to have been forced into the infant's system. Which is how Lucy Letby achieved something that the reviewing paediatrician Sandie Bohin had never previously seen in neonates – she made some of them scream. Had the prosecution found the courage to release that image some doubters may be silenced. But the CPS refused, saying it formed part of an individual's medical records. Medical expertise Much has been made of the international panel of medical experts drawn together by Letby's new barrister, Mark McDonald. But it is hugely significant that Ben Myers, the lawyer who led her defence in both trials, made the very deliberate decision NOT to call ANY of the medical experts he had briefed on the case. In fact, the only defence witness aside from Letby was Lorenzo Mansutti, a plumber, who spoke briefly about drainage problems at the Countess. Myers' reasoning was clearly tactical, perhaps made because he doubted the ability of those potential witnesses to counter the allegations that Letby harmed babies mostly with injections of air or insulin. Any future appeal is likely to fall short unless McDonald can come up with a satisfactory answer to Myers' decision. Ultimately the jury was swayed by the assertion of Nick Johnson KC, the lead prosecutor, that Letby had been caught out by 'a constellation of coincidences' that had no other plausible explanation. For all the protests to the contrary, I don't believe for one second that Letby was set up as a scapegoat. She was simply found out by colleagues who finally realised she was the killer in their midst. Almost two years on, we now have the prospect of Letby facing a third trial. On top of that three members of the leadership team at the Countess were arrested last week on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter and may yet face trial themselves. And then there is the Thirlwall Inquiry into the killer's activities and the conduct of NHS personnel at the time. It's due to report next year. So all in all, overwhelmingly bad news for those wearing yellow butterfly emblems in support of their fake heroine. Genuine miscarriages of justice do occur. Of course they do. But they're extremely rare. Years ago, for example, I wrote about Stefan Kiszko, who was exonerated over a murder he couldn't possibly have committed. But Letby? I just don't see it. More than that, I abhor the white noise repeatedly being drummed up in her name - often by people who should know better - while Letby herself remains silent; brooding in HMP Prison Bronzefield, Surrey. For me, as for the families, hers is a name that speaks only of sickening cruelty and betrayal. As one of the mums said recently: 'You don't want to see her face, you don't want to hear her name, you don't want to hear people shouting that she's innocent. "She's not innocent, she was found guilty in a court of law." 'Their contemporaneous notes in the babies' case records reveal errors in the recognition of problems and their management.' Around the time of the Letby crimes, Prof Gill told The Sun some mothers going through high-risk pregnancies would have also been part of clinical audits and trials at various hospitals, including testing the now-standard usage of laser treatment 'to fix the blood flow' in a uterus carrying multiple babies at risk of TTTS. In LWH's Quality Report 2015-2016, it states: "During 2015-16 Liverpool Women's NHS Foundation Trust participated in 100% of national clinical audits and 100% of national confidential enquiries of the national clinical audits and national confidential enquiries which it was eligible to participate in." It added: 'The total monetary value of the income in 2015-16 conditional upon achieving quality improvement and innovation goals was £1,977,598. The monetary total for the associated payment in 2014-15 was £1,955,007.' It is unclear if any of the triplets, or Letby's other victims, saw their treatment directly impacted due to any kind of clinical audit or procedures, which would include the much-publicised National Maternity and Perinatal Audit. But it's possible that, any one of these may have impacted how many high risk pregnancies were dealt with at Liverpool, claims Prof Gill. In June 2015, the same month as the first deaths in Letby's rampage, MBRRACE-UK, the national body which collects data on perinatal mortality, showed LWH had made significant strides in reducing stillbirth and neonatal mortality rates. Specifically, their stillbirth rate was rated 10% below the national average. Prof Gill went on to say: 'If you have twins or triplets who have a very poor outlook then you might prefer that they died somewhere else. 'Now that's a very serious allegation, I don't think that. I mention it, and one might think that. 'I would rather think that out of some rules in their protocol that they were reserving beds for patients they could treat because that would give them good results. 'As a consequence, more babies got treated elsewhere than usual. I'm sure there is an honest explanation for that. But it is really weird.' He added: 'My feeling is this would all need to be looked into if Lucy Letby is ever exonerated and there is an inquiry into what went wrong.' A spokesperson at the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said: 'Due to the Thirlwall Inquiry and the ongoing police investigations, it would not be appropriate to comment further at this time.' NHS England did not wish to comment when approached.
