Posted on 10/21/2009 4:44:01 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
A boy of 10 died from meningitis after doctors wrongly diagnosed a migraine and told his mother to give him calpol, an inquest was told yesterday.
William Cressey saw five doctors in three days before finally suffering 'catastrophic' brain damage.
His mother, Cheryl, 48, repeatedly told doctors that she suspected meningitis but each time was ignored, she said.
Just hours before he died the schoolboy begged one of those doctors: 'Please help me. I'm going to die.'
By then his face was so swollen that he could barely see and he was drifting in and out of consciousness.
Wiping tears from her face Mrs Cressey, a former statistician, told the hearing: 'They wouldn't accept that he had a serious illness.
'They just wouldn't consider meningitis as a possibility. They told me he had a migraine, but he was far too ill for that.
'The deterioration in his health was so sudden and the change so marked that I knew it had to be something very serious.
'I wanted them to investigate and eliminate it as a precaution...but they were adamant that it wasn't meningitis and that was the end of it.
'He was dying and they told me to take him home and stop off at the shops on the way for some calpol.'
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Coming to a town near you...thanks Liberals!
Obamacare preview
MediocreCare: It’s hope and changey!!!
You read my mind. We should savor the last days of quality health care. In ten years, our quality health care will be a distant memory.
Coming soon, to a hospital near you.
His migraine was treated however his health care credits were used up because of it.
It could happen in ANY government run system.
What's the big deal?
I believe something similar to this happened to me at a military hospital when I was just 13. I had severe symptoms including stiff neck, high fever, incredible drowsiness and malaise. The military doctor diagnosed it as “muscle spasms.” I was sick, with continual relapses, for about a month, but eventually fought off whatever it was. To this day I wonder whether it was meningitis.
Even I know that children presenting themselves with severe headaches one must suspect meningitis.....poor family
God help us - that poor mum. A spinal tap is not that relatively expensive; this just sounds more like serial incompetence rather than NHS cost-saving crap.
I don’t know what they mean by saying his meningitis was incurable, since they don’t really say what type it was. Yeah, it’s incurable once your kid is BRAIN DEAD, for sure!
Yep, Once-Great Britain for sure.
Based on what's in this article, what happened doesn't even qualify for the label "incompetence," especially at the hands of people who have the temerity to call themselves physicians. It's downright criminal.
The same thing happened to me when I was a teenager. I had stiff neck, severe headache, extreme sensitivity to light, was extremely weak and sick, and had a slight rash. The doctor said I had the measles, even though my stepmom and I both remembered my having the measles when I was younger. I was out of school and severely sick for weeks. A few years ago I read about meningitis and recognized the symptoms.
Not the first time this has happened and just recently, too
What IS their reluctance to test for meningitis? Spinal tap costs too much taxpayer money?
May those careless/arrogant doctors see that boy’s face at the moment of their own passing.
Socialist medicine works. The ungroomed Michael Moore says so.
IMO meningitis is difficult to diagnose if one is presented with the index case. The symptoms mimic many other problems and the disease progresses rapidly, not allowing a physician to consider the differentials with the progressing symptoms. Once the first case has progressed to severe symptoms, then they are alerted to other cases. It sucks to be an index case but that is the fact of life.
To be fair that sort of thing happens over here too. I remember a person having the wrong limb taken off near me not long ago and thousands of people being operated on with surgical instruments cleaned with hydraulic fluid.
I think the difference is that our system tends to make these things less likely. A big reason is that we give patients more choice. That tends to weed out the worst places and tends to force everyone to improve their product. We also compensate doctors better.
Poor child. RIP.
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