By the end of the summer she was dead, after shocking mistakes were made at one of the UK’s top hospitals. What follows is an account of how Martha was allowed to die, but also what happens when you have blind faith in doctors – and learn too late what you should have known to save your child’s life. What I learned, now I want everyone to learn. In some small way, I hope Martha’s story can change the way some people think about health care. it can even save a life. I am a strong supporter of the principles of the NHS and realize how many excellent doctors are practicing today. No need for the usual political arguments: as the hospital in question confirmed to me, what happened to Martha had nothing to do with under-resourced or overworked doctors and nurses. it had nothing to do with austerity or cuts, or a health service under pressure. No matter how many times I was told that “the doctors’ job was to take care of Martha,” I know, deep down, that if I had acted differently, she would still be alive and my life wouldn’t be broken now. . It’s not that I think it’s my fault: the hospital admitted a breach of duty of care and called it a “catastrophic mistake”. But if I had been more aware of how hospitals work and how some doctors behave, my daughter would be with me now. As another bereaved parent told me, life after your child’s death is like being on an island, separate from the mainland where “normal people” live. You want so badly to go back there but you never can. You’re stuck on the island forever. I had booked a cottage on the outskirts of Snowdonia National Park. It was a small, old farmhouse with low beams and no wifi or phone reception. the parking lot was at the bottom of a hill where sheep grazed. We carried our bags to the door in a cart, which Martha and her younger sister, Lottie, also wanted to get into. Our first day was sunny: we went bodyboarding on Barmouth beach and Martha and I painted the view of the valley from the cottage. We ate in a pub, played cards – everything was easy on holiday, full of light. Martha at the cottage, the night before her accident last summer. Photo: courtesy of Merope Mills On the second day, we rented bikes and set out on a familiar bike trail: nine miles of old railroad track, to the beach and back. A guide in the area described the route as “scenic, flat and family friendly”. On the way, Martha drove by me and I remember we talked about body hair (she wanted to know if she should shave her armpits). We swam in the sea, ate crab sandwiches and chips. But shortly after we set off again on our bikes, Martha slipped on a patch of sand that had blown from the beach to the trail. She was riding the bike slowly – ‘Captain Sensible’ was our nickname for her – but she fell and was soon making the zombie sounds of someone with bad air. The path was busy with other cyclists so it was pulled aside. As we waited for him to recover, another family with a much younger child cycled past. This girl also slipped on the sand, but she wobbled and stayed upright, so the family continued on their way. No doubt they will never think of that moment again. Martha wasn’t feeling any better so we took her to a minor trauma unit. When she lifted her T-shirt for examination, we saw a red ring on her stomach: as she fell, she had landed with her full body weight on one end of her twisted handlebars. There was no blood or cut, just the O-shaped mark. The nurse described the injury over the phone to a doctor, who said he didn’t need to see Martha – it was probably an internal bruise – and paracetamol was prescribed. I wondered if I should make a fuss and insist that the doctor look at her. I didn’t and we went back to the cottage. But at 2am Martha was sick and in pain so we decided to take her to A&E. “I can’t get down the hill to the car,” she said, but Paul, her dad, pushed her in the pram, trying to navigate the bumps while Lottie held a phone as a torch. We eased Martha into the car as gently as we could. At Bronglais Hospital in Aberystwyth, they agreed to run tests and keep her overnight for observation. I still thought this was just a precaution, but at dawn a serious-looking doctor told us that Martha probably had pancreatic trauma: she had fallen with such force that her pancreas had been pushed into her spine, causing a rupture. I knew immediately that the injury was serious, but I had complete faith in the system. Two years of Covid had seen us talking non-stop to the girls about how lucky we were to have the NHS. Martha and Lottie painted rainbows with the words “Thank you” and put them in our window. For some weeks we stood outside the door on Thursdays and joined in the common applause. Martha tapped a pan with a wooden spoon. I was so confident of her recovery that I started taking pictures – they would be props when she told the story of her summer adventure. The first captures her sleeping in the blue light of her room at Aberystwyth Hospital. In the next, he’s outside the helicopter that took us over the Brecon Beacons to the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff. The paramedic leans over her shoulder and they both give the camera a cheery wave. Martha in hospital in Aberystwyth after her accident. Photo: courtesy of Merope Mills In Cardiff, Martha was taken to intensive care and connected to the kind of screens I only knew from TV dramas. She breastfeeds one to one – a nurse was with her the whole time, standing behind a kind of lectern at the foot of her bed. Neither of us had been in hospital before and I was frantic, but one of the doctors grabbed me by the shoulders: “It’s going to be a tough few days – but it’s going to be fine.” I was already googling. Pancreatic trauma, in adults, usually occurs along with other organ damage in victims of car accidents or gunshots: I thought of the “O” in her stomach – a bullet wound without the bullet. In children, it is most often associated with cycling injuries – BMX jumps and stunts gone wrong. What is important is to find the injury quickly, before the corrosive juices escaping from the pancreas cause too much damage. I was so relieved that we went to the hospital at night. From Cardiff, Martha was airlifted to King’s College Hospital in London – one of three specialist centers in England dealing with pancreatic injuries in children. There he settled on the Rays of Sunshine ward, which the nurses told us is well funded, through a combination of NHS money, donations and fees from private patients who come from all over the world. Martha had a glass booth with a television. the ward had new equipment and a playroom – some children, including liver transplant patients, stay there for a long time. “You are in the best place,” we were repeatedly told. Around the walls were posters for the Great Hospital Hike – a fundraiser in September for King’s, which I decided to sign up for, thankfully. “We are so lucky to be here,” Paul and I said to each other. It turned out, however, that Martha was worldly unlucky. Her injury was treatable: she became the first child recorded at King’s to die from it – after her care became careless. Her avoidable death is an example of what one hospital official described to us, in a barbaric phrase, as a “bad outcome.” I will spend decades asking: why was my child the one who met such an unlikely fate? I got pregnant with Martha at the age of 29 and it all happened so fast I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do. I liked my job, I enjoyed life – the parties, the freedom. I was worried that I might be too selfish to be a parent, that a baby would squash my style. But when she appeared, battered and bruised from the misdirection inside me, I changed immediately. As I told a friend at the time, I felt like I had been slapped in the face by love. He was such an easy baby, people told Paul and I that we were great parents. Of course we took the compliment, but the truth is that she just came out like that – upbeat and content. “I’m as happy as a happy bird,” she used to say when she was little, and that summed up her temperament nicely. In Rays of Sunshine, Paul and I would take turns spending 24 hours at Martha’s side, sleeping next to her on a rollaway bed. We were told every day that her recovery was never in doubt: it was just a matter of time and patience. After a fortnight, he was walking down the hall and friends came to visit. A doctor told her, “I’m going on vacation and I hope I don’t see you when I get back.” We got used to the routine on the ward: nurses making observations, early mornings, blood tests, the suffering of the boy in the next ward who also had a pancreatic injury from a steering wheel accident. We put pictures of our cat on the walls of the ward. I grabbed snacks on the ground floor of the hospital. As I was going down there one day, I saw two women shouting in anger. “Fucking murderers,” she screamed with her hands over her mouth. She wanted everyone to hear her. “Let’s get away from the fucking murderers,” shouted the other, as they headed for the exit. I left and instinctively sided with the doctors. Merope with Martha, eight, in November 2015. Photo: courtesy of Merope Mills Martha was nil by mouth and given milky formula through a tube up her nose. With no meals to dispel the fatigue of the days in the hospital, he looked longingly at the pictures of lasagna…
