Cry for help were last words wife was to hear

As a long-distance lorry driver, he spent much of the week with his vehicle, but in the early hours of June 27 2008 he woke her in a desperate call to the family home near York telling her he was struggling to breathe.

She could hear him gasping and urged him to get an ambulance to the farm near Boroughbridge in North Yorkshire where he had parked up for the night.

She rang again as her husband was being treated by paramedics. She did not speak to him but was told they were taking him to Harrogate hospital.

“I never spoke to Tony again,” she said.

She called A&E at Harrogate after his arrival and could hear him still gasping in the background as if he had something stuck in his throat.

She was told they were planning to transfer him 20 miles to York but soon after she was called to be told there had been “a bit of a setback” and she should go to Harrogate. Dawn was breaking when she arrived at the hospital to be told her husband was in theatre. It was to be another five hours before she could see him.

By this time he was in intensive care. Doctors told her the first 48 hours would be crucial but in the coming days his condition changed little and he developed a series of infections.

He was given high doses of medication to try to control repeated fits but she said she was given conflicting accounts of his prospects – that he had suffered brain damage and would never drive again, or that he might even walk out of the hospital.

In one distressing episode, she called to hear from a nurse that he was sitting up and talking, only then to be told that there were two Tonys on the ward and she had got them mixed up.

“After hearing this, I felt like I was going to die,” she said.

“They were so cold towards me – nobody wanted to deal with me because they didn’t dare tell me what had happened.”

His final 10 days were spent at York hospital where the family found treatment was significantly better but he continued having violent seizures. She said for the first time they were told how serious his condition was.

“It was so bad that they told me the kindest thing to do if he developed another infection was not to treat it,” she said.

Throughout, she and their son Josh had talked to him in the hope he could hear them. Josh would tell him everything he had been doing and his headmistress even gave them his school report early so they could read it to him.

Both were at his beside when he died on July 30.

“Josh went to get the nurse when Tony stopped breathing and I heard him say to the nurse that his dad had died. I did not ask him to go and tell the nurse, he just did it – he was unbelievable,” she said.

It was three weeks before they could hold a funeral. Josh, now 13, is growing a horse chestnut tree and one day they hope to inter his father’s ashes underneath it.

Concerns raised following his death triggered a police inquiry but it was another devastating blow to be told in May 2009 that the Crown Prosecution Service had decided not to proceed.

She said as they tried to deal with the tragedy their problems were compounded by financial difficulties which made a “horrific situation practically unbearable”. Both had counselling from the bereavement charity Cruse.

“If it hadn’t been for Josh, I wouldn’t have been here. It was Josh that pulled me round. I was in pieces. He was so strong,” she said.

She had begun work part time at a local racing yard but the death of her husband of 17 years had left a dreadful void – made worse by concerns about what happened in hospital. He had suffered a sore throat in the week before his collapse but this had cleared up and days before he was “as large as life, larking about with Josh. He was just perfectly normal.”

She said she would like to thank friends and family, Cruse, staff in intensive care at York, former coroner’s officer George Rawling and personal injury specialists Irwin Mitchell for their help.

On Good Friday, she was thrown off a horse and was knocked out, also breaking her shoulder.

Despite falling in and out of consciousness, she insisted Josh join her in the air ambulance which flew to Leeds General Infirmary.

“I went into a panic. Josh said to them, ‘My mum’s frightened of hospitals – my dad went into hospital with a sore throat and came out dead’.”