It is November 2025, and the Public Inquiry into the UK response to the Covid Pandemic has just delivered its final report. The Chair, Baroness Hallett, has succinctly characterised the UK government’s response as “Too little,too late”. Anyone who has read my Covid posts from the beginning will understand my reaction: “Well, that’s a surprise! Not.”
The inevitable refocussing of public and media attention has made me revisit my posts and realise that my previous ‘final’ post on this subject had not covered the most direct impact on me: the death of my wife, Judy, in September 2021.
Judy did not die from Covid, but was collateral damage. I would argue she was one of the countless number who succumbed to another illness, in her case cancer, due to the impact of Covid on the effectiveness of the NHS. Apart from the direct impact on her treatment, our experience of it and the experience of our wider family of her dying and death, was also profoundly impacted by Covid restrictions that were in place at the time.
Visits to hospital for consultations or chemotherapy were made under restrictions, restrictions that continually changed along with government dictat about testing, mask wearing and social distancing. In normal circumstances it would have been possible to accompany Judy to all of these events, but she often had to endure them without my support. When, despite earlier promise, the treatment began to fail she was to begin a (then) novel treatment – immunotherapy. Before starting immunotherapy, Judy had to have blood tests, as she did before each three weekly cycle of chemotherapy, but on the Friday evening before the Monday when she was due to start, we received an urgent phone call from the hospital asking her to come immediately, and present herself at the Medical (rather than universal) A&E, and she would be expected.
She had developed hypercalcaemia, a known risk of her chemotherapy, but which was not being actively monitored. She was admitted to hospital at the worst possible time: 9pm on a Friday night when shifts had recently changed, senior staff had gone home for the weekend and Covid was still very active.
Hypercalcaemia has known risks, amongst which are atrial fibrillation (AF) which she had on admission. Amongst the known risks of AF is the potential for the heart throwing off clots. Despite her admission being expected, for 48 hours, effectively until after the weekend, my wife was not aggressively treated for hypercalcaemia and, crucially, not at all for the risk of clotting.
When finally transferred to a ward (cancer, not cardiac) her heart did throw off a number of small clots and she suffered a stroke – which I identified and drew to the attention of staff during a visit. It affected her speech and therefore her ability to communicate and self-advocate to the overstretched staff. She was flagged, treated and prioritised, as a cancer patient not a cardiac patient. During the three weeks she was there, visits by me and family were severely curtailed because of Covid, restrctions which changed almost daily. For example only one, named, visitor was allowed for the whole three weeks – and naturally that was me. Wider family, children, siblings, were not admitted, although towards the end my children were allowed once on production of a clear Covid test result. Ultimately she developed a major thromobosis, a ‘cascade’ of deterioration ensued and she came home to die, a few days later.
I will always believe her death might have been avoided entirely if her diagnosis had not stretched out over Covid interrupted year. However, once her cancer developed, and death was inevitable, it was not the cancer that killed her. Her death was hastened by a predictable, known, side effect of her treatment that was not monitored, and then by inappropriate treatment when it was discovered. I lay all of that on the doorstep of the an NHS struggling with Covid.
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