Eddie Robinson hopes his late wife’s legacy

will be a greater awareness of the benefits

of aspirin for patients who have undergone surgery or strokes. He tells SUE BRADLEY how

he hopes to save other families from the

pain his has endured

Eddie Robinson hopes his late wife’s legacy will be a greater awareness of the benefits of aspirin for patients who have undergone surgery or strokes. He tells Sue Bradley how he hopes to save other families from the pain his has endured.

Seven years ago Eddie Robinson was a man who had it all: a beautiful converted barn in the heart of a Cotswold village, a new business to get his teeth into, a loving son and daughter, a grandson and, above all, his devoted wife, Julie.

Little did he know that his family were on the cusp of a horror story that would see Julie’s health destroyed by a catalogue of hospital errors, ending in her death at just 59, and the loss of everything they had worked for.

“We were together for 42 years: I married the first girl I ever kissed,” Eddie, 60, recalls fondly.

“We were actually born in the same hospital, Marston Green in Birmingham, two days apart, but the first time I met her properly was at a village disco near Coventry when we were 17.

“She was 5ft 2ins and I’m 6ft 3ins. She was such a pretty thing and always dressed beautifully. Everybody called her ‘Glamorous Julie’.

“We were truly soul mates: as people we were very different, but it worked.”

The couple married the week after they turned 21 went on to have two children, Hannah Lush, 35, and 27-year-old Tom.

During the early 1990s Eddie left his surveying job to strike into interior contracting and together he and Julie built a successful company, at one point importing a million chairs into the UK every year.

“I was known as Mr Chair,” he says. “We were a small team. I would have to go abroad quite a lot and Julie would run the company while I was away. She used to arrange all the importation and dealt with customer accounts.”

The Robinsons’ Cirencester-based company, Concept Chair, went on to secure a 25-year contract with Amaryllis PLC to supply the Department of Work and Pensions with all its office furniture needs. Subsequently they sold the business to Amaryllis, which enabled them to buy their dream family home, a stone barn conversion in Marston Meysey, in which they lived for 10 years.

Eddie remained with the company for a while after the sale, but eventually he and Julie decided to take on the challenge of turning around a failing manufacturing firm with 32 employees in Essex, which involved them making a personal guarantee against its debts, never suspecting for one moment that their lives were about to change forever.

“Julie was 53 and very fit; she hadn’t seen her GP for 15 years,” Eddie explains.

“She would describe being ill as ‘stuff and nonsense’. She was indomitable. During her eulogy I told everybody she was a big dog in a little dog’s body. When she was playing tennis she wouldn’t just want to beat you, she would want to kill you.

“She was a great mother and grandmother. She was a brilliant cook, she could have done it professionally and we did used to talk about her going onto MasterChef. She also loved gardening and had an encyclopaedic memory for plants. We had such a happy life together.”

The day in 2010 when things started to go wrong for the Robinsons started innocently enough, with Julie taking her grandson Freddie, then four, out for a walk.

“She bent down to pick up something and felt a tear like Velcro inside her body,” says Eddie. “Nevertheless she came home and cooked Sunday lunch.”

Eddie was in Essex when his son called the following day to say that Julie was unwell. He raced home before she was admitted to the Great Western Hospital in Swindon with severe abdominal pains.

Doctors diagnosed a perforated bowel, but delayed operating on her for 15 days.

“She should have been treated within 48 hours, but they left it, by which time she was in a parlous state,” says Eddie.

“She had raging sepsis and at one stage had a CRP reading (the inflammatory marker used to measure how the body is responding to infection) of 631, which was unprecedented.

“To put it into context, a normal level would be six and a raging tooth abscess 35.

“Fifteen different doctors saw her over a two-week period, with nobody taking control of her treatment.

“By day 10 her care was handed over to the surgeon Richard Payne, a man who really was between a rock and a hard place. He had to make sure he had his expert surgical team around him before he could do anything, and this took a further five days to put in place.”

Eventually Julie underwent an operation and was then placed in an intensive care ward for several days.

“She was hooked up to all sorts of machines; she wasn’t breathing on her own,” says Eddie.

“She could not eat for two weeks and was six stone when she was discharged from hospital. She was very weak.”

Julie was at home for nine days before suffering the first of two severe strokes, which Eddie now knows was caused by the thickening of blood platelets while her body was under stress dealing with the sepsis.

“Suddenly she sat bolt upright with her right fist clenched,” recalls Eddie. “She wasn’t there.

“She tried to take a drink and it dribbled out of her mouth. It affected the left hand side of her body.”

Julie was taken to the accident and emergency unit at the Great Western Hospital just after 9.30pm and discharged just a few hours later – at 2.45am - with a prescription for aspirin and direction to attend a clinic. A&E staff did not give her the drug at the time, even though it was the hospital’s policy and in keeping with NICE guidelines to administer it, or acceptable alternatives, to people displaying stroke symptoms.

Julie suffered a further stroke just a few hours later, which affected her left side, and she was in an ambulance and heading for the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital soon after 7am.

“The paramedics bought her an extra hour; they knew the stroke consultant at Gloucester started at 8am while the one at Swindon wasn’t on until 9am,” says Eddie.

The strokes robbed Julie of her mobility and left her needing help to dress, wash and go downstairs. Most distressingly for such a devoted family woman, she was unable to hold the youngest of her three grandsons.

She struggled with the stoma that was fitted after her abdominal surgery, but an operation to reverse it in 2011 was unsuccessful and led to a further serious infection. She was in and out of hospital on several occasions suffering from dehydration, and broke her hip after falling down the stairs.

At times stress caused Eddie to, in his words, “lose the plot”, and it was on one occasion that Dr Sarah Woods took charge of Julie’s treatment, drawing up a plan and keeping her in hospital until she was well enough to undergo a second reversal operation in April 2012.

“That’s when we turned the corner,” says Eddie. “She came out of hospital and we slowly and surely turned her around.

“I had learned to cook by then; she needed concentrated nutrition to keep her well and I am so proud that she didn’t have a single stomach upset over those few years.”

Julie’s struggle came to an end in December 2016, six months after she was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx.

“She was so tough; she was stoical and she never made a fuss,” says Eddie.

“But by the time the cancer was diagnosed her body was weak and she could not fight it. It was very aggressive.

“Just before she died she told me that she was setting me free.

“I did everything I could for her – nobody could do more. I did it because I loved her.”

Eddie and Julie began taking legal action against the Great Western Hospital six and a half years ago, and at the High Court last month, His Honour Judge Michael Yelton agreed that the institution had been at fault.

In his summary he said that seven years of illness that dogged Julie could have been prevented had she been operated on quickly after being admitted to GWH with abdominal pains.

“We received the judgement on what would have been Julie’s 60th birthday,” says Eddie. “The judge was scathing.”

Eddie was awarded £185,000 in damages, but he says the money will never compensate him for all that he’s lost: his decision to care for his wife meant he was unable to turn around his new company and this ultimately led to the couple’s home being repossessed. The stress of what happened to Julie led to him suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and having a breakdown.

He believes the Great Western Hospital was ‘out of control’ throughout his wife’s illness and claims it treated patients as a set of symptoms rather than people. He’s now working to raise awareness of the value to giving aspirin to people who have undergone surgery, and those who have suffered strokes, and has recently agreed to become an ambassador for the Stroke Association.

“My family has been destroyed by what’s happened,” says Eddie, who now lives in a rented home in Fairford.

“To see someone you love die at 59 after suffering what she suffered over the last six years of her life is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

“I have never had an apology from the hospital, although they say they have changed things. People glibly say you should move on, but it’s not that easy

“Going forward I am going to front a campaign for surgeons to start a routine of aspirin for patients after discharge: it would cost the NHS buttons but it could save lives. I want my Julie to have a legacy.”