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[choir sings: In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan ...]
So I first heard about the Staley incident because I was on duty on Saturday
and on Friday evening one of my colleagues had been
involved with the resuscitation of the Staley family;
and so she rang me on Saturday morning to describe the resuscitation
had been incredibly difficult and incredibly traumatic.
When Evey was brought into the hospital, she was very very very unwell
and with the best efforts of all the team here
she was very difficult to stabilise and had to be transferred to the
specialist Children's Hospital at Southampton and even then she was still
critically critically unwell.
At the same time of course the parents were injured so the
intensive care unit and the emergency department were swamped with the amount of work that came
in at the same time, so then when I came in on duty on Saturday morning
I had both Mr & Mrs Staley on the intensive care unit and I was responsible for their care then.
So, Mrs Staley had had a brain injury
and in order to help her recover from that she was in an induced coma so she was asleep
and on a life-support machine, so it was not possible to communicate with her;
she just needed to be looked after.
Mr Staley had had severe injuries to his back and his pelvis
and he was on very strong pain killing medicine but he was conscious
and awake and we knew, of course, that his daughter was across the water in
Southampton on the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit;
So I spoke to the consultant on the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit in Southampton
and we heard that Evey was, to all intents and purposes, brain dead.
Her body was still functioning, her heart was beating and her lungs
were being kept alive by life support machine but her brain had ceased to function.
Mr Staley didn't know this.
Mr Staley wasn't able to talk to his wife, her mother because she was in a coma
and had also been incredibly unwell himself.
We, as a team, thought he might want to be with her;
so we made arrangements, before we spoke to him,
to see if Southampton adult intensive care unit could take him so that
he could be looked after next to her.
And, as this conversation went on it became clear that Evey was, her body was going to die;
they were going to withdraw the life-support within the next 24 hours as well.
So we have to tell this man, who didn't have a great recollection
of what had happened, this terrible news.
So we chose to wait until Mr Staley's sister came in so that he had some support
and I, along with the Senior Sister on the ward, spoke to him.
And we told Neal that his daughter was dead,
though her body was still alive, which is a really horrible difficult concept for
anybody to understand, particularly if you can't see it.
This wasn't a child who'd been unwell. She hadn't deteriorated into illness.
She'd be an alive, vital, well child the last time he saw her.
And now he was being told, by people he didn't know, without his wife's support,
that she was dead.
He chose not to go to Southampton to be with her because he was very
clear that he wanted to remember her well. He didn't want to remember her on
a life-support machine with drips and tubes,
and looking awful; so that was a very difficult decision for him to make
and it's difficult to know how much he understood emotionally at the time
because he was in, he was in a very difficult position
and his wife wasn't there to help him understand.
I can say that everybody was crying except him.
He was incredibly strong and almost detached from the emotional experience
I was very upset. His wife, um, his sister was very upset
but we knew that Evey had, I think, her grand parents and
her older sister with her there.
I think, I remember Neal being very upset because he wasn't able to support his elder daughter.
who was going through this because he was here.
So that was ... we had to tell him this awful news.
The second part of the conversation we had to have with him
was whether he would consider Evey's organs being donated
for other critically unwell children and
that's an incredibly difficult concept to think about because, not only do you have to
accept that your child is dead though her body is still functioning ...
you then have to think about can you be generous enough
to allow others to live as a result of this hideous incident
and, in fact, I know that Evey's organs did go on to be donated
after the organ donation and transfer coordinator came to speak to him;
so the whole event was, was very upsetting because
he was so alone because his wife was in a coma,
she was very unwell because he couldn't be with her and because
she had been well 12 hours previously and now she had been taken.
And that's how it felt. It felt very much like that.
[choir sings: ... bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed ...]
It has upset me actually and, we do see a lot of terrible things happen to people all the time.
I think, very selfishly it's because I have children of a similar age
and once you've seen children of a similar age as your own children
it's very difficult to not emot ... to put yourself in that parents place and I
don't know how I would feel in that position that Neal and Penny were in.
It's was unimaginable
Also everybody, I heard, afterwards had said what a vital bright,
charming lovely child she was and to ... no child, of course,
you know, nobody wants a child to die but to hear that this charming delightful
child had died, it was just very upsetting, very upsetting.
And even now, talking about, I feel upset.
[Choir sings: ... I would do my part ...]
[Choir sings: ... yet what I can I give him: give my heart ...]