By early 2021, Maeve’s condition had deteriorated to the point where she was unable to consume enough food, even with her mother preparing liquified meals. Boothby and Maeve’s GP at the time advocated for her to be hospitalized so she could have a feeding tube inserted. In mid-March, Maeve was admitted to the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital. Noting that her tests appeared to be normal, the staff physician refused the tube-feeding request.
“They kept treating her as if she was making it up,” said Boothby.
Maeve was discharged without a plan for providing her with sufficient nutrition at home, Boothby noted in a chronology of events of the last months of Maeve’s life that she prepared for the inquest. She was “unable to sit up, hold a cup to her lips, or chew,” wrote Boothby, and “all her symptoms were now highly exacerbated.”
- https://www.codastory.com/waronscience/lisa-maria-kellermayr-anti-science/
Further deterioration in Maeve’s condition led to a second hospitalization in May. By then, Dr. Weir had examined her and found her to be extremely debilitated. In a phone call and a follow-up letter, he recalled, he urged the hospital physician overseeing Maeve’s care to insert a feeding tube.
The hospital did not follow Dr. Weir’s advice. The doctor, Boothby wrote, was “adamant she would not tube feed Maeve and told Maeve she would ‘feel much better if you gave your hair a wash.’”
Again, Maeve was discharged without a plan for home care, according to Boothby. “She was completely immobilized except for being able to turn her head from side to side,” she wrote. “Her voice could not rise above a whisper. She was unable to reposition in bed or to lie on her side.”
During a third hospital admission that summer, a naso-gastric tube was finally inserted. But by that point Maeve’s body was unable to tolerate the hospital’s tube-feeding regimen. She responded with bouts of pain and constipation, which caused crashes and further exacerbated her condition. The tube was removed, and she was again discharged.
On August 27, 2021, Maeve turned 27.
When tube-feeding fails, another possible option is total parenteral nutrition, in which the digestive system is bypassed and patients are infused through a vein. In a letter dated September 9, 2021, Dr. Weir warned the chief executive of the Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, that Maeve’s situation looked dire if this approach was not adopted.
“I have experience of similar cases leading to death and Maeve’s current clinical status shows all the initial hallmarks of this,” he wrote. “I am not exaggerating the issue when I say that this [total parenteral nutrition] may well save Maeve’s life.”
Maeve ultimately refused to be readmitted because the hospital would not guarantee that she would receive total parenteral nutrition, according to Boothby’s written chronology. Maeve knew that without nutritional support she was going to die, Boothby told me, and she wanted to die at home — not in the hospital while being denied care.
“She said, ‘At least we tried, mum,’” said Boothby.
Maeve continued to deteriorate throughout September and received morphine for pain. On October 1, according to Boothby’s written chronology, Maeve “said she was experiencing mild hallucinations.” On October 2, she exhibited “rapid shallow breathing, racing heart, eyes rolling.”
At 1:45 a.m. on October 3, “Maeve was awake but incapable of utterance or focusing.” At 3 a.m., she was found dead. Doctors confirmed her death at 11 a.m., and her body was removed to a funeral home in the early afternoon.
That evening, Maeve’s GP visited Boothby. “She said she had never had a patient so poorly treated by the NHS,” wrote Boothby.
