…featuring evidence from the Scottish Covid Inquiry, this testimony (transcript below) from Pamela Thomas is well worth a look:
I’m Pamela Thomas and I’m here today to speak about the death of my brother James Cameron. He was 41 years old. And he died on the 5th October 2021 in Ninewells Hospital [in Dundee].
He originally went to hospital on… 17th September [with] dehydration and diarrhoea. My son took him to the hospital because he was obviously unwell and he needed seeing to. It’s not a place he would usually go… but he needed a wee bit of help…
My son says, “I’ll just drive him up the hospital.” So he did. When he arrived there he got told, “I’m sorry… we can’t see your uncle. We’re dealing with a boy who’s a teenager who’s got a broken ankle…” This was a nurse in the A&E department, and my son was quite adamant: “You’re going to have to see my uncle… he’s here and he’s not well.”
And so he went outside, and there was paramedics and ambulances… and he went out and spoke to them and says, “Look can you come over and see my uncle… he’s been in his bed for a week, he’s not well, he’s dehydrated.” He was kind of gaunt-looking… he was a bit disorientated… [but] the paramedics… said no. So my son eventually had to phone 999 from outside the hospital, and it was a call handler that said, “Look, just stay where you are. I'm going to phone into the hospital and I’m going to get somebody to come out, which they did…” And…I thought, “Great… he’s going to get seen to.”
Within a couple of hours we… got a phone call. It was my brother’s partner at the time. She phoned me first and says to me that she’d phoned the hospital to see what was going on. And she says, “Pamela, they’ve told me I’ve got to get the family and that… James is going to die.” And I can just remember it was hysterical… I remember I was just running back and forward in my garden… I phoned my Dad… he was away down in Leicester at the time. I phoned my wee brother — he was down in Glasgow. I phoned the hospital obviously as well.
I was one one phone, and… his ex-partner was on another phone. She had phoned them from St Andrews. My brother was on the phone from Glasgow… when I [later] got his medical records I could see that they were all… talking to us at the same time… different doctors and that…
He ended up in the hospital… in a high dependency unit after a couple of hours then… ended up on an intensive care unit… he was put on a CPAP [continuous positive airway pressure] hood… it was meant to blow oxygen… he was still communicating with me on messages… I was like, “Are you all right, brother?” And “What’s going on?” He was very limited in what he what he was saying to me, but the communication was there…
I… knew from previously about… people going in hospitals and about other stories about ventilators… They’d said on the phone… [that] my brother would maybe have to go on a ventilator… I said, “No, he’s not going on a ventilator.” They then gave him something… to make him sleepy but they didn’t tell me that at the time… And I knew, because communication with him became non-existent. And I thought, if… he’s eating and communicating with me… they can’t put him on any ventilator.
So then what happened was… the Monday night… early on the Tuesday morning… they put my brother… on a ventilator. They phoned me up the following day [and said] to me that my brother was struggling, and he’d asked to be put on a ventilator… asked for help. So I asked them [if they had] any messages for… his sons… like “Tell them I love them” — just a basic thing like that… And they says to me, “No, he couldn’t speak.” And I say, “So how did he manage to ask to go on a ventilator then if he couldn’t speak?” It was just automatic… because I knew that he would never have asked that…
He was in the hospital for about three weeks. I joined a ventilator survivor group on Facebook, and I was learning about the names of the medications… the sedation, the paralysis and stuff like that because they were telling me he was on this paralysis… but that can affect his blood pressure and put it low. And so I was finding out these things… I wasn’t communicating with anybody but I was taking the things that I needed to that were important back to the hospital [and] phoning up four times a day, asking them questions, telling them that I wanted him off this paralysis medication and stuff like that.
And three weeks later I got a phone call… it was the Sunday before my brother died on Tuesday the 5th October… I’d been trying to video call for teatime. They kept putting off… eventually they let me see him and when I seen him… I understand now why they were putting it off… because his face was swollen and red raw. It was like a balloon going to pop, and I was like, “Look at the state of him. What’s the matter with him? What’s going on?”
The following day, on the Monday, I got a phone call to say, at lunchtime, “Don’t be concerned about the state of his face. That’s nothing to be concerned about. He’s got covid lungs.” So I was kind of put in my place. It was a different doctor phoned me that day…
That Monday, there was a blackout on WhatsApp and… video calling… you couldn’t… do video calls, so I never got to see him on the Monday. On Tuesday morning I phoned up… at 8:30 in the morning. I said, “Right, you know I’ve not seen any scans, any X-rays. I don’t know what’s going on… I’m concerned about my brother. Can you send me everything that he’s been through… an email.” They told me, “No, for data protection.” And, unbeknown to me at that time, that didn’t really matter because I was his next of kin and he was sedated and paralysed. So it should have should have came to me, that information. So I told them at [8:30] in the morning… “Well if you cannot send me it… I’m going to get ready and I’m going to come through and I want to see how he is face-to-face… I hadn’t been allowed to see him. I hadn’t been allowed to visit him, touch him, sit with him anything like that. I wasn’t allowed in the hospital at all….
Just over an hour and a half later, I got a phone call: “Pamela, Pamela…” And I knew… and I says to him, “Just f*cking tell me…” (sorry for swearing). He says, “Pamela [are] you alone? Are you sitting down? Have you got someone with you?” And he says to me, “It’s James, Pamela. He’s… gone.” And I just hung the phone up.
Obviously I phoned my Dad… and let him know. And then later on that afternoon the doctor phoned me back and asked me if I had any questions. And I asked them… I wanted to know about resuscitation and that…You see them using the pads and bringing people back... And I was listening to what happened, and they never told me that they used any of that. I was like, “You didn’t resuscitate my brother…?”
And then he told me that I could go through and see my brother if I wanted to… only after he died. So I did take him up on that offer… it was about teatime. My son’s girlfriend came and got me… went and got his ex-partner… We went to the hospital and… my brother was lying there. It was just horrific. His lips were swollen like bananas, and his two eyeballs were were swollen… like tennis balls. And it just didn’t feel like it was my brother that was there.
And then someone was sitting right with me… I spoke to the consultant outside and… I says to him, “I want a post mortem done,” because I thought, “Did [my brother] have an allergic reaction? Is that why he was all swollen? …And he says that he’d contact the Crown Office [The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) is Scotland’s public prosecution service and death investigation authority] and stuff like that. This was teatime remember on 5th of October… he said he would contact the Crown Office but that ultimately that decision lay with them.
So I then find out that they had contacted the Crown Office at 11am the morning that my brother died, 10 minutes after… for whatever reason I don’t know, but they said that they could confirm his death and it was covid… SARS-CoV-2 is the only thing that’s on his death certificate… I then refused to take my brother out of the hospital. I says, “I’m not taking him out. I want a post mortem…” I eventually went to a funeral directors and says to them, “Look, can I get a funeral organised for my brother?” I’d been to the Crown. I’d been to MPs and stuff. I wasn’t getting anywhere. I wasn’t getting a post mortem, I wasn’t getting any support.
So eventually… I started to feel a bit guilty… for leaving him…in the hospital and I said, “Right, okay, I’ll go and get him.” So the funeral directors had made an arrangement to go and get him… on his birthday… 13th October. And I asked them not to get in touch with me that day because I had an appointment for the 14th. I asked him not to get in touch with me on his birthday. I didn’t want to speak about funerals or anything on his birthday. But they phoned me [at] 9:00 that morning… and they went to get him on his birthday, and they says, “Look now, you’ve got an appointment tomorrow later on tomorrow evening. Can you come in earlier, first thing?”
I never thought nothing of it… until I got there. And then I very quickly realised… They asked me, “Have you got a photo of your brother?” And I showed them a photo of my brother. And then they were asking me questions about him, if he was on any medications… I very quickly established that I was being questioned. And I had my son with me and my sister… The funeral director stated that they had the form… and what used to happen is, if the funeral director had an issue with a cause of death, then they would tick this box… So he says to me, “But they’ve done away with their forms…”
I knew there was something going on, and it was important. I says to the funeral director, “You’ve been dealing with these covid deaths and people and all that… Have you had anybody like my brother?” So it was important that I held that conversation… because I knew something was not right, and this was the only other professional that had ever met me anywhere — not that I’d even asked him to. This happened off the back of booking a funeral, and him getting my brother and seeing the state my brother was in.
He says to me he would have ticked that box… to say that he had a concern. So then I went back to the Crown Office. I went to Health Improvement Scotland. And they had said to me that… there was a Dr Peter Wiggins… that I could get a post mortem private for £1,500, but it would be a three week delay. So I was like, “Brilliant.” He says to me, “But the Crown need to direct you to get that…” Back to the Crown I went. And the Crown was saying to me, “Health Improvement Scotland’s giving you the wrong information.” So, back to Health Improvement Scotland… “Look, the Crown are saying you’re giving me the wrong information. What is it…?” So I was just kind of getting passed back and forward… I ended up… I never got a post mortem… I went ahead with the funeral.
Prior to that I’d been to the police station… before I took my brother out of the hospital as well… and reported his death… But I didn’t have access to his medical records and then all I had to go on was the state he was in when I had seen him… the red swollen face… the amount of fluid… because his neck was on his face… he was like blew right up… They’d also put him on a… randomised trial. I didn’t know the names or anything at that point in time because I had no access to his medical records… it wasn’t until the November that I got them, so I was giving the police a statement on just what I knew at that time.
Anyway, I got the medical records… the police never done anything. They took my statement but never went any further… I went ahead with the funeral, got the medical records, and then I went through them, and I found that my brother was enrolled in a… randomised control trial, and that that trial withheld antibiotics. I also found that that was not my brother’s signature… who signed… It was a study investigator’s…
It was clearly… you could see that the way the handwriting was… it was a squiggle… I had my brother’s driving licence and his signature on it, and that wasn’t my brother’s signature. That was a study investigator… that signed my brother’s name and excluded him from getting antibiotics, and put him into this trial.
I then went through the medical records, and I found out they had ventilator-associated pneumonia. I found out they had MRSA, haemophilus influenzae... So I was having to Google all of these names and what they were, and when I was putting them in it came up about Queen Elizabeth Hospital [in Glasgow]… and [water-borne] infections… So I’m automatically thinking, “Well how can my brother have all these killer infections, and there can be… inquiries into them in the Queen Elizabeth but not in Ninewells.” How many other people have died with them… got [such] infections… bearing in mind none of them are mentioned on his death certificate.
I also got the funeral directors to weigh [his body] and weigh the coffin. And there was a four stone weight gain, so it was fluid… so he just filled right up… no attempt to put any drains… to take the fluid off him… And his face was mangled. His face was a mess… and that’s what his wee boy had to see for the last time, that’s the image that’ll haunt him… my Dad also… our siblings… That was the last image of him, the state that he was in…
So that’s where it all then kind of really began… So I was going back to the hospitals for meetings and stuff like that… recording them. I’d kept a diary the whole time James was in as well, about every time I called… what date and time and stuff like that, and what his oxygen was at… all that kind of stuff. I then… tried to go back to the police. I then joined the Scottish Covid Inquiry. I gave evidence there. I was doing things like podcasts and anything… just to try and keep this out there… what had happened to my brother.
And eventually… people were contacting me and asking me questions about my brother, and asking if I had got his medical records. And it was a man from England actually… I believe he’s like an ex-barrister, something like that, he got in touch with me and he managed to get hold of my brother’s medical records through giving my permission, and he sent them off to… a friend or a colleague or something of his who happened to be a consultant of over 30 years experience. And he done a report for me which I was then able to take back to the Crown Office.
I had sent hundreds and hundreds of emails to the Crown Office… even with regards to the signature and stuff. I told the inquiry, “Look, this is a signature carry-on. This is criminal.” And the inquiry says, “You need to report that to the police.” I went to the police and [they] were telling me to go the Inquiry. So I made the inquiry aware. I was being passed [from pillar to?] post. And when I got this report, it basically says that the normal procedure or protocol for sepsis on arrival at the hospital wasn’t followed with my brother, and that it was believed that that could have been the cause of my brother’s death. And obviously not getting the antibiotics for being in this trial… and that the trial document wasn’t filled in properly and it looked like to be not my brother’s signature… so I was then able to go to the Crown Office with this, present it to them and say to them, “Look…” Which I did. And they then turned round and tell me, “It’s only an initial. It could be for anybody.”
So I went back to the [English] guy and I says, “Look… the Crown Office… they’re saying it’s just an initial, so they’re not going to accept it. And lo and behold, the actual consultant passed on his full name, GMC number… all his details, and told me to pass [them] on to the Crown Office. So I did. Then the Crown Office got back to me and says it’s because I’ve been kind of persistent and… for peace of mind and stuff… they were going to send [it] to the Crown Council, and if possible could I then send in my brother’s medical records to them. So I done that… back in about maybe… October/November… They asked me, “Can I get a two-month extension before I get back to you… it’ll be another two months before I go back to you…” So they’ve done that to me twice now, so I’m just waiting to hear from the Crown… Besides all that… when things like this are coming up and… any kind of talks, anything… I’m trying to keep myself out there to keep it from going stale just so that I can… I don’t want it to go stale… [so I] just keep applying the pressure.
There is a further 10-15 minutes discussion on the video.
I wonder how many people there are who had a similar experience in 2020/2021. This is not the first case of its kind that I have heard about. I hope that the testimony of Pamela Thomas will encourage others to come forward and speak about what happened to them and their loved ones.
