After shielding carefully for months, the retired engineer was taken to A&E with stomach pains and placed on a ward with suspected coronavirus patients. He died weeks later
The text came through at 3.02am on 25 October last year. “They put me in Covid ward because my temp was high,” wrote Carl Dillon, then 84, a retired mechanical engineer from Chorley, Lancashire. Carl, who had type 2 diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and had been shielding since March, had been taken to hospital the previous evening with stomach pain. Immediately, his daughter Christine Cherry, a 57-year-old potter from Preston, Lancashire, was concerned. She called him. “He sounded really anxious,” she says now. “Like he wanted me to help him.”
Christine phoned the Royal Preston hospital (RPH), a 700-bed, 70s-era hospital on the outskirts of Preston, to see if her dad could be moved. A doctor confirmed that Carl was in an assessment area of A&E with other suspected Covid cases, but told Christine not to worry. “He said: ‘He’s not near anybody. We have them in different bays.’ But it did concern me. It was a bay, not a room. A virus doesn’t stop at the top of a curtain.” She thinks the doctor sounded uneasy. “It felt like he was trying to reassure me, but also reassure himself at the same time that what he had done was OK,” she says.
