This interview was broadcast on BBC Radio 2 (89-91 FM) on Jeremy Vine’s mid-day news\/chat programme. Kay Gilderdale appeared on the show supposedly as part of ME Awareness Week, but Vine was more interested in the details of her daughter Lynn’s suicide and Kay’s role in it.<\/p>\n
Lynn Gilderdale had suffered from ME very severely since 1991, and had been bedridden and unable to speak or swallow since mid-1992. She had endured constant, severe pain and nausea for the duration and had also suffered various forms of abuse and negligent care, often with disastrous and traumatic results. In her later years, she was active in an online community mostly composed of women with severe ME, and used the alias Jessie Oliver. She died on 4th December 2008 from a self-administered morphine overdose taken the previous morning. Her mother was charged with attempted murder for giving her drugs which were intended to ease any distress she might have been in between her overdose and her death, but was cleared in January 2010.<\/p>\n
There is video footage of Lynn from mid-1993 in these two YouTube videos: [[1]](http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=69tipYwj8kw), [[2]](http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=cDeu_OlMivU) and a transcript of that programme [here](https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/articles\/transcript_of_frontline_documentary_on_me_from_1993).<\/p>\n
**Jeremy Vine:** We’re going to talk now to a woman who made the agonising decision to help
\nher seriously ill daughter take her own life after a 17-year battle with ME.
\nIn December 2008, 31-year-old Lynn Gilderdale tried to kill herself with a
\nmorphine overdose. Her mum, Kay, tried to talk her out of it, and then agreed
\nto help and handed Lynn more morphine. When Lynn began to have breathing
\ndifficulties, Kay crushed some tablets and gave them to her. Thirty hours after
\nshe began her attempt to end her life, Lynn died.<\/p>\n
Four months later, Kay Gilderdale was charged with attempted murder. She
\ndenied it, and went on trial at Lewes Crown Court in January this year. The
\njury took less than two hours to find her not guilty; she admitted the lesser
\ncharge of aiding and abetting suicide, and was given a 12-month conditional
\ndischarge. The Crown Prosecution Service was criticised for pressing ahead with
\nthe attempted murder charge, but defended its decision, saying there was
\nevidence that Mrs Gilderdale had gone a step further than the assisted suicide.
\nBut the judge, Mr Justice Bean, said the jury’s decision to acquit her showed
\n“common sense, decency and humanity”. And I’m pleased to say Kay Gilderdale
\njoins us in the studio now. Good afternoon to you.<\/p>\n
**Kay Gilderdale:** Hello.<\/p>\n
**JV:** Can you take us back to the night itself and just, if you can bear it, just
\nremind us what happened? It was December 2008, wasn’t it?<\/p>\n
**KG:** Yes, December 2008. I had gone to bed, and Lynn knocked for me; it was
\nabout quarter to two in the morning, and I went in to find that she had
\nconnected her morphine to her Hickman line, which is a direct into a vein, to
\nher heart, so the slow-release morphine was given in one dose, basically, an
\nimmediate dose.<\/p>\n
**JV:** Which should be fatal?<\/p>\n
**KG:** It would be, yes; it would be for the majority of people. Lynn had been on
\nmorphine for some time, so she had built up a tolerance but even so, she was on
\nsuch a high dose that it was surprising that what she had given herself hadn’t
\nworked.<\/p>\n
**JV:** And what happened next?<\/p>\n
**KG:** Em, I sat down on the side of her bed and asked her what she’s doing, and
\nI tried to dissuade her; we spoke for some time. Lynn can’t … couldn’t speak,
\nso it was all through her sign language, and she told me that she had had
\nenough, that she was too broken, that she couldn’t go on anymore, because she
\nhad suffered incredibly for the preceding 17 years, and she had an incredible
\nspirit, was very strong, and had hope; she really believed she’d get better,
\nbut when she got to the point where so many things were going wrong in her
\nbody, she said she couldn’t go on, she couldn’t carry on like that.<\/p>\n
So she asked me to help her, and she had spoken for two years about wanting
\nto die, and she said she can’t do it herself, she can’t get up and get out of
\nbed; she was totally bedridden, she couldn’t even sit up, raise her head, and
\nshe asked me if I would get her more morphine, which I agreed to and gave it
\nto her, and she administered it herself and went unconscious.<\/p>\n
**JV:** And that was the fatal dose there, was it? Or did you do more for her?<\/p>\n
**KG:** Well, nobody could tell whether that was the fatal dose or not. It …
\nthat amount of morphine, I’m sure, would have been a fatal dose, even for
\nLynn, but she was unconscious, and I did … I did begin to worry, when she
\nshowed signs of distress; I don’t really want to go into all the details of
\nthat night or of that time, but she did show signs of distress, and I gave
\nher her normal medications, so another normal dose of morphine, which would go
\nin over 24 hours, basically because she could have been in pain, because it was
\nsome time since she’d had the morphine she’d given herself.<\/p>\n
**JV:** And was there a point at which you realised that your daughter had died?<\/p>\n
**KG:** Yes, yes, I felt she was dying, and she had made it very very clear that
\nshe didn’t want to be resuscitated, and she didn’t want to be put on machines,
\nshe didn’t want to be kept alive. So yes, the moment she died, I knew
\nimmediately, but yes, I felt she was dying …<\/p>\n
**JV:** What did you do when you realised? It’s at night, you’re home alone with
\nher, she’s in her bedroom where you’ve been looking after her for years, what
\ndid you realised she was dead?<\/p>\n
**KG:** I sent a text to my ex-husband and asked him to come, and said “don’t
\nrush”, I was worried he might have a crash or something if he panicked, but he
\ndidn’t; he said “what’s wrong?” and I said, “I’ll tell you when you get here”.
\nAnd he didn’t push it, because of course he knew as well that Lynn had been
\nspeaking about wanting to die for some time. And she’d also told us that she
\nwould never go back into hospital again; she’d had 55, 60 admissions to
\nhospital, and we knew that she would need to go in; she always had to go in in
\nthe winter, she was always getting bad infections or some crisis happened, and
\nshe was adamant that she would never go in again, so even if she hadn’t
\nattempted suicide, she would not have had any further treatment, and she would
\nhave died at some stage.<\/p>\n
**JV:** I saw that you, it was written some place that you threw yourself across
\nher bed, and …<\/p>\n
**KG:** I did, when she was unconscious, I mean, I was sitting by her bed and I
\njust lay across her, and … of course, I was distraught, because it is
\ntotally against what you want when you love somebody, you don’t want to let
\nthem go, you want them to stay, and my heart was absolutely broken.<\/p>\n
But it wasn’t just that night that took Lynn’s life; it was all that happened
\nduring the 17 years that took her there, day by day, week by week, year by
\nyear, it was the suffering … also, it hurt her terribly that, I mean, this
\nweek is ME Awareness Week, and it hurt her terribly that people did not
\nbelieve that her illness was real. There she was with so many things going
\nwrong in her body, and we still came up against this belief, and all she
\nwanted was belief, acceptance and respect for a very serious neurological
\nillness. So it was all those years of suffering and everything she had to
\ncontend with. She was very, very brave.<\/p>\n
**JV:** She came down with it, with this ME, drastic version of ME at about 14,
\ndidn’t she? And she’d just had that injection at school, was it?<\/p>\n
**KG:** Yes, she was very fit, she was into all kinds of sports, and fun-loving
\nand everything. And she had a BCG which … it wasn’t the vaccination that was
\nthe problem, it was her immune response, and there is actually some good
\nscientific research being done, all funded privately because there’s no
\ngovernment money going into research into ME, that have found that there are
\ngene abnormalities that affect the immune system. I don’t know, because this
\nneeds to be proven, but it would appear that her immune system did not respond
\nand straight away after that, she became ill that afternoon, and she got one
\ninfection after another and needed antibiotic after antibiotic. And that was
\nin November, late November, and by February [1992] she was extremely ill.<\/p>\n
**JV:** And she lost 50% of her bone mass …<\/p>\n
**KG:** Yes …<\/p>\n
**JV:** And she could only move her head, could she, is that right?<\/p>\n
**KG:** She couldn’t even move her head from side to side. She could move her arms
\n– at one point, she couldn’t even move her arms, and she had to push her head
\nwith her hand from side to side, and a lot of things went wrong in her body,
\nyes, she only had 50% bone mass; that was due to the fact that she was
\nbedridden, also the fact that she stopped producing a lot of hormones in her
\nbody. Her brain, a part of her brain, the hypothalmus, the part that
\ngives out instructions to other places, to make the pituitary make hormones,
\nactually shrunk and stopped giving out messages to her body. So a combination
\n… plus, she had to take steroids for, she had total adrenal failure, so all
\nthose things had an effect on her bones, yes.<\/p>\n
**JV:** So you have this terrible period– well, more than a period, 17 years of
\nlooking after her, and it’s just you and her in the house most of the time,
\nand then it comes to the night that you’ve described, and then you are
\nprosecuted for attempted murder. Now, why the charge of attempted murder? Is
\nit because, after she lost consciousness, you added some things yourself, or
\nwhat?<\/p>\n
**KG:** Em, I thought in the beginning that the attempted murder was a mistake,
\nand they would realise it. I thought they had misunderstood, that they thought
\nI had administered all the morphine, because there was a little bit of
\nconfusion, it was like Chinese whispers, within the reports. So, I thought
\neverything would be fine, they’d see, I’d said what it was, assisted suicide,
\nand I expected to be taken into custody for that. I was baffled by the
\nattempted murder charge, and yes, possibly, they believed that what I gave
\nLynn was to cause her death, but in fact, as the doctor said at the time,
\nwhat I gave her was therapeutic, to make sure she wasn’t suffering …<\/p>\n
**JV:** And you were cleared in January …<\/p>\n
**KG:** I was, yes, and very grateful to the jury and the judge …<\/p>\n
**JV:** But you got a conditional discharge for aiding and abetting a suicide, is
\nthat correct?<\/p>\n
KG: Yes; the reason for that was, I did plead guilty to assisted suicide (sic)
\nright from the beginning, and because of the new guidelines, had they been in
\nplace when I was arrested for that, because all the points when someone should
\nnot be charged applied to me, so that’s why at that point it was a conditional
\ndischarge for the assisted suicide.<\/p>\n
**JV:** So let me just ask you about life since then, because you are obviously
\nstill grieving your beautiful daughter.<\/p>\n
**KG:** Yes.<\/p>\n
**JV:** And that takes precedence over everything.<\/p>\n
**KG:** Yes; what the year leading up to the trial did was … everone in the
\nfamily had to keep going, had to keep pushing ourselves to deal with all the
\ncourt hearings, everything else; we were grieving for Lynn terribly, but we
\nhad to keep going; so, of course, once the verdict came out in the trial and we
\ncould, sort of, we had relief in a way, we could grieve again; well, the
\ngrieving never stopped, but we’re all still … it’s still very raw, and we’re
\nall still missing Lynn terribly.<\/p>\n
**JV:** And are you traumatised by the whole legal process, by having been in
\ncourt, by having wondered if you’d go to jail, do you still wake up
\nthinking about that?<\/p>\n
**KG:** I think, when it started off, I knew that I had assisted suicide so I was
\nprepared for whatever might come in as much as anybody could be prepared; but
\nI … (long pause)<\/p>\n
**JV:** You weren’t ready for that level of …<\/p>\n
**KG:** I wasn’t ready for that.<\/p>\n
**JV:** The prosecution?<\/p>\n
**KG:** No.<\/p>\n
**JV:** What would your daughter make of the story since she died?<\/p>\n
**KG:** She would have been jumping up and down and shaking her fist and been very
\nupset by it all, because she didn’t want me to get into trouble at all, and …
\nShe didn’t have a choice, because she couldn’t get up out of bed herself, she
\ndidn’t want me to get into trouble, but she had no other way of getting out
\nof the miserable, painful, terrible life that she had. She had tried to put up
\nwith it for so, for such a long time, and it was mentioned in once place that
\nLynn was selfish by asking me to help. She was not selfish, she was selfless,
\nand she had no other option at that point.<\/p>\n
**JV:** Just a couple of comments for you. Jamie emails, “I wanted to say what an
\namazingly strong and courageous lady; her daughter would surely be very proud
\nof her Mum. Please pass on my best wishes”.<\/p>\n
Judith Taylor is in Manchester; she says, “my father had ME for nearly seven
\nyears. He never made a full recovery. Unless you have lived with someone who
\nhas ME, you have no idea how awful it is. There are different levels, that
\nshould be appreciated, and I feel tremendous sympathy for this woman. She
\nshould not be judged by anyone who doesn’t know what it’s like.”<\/p>\n
And Paul Hart in Dagenham says the same kind of thing: “the police and the
\nprosecution service should be ashamed of themselves for prosecuting Kay
\nGilderdale. If you kept an animal that was this sick alive you would be
\nlocked up. Kay Gilderdale is an honourable and caring mother; she should
\nnever have faced a trial”.<\/p>\n
And you did spent, what was it, fourteen, seventeen years caring for your
\ndaughter …<\/p>\n
**KG:** Yes …<\/p>\n
**JV:** You gave up your job …<\/p>\n
**KG:** Yes, yes …<\/p>\n
**JV:** And you were on hand day and night.<\/p>\n
**KG:** Yes, and willingly, because you know, obviously I didn’t want my daughter to be ill,
\nI didn’t want it to be necessary, but I willingly looked after her; as long as
\nshe needed me, I would have looked after her.<\/p>\n
**JV:** Thank you for coming in and speaking to us.<\/p>\n
**KG:** Thank you.<\/p>\n
**JV:** Kay Gilderdale.<\/p>\n
(“Here Comes the Sun”, by the Beatles, starts playing.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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