A mum whose husband died less than two weeks after being diagnosed with (MND) has said he was "let down by medics."
Claire Clark watched her husband John, 41, as he went to hospital after collapsing at their Doune, Perthshire, home on December 31. Football-mad John died at Forth Valley Royal last month - just 12 days after he was diagnosed with MND.
The factory worker planned his own funeral two days before and was buried last week. Claire, 43, has since shared her heartache in a bid to help others who suffer from MND, a condition that affects the brain and nerves.
READ MORE:
READ MORE:
"Once he went into hospital on Hogmanay he never got back out," she told affiliate the Daily Record. "We had no real time to prepare."
"The week he died we were planning on getting him home and I was getting things ready at the house. I stayed at the hospital with him the night before and went home to get a shower.
"I left at 8am and got a phone call at 9.30am saying he’d died in his sleep. I know it can take a long time to diagnose MND and there’s not a lot you can do for it, but I just feel like he was let down. We said it could be MND many times because we’d seen his gran suffer from it."
John had recently returned from a holiday to Turkey when he began feeling sick in July. It was suspected he had a virus but he soon complained of having pain in his legs.
"He was saying they felt heavy," Claire said. "He felt numb from his knee to his waist. The doctor said it could just be muscular. Then the sickness returned."
John went to see a neurologist in September who suspected he could be suffering from a functional neurological disorder, which is typically not life-threatening. He underwent a series of other tests and scans but his health started to deteriorate quickly.
"Sometimes he was ok and others he couldn’t stand up properly," Claire said. "He told the doctors his gran had motor neurone but they said they didn’t think it was that because it wasn’t presenting the way it should.
"He couldn’t go to work and fell a couple of times and had to crawl through to the living room because he didn’t have the power. By time he was barely eating anything and lost over a stone in one week. On day he woke up and just fell to the floor."
John was finally taken to Edinburgh for tests on his nerves and was ultimately diagnosed with MND on January 15. "We’d seen what his gran was like when she had it and questioned this the whole time. John said ‘I knew all along it was going to be MND’. He said if he did have it he didn’t want to suffer the way his gran did," Claire added.
"The doctors told us it was very aggressive and developing faster than what they ever expected. He died on January 27. It was gutting I wasn’t there right to the end, but I think he would have wanted it that way. We were together 16 years and married almost 14 years. It was just horrible to watch but in a way I’m glad he’s not suffering now. He never lost his sense of humour and was smiling right until the end."
There is no known cure for MND but treatments can include medication, physiotherapy and support services to manage symptoms. According to the , symptoms of MND can include:
An NHS Forth Valley spokesman told The Daily Record: "We would encourage the family to contact our Patient Relations Team so that they can look into any questions or concerns about the care provided by hospital staff and respond directly."
