Doctors and nurses are supposed to fight for their patients’ lives and ensure they are getting the best care possible. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen.
When a mother from the UK noticed her young daughter had an insidious mental illness, she begged doctors to help her daughter get better. She expected doctors would take her daughter’s illness seriously, yet they failed the 16-year-old when she needed them most. Now, the devastated mother is fighting for answers and justice.
A Mother’s Dream
Rosemary Westwood-Rose always imagined that when her daughter Libby grew up, she would be happy and successful. She dreamed that her daughter would grow up and start a family of her own one day. When Libby was a child, it seemed like that dream would one day become a reality.
A Bright Future
According to Rosemary and Libby’s father, Ricky, they had always been proud of their little girl. She was smart, kind and ambitious. Libby had a bright future ahead of her, however, that all changed when she left her school at The Old Hall, a prep school in Wellington, England.
The New Kid
At the time, Libby was 11 years old and she transferred into the Charlton School, which was also in Wellington. Libby didn’t know anyone at the new school and she struggled to make friends at first. As a result, she focused even more heavily on her studies.
Things Start To Change
Eventually, Libby became friends with a group of girls, who Rosemary described as like-minded and sensible. Over the next few years, Libby was happy, was doing well in school, and had a good group of friends. However, things took a turn when Libby was 14 years old.
Self Awareness Turns Into Self Loathing
Libby had become aware of the fact that she was bigger than many of her friends and decided to go on a diet to try and lose weight. “I thought I had this super clever child, that she’ll do the diet and feel a whole lot better about herself,” Rosemary told Shropshire Star.
Like Mother Like Daughter
“I have always struggled with my weight and I thought she’d be like me, she’d gain and she’d lose and try diets like me. I didn’t know she would develop an eating disorder,” Rosemary explained. “I just saw my clever, smart, astute 14-year-old. Had I known then what I know now, I would have stopped it then and taken a lot more control.”
The First Diet
No one knew it at the time, but that first diet was the beginning of an incredibly unhealthy and dangerous relationship with food that soon spiraled out of control. After finishing her first diet, Libby started a ‘clean eating’ diet, which Rosemary wasn’t worried about. She thought Libby was just getting interested in taking care of her health.
The Concerning Weight Loss
In reality, the opposite was happening. And when Libby started losing weight, Rosemary thought her daughter had just lost some baby fat. Yet when people started commenting on the weight loss, Rosemary decided to bring her daughter to the doctor just to check and see everything was fine. “She didn’t look ill, and because I saw her every day I didn’t notice it,” Rosemary explained.
Time To See A Doctor
“She wasn’t wearing big baggy clothes, she wasn’t covering up and she was eating. I thought everyone was making a fuss and that I knew her better. But because enough people had mentioned it we took her to the doctor, and this was when she first entered the system,” Rosemary said.
A Shocking Sight
“She had to take her top off and lie on the couch to have the ECG electrodes connected. It was at that stage I looked and I was really shocked. She didn’t look emaciated, but she was thin and I thought, ‘my God, how have I not noticed this?’ It was like someone had lifted the blinkers. I fell apart right there in the surgery. She admitted she had anorexia, but said she was going to stop.”
A Triggering Meal
After leaving the doctor’s office, Rosemary and Libby cried together. Then Libby promised she’d get healthy again and asked for pizza for dinner and then tea. Rosemary thought that was a promising step in the right direction. But it was really the point that things truly became out of control with Libby.
A New Battle Begins
Libby had been starving herself up until that point. After binging on pizza at dinner, she threw it all up later that night, thus beginning her battle with bulimia. “I didn’t realize the huge impact of her having that pizza that night. It seems incredibly stupid now, but at the time I just didn’t know,” Rosemary said.
Uncontrollable Binging
“I would start to find lots of food packets, but I still didn’t know about bulimia. I’d find the packets, clear them out and I would talk to Libby about sensible eating and not pigging out. Sometimes I got cross. But I just did not know what was happening,” said Rosemary. “I’m a nurse, but I didn’t see any obvious signs of poor health.”
A Vicious Cycle
As time went on, however, Rosemary realized what was happening. “She started buying so much food, I didn’t know. It would be eaten, vomited and then hidden. But the evidence became more and more obvious,” said Rosemary, who tried to get her daughter help at that point. Unfortunately, Libby’s BMI wasn’t low enough to be considered an urgent case needing treatment.
Treating The Wrong Problems
“At one point her case worker said ‘I don’t really know what to do’, and that is not enough,” said Rosemary. “The eating disorder books were mostly about anorexia. But the same guidance doesn’t apply for someone with bulimia. How could I sit and say ‘Libby you need to eat’? Getting her to eat wasn’t the problem. That was the least of the problems. She ate non-stop, all the time.”
Out Of Control
Rosemary was lost and had no idea what to do. She even tried locking the doors and windows to the house to keep Libby in, but she managed to break out. At one point, the family even tried locking the food away to keep Libby from binging and then purging. When Libby turned 16, Rosemary lost even more control as the teenager got her own bank account and told doctors she didn’t want her mother involved with her case anymore.
Begging For Help
“A lot of it I didn’t see. It sounds crazy to say it, but she was really adept at hiding it all,” Rosemary said. “It got to the stage where I started to notice bottles of vomit in her bedroom. One day I counted 27 bottles of vomit around her bedroom. Along her radiators, along her surfaces, some of them overflowing. All the professionals knew about this, I told everybody. They couldn’t do anything.”
Libby’s Last Chance
Shortly after turning 16, Libby’s condition got so bad that Rosemary rushed her to the hospital where doctors finally agreed she needed to be treated at an inpatient facility. Libby spent three months at an eating disorder clinic in Sutton Coldfield. According to Rosemary, she received almost no treatment or therapy. She was nowhere close to overcoming bulimia, but the clinic discharged Libby anyway.
A Tragic Ending
Three days later, Libby’s heart stopped as a result of dangerously low potassium levels and she died after suffering for two years. “The three days before she died were lovely,” said Rosemary. “Looking back at her letters she knew she was going to die and wanted to make everything right.” After Libby was found dead in her bedroom, Rosemary found notes Libby wrote in her final days knowing she was about to die. “It’s no one’s fault,” Libby wrote. “I love you so much.”
Fighting For Justice
Now, Rosemary is taking legal action to fight back against the system that failed to give her daughter the early intervention she needed and discharged her when she was deathly ill. “We are all angry and frustrated, broken. We want to know why Libby did not receive early specialist support and the subsequent therapy that she needed to prevent her unnecessary death. We are determined to find out what happened and what could have been done to prevent Libby’s death,” Rosemary wrote on Crowd Justice. “We want to know what changes are needed to improve services for others suffering from eating disorders.”
