The operation is 90 per cent successful - if you can get it.
Angie Webster was not so lucky. She was put on a waiting list and Margaret, a supervisor at Pak 'n' Save, was told she may have to wait up to 18 months before a bed became available at Waikato Hospital. Angie was put on medication - Flecainide - and sent home. Meanwhile, her condition worsened. She stopped playing sport, became chronically exhausted, and then one day had a heart attack while walking to the movies.
Angry at her daughter's life being "put on hold", as Margaret described it, and seeing Angie suffer from the now extremely high dosages of another drug, Tambocor, Margaret confronted Health Minister Annette King at a public meeting in New Plymouth. But an unmoved Mrs King told her to go back to her specialist, or contact her local MP, Harry Duynhoven.
For Margaret Webster it was fatuous advice, since she'd been talking frequently to Angie's specialist about her daughter's condition, and Angie's medication - because of the long wait for surgery - had already been cranked up to dangerously high levels. Indeed, when the Hawera coroner Simon Shera reported on Angie's death in January 2001, his findings stated it was the lethal amount of the heart drug that killed this young teenager - a drug she'd been forced to take because of the long wait for surgery.
Via Silent Running.
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