Grieving widower’s plea: give us some honest truths

Queensland engineer Bryan O’Connor has sought answers about his wife’s death as she was seeking a heart transplant at Brisbane’s Prince Charles Hospital. He is still waiting.

Bryan O'Connor at his home at Sunrise Beach, on the Sunshine Coast. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Queensland engineer Bryan O’Connor does not particularly like to be photographed, and he certainly doesn’t want to step in front of a camera now.

His wife Michelle, who died waiting for a heart transplant, was the same. It’s hard to find photographs of her for this story because she always had her head resting on a loved one’s shoulder.

Reserved, giving, and never one to complain.

Even as she lay in hospital in the most fragile of health, Michelle preferred her husband of 25 years be at home holding down the fort for their family than be at her bedside.

“She’d cry every time she’d see me come around the door,” Mr O’Connor recalls as his wife lay in her bed on a ward in The Prince Charles Hospital. “She’d say ‘don’t come tomorrow’.”

The couple were blessed with a marriage that Mr O’Connor simply describes as “beautiful”.

Mr O’Connor doesn’t remember the last time he told his wife he loved her, because they said it all the time. “It just used to roll off the tongue, it was just so natural. We were just so close..”

Despite being a private man, a match for Michelle’s reserved ­nature, Mr O’Connor is willing to stand up publicly now and ask questions. Disclosure as to ­Michelle’s care and whether there were any failings of care was not initially given by the Metro Health Service, the administrators of TPCH. It still has not been.

Michelle was told by her cardiologist to go to Sydney for a transplant in her final weeks, but by that time she was too weak.

Bryan and Michelle O’Connor.

Michelle died last year aged 51 while waiting for a heart transplant. She was told by Queensland’s Heart Transplant Service at TPCH that she was a difficult ­candidate for a transplant because, as the mother of three children, she had high levels of antibodies in her blood.

During pregnancy, mothers transfer protective antibodies to their babies in utero. The transfer that takes place in the placenta provides the foetus with passive immunity.

Michelle was given therapy at Prince Charles to try to reduce the volume of antibodies in her blood. During the plasma transfer procedure, known as plasmapheresis, she caught an infection.

“There was this approach to do a flush of her system,” Mr O’Connor says.

“It was quite a long process on a daily basis, where they would hook her up to the machine and flush her blood through. And I got a phone call one evening that she picked up an infection from this process.

“We inquired about how the ­infection occurred and we were told that the samples from the equipment were compromised, and we got nothing more than that.

“They basically were pumping an infection into her and she ­obviously went into some sort of shock around that.”

Later, his wife contracted a fungal infection at Prince Charles while she was extremely weak, the last thing the mother of three needed while she hung in for a donor heart.

The fungal infection was ­contracted months after the deaths of two patients from fungal infections contracted at the same hospital.

Mr O’Connor has sought ­answers concerning his wife’s fungal infection through official channels. The health service has not been forthcoming.

The grieving widower has had to resort to formal right-to-­information requests to attempt to gain disclosure under administrative law. But it hasn’t got him far enough, and the findings of the external benchmarking ­review into the Heart Transplant Service published a week ago by The Australian deeply concern him.

“I’ve put requests for information directly to the hospital and had (received) heavily ­redacted ­reports. I’ve appealed that,” he says.

“I’m still waiting on an outcome or more information around those fungal infections, and what recommendations were made.”

He also wonders whether conservative decision-making at the heart transplant service may have let his wife down.

“We don’t know if she was ever a suitable candidate for a heart transplant because of her antibodies,” he says.

“No one’s ever told us that a woman who’s had three children has had a heart transplant.

“With what’s coming out of these reports, we would have liked some honest truths well ­before she passed.”