18-year-old tudent collapsed and died just four days after moving into university accommodation, inq
The mysterious and sudden death of an 18-year-old university student who collapsed in the bathroom of her student accommodation and died just days after moving in, has baffled pathologists and doctors, Daily Mail reported.
Abigail Hall had been vomiting and complaining of stomach pains for three days prior to collapsing in her room at the Trigon student accommodation on September 23, 2015.
The Sheffield Hallam student died soon after. Her boyfriend Josh Thompson, 22, placed a ring on her finger and announced over Facebook: 'Abigail Hall and I are now engaged. She is my life.'
It is believed that Josh requested permission from Abigail's parents to become engaged to her once she had died.
The day before she died, Abigail's parents had taken her to a walk-in medical centre in Rockingham Street, the Sheffield Coroner's Court heard.
Charlotte and Mark Hall told the court that when the on-call doctor, Dr Thomas Pollak, asked Abigail about what her vomit looked she told the medic it resembled 'coffee coloured grounds'.
Mrs Hall said Dr Pollak 'said he had seen other students that had come in with viruses. He said it might be a virus or the beginning of appendicitis...and gave her a prescription for Buscopan,' The Star reported.
Abigail received a prescription and went back to the student halls with her parents, ready to enrol in her course the following day.
Her housemate, Agata Paliwada, told the court that she had been 'keeping an eye' on 'happy and friendly' Abigail after she fell ill, and went to check on her just before 7pm.
She said: 'She wasn't in her bed, and I thought maybe her parents had come and got her. As I was walking away, I saw the light on her bathroom, I looked in the bathroom. She was there. She looked unconscious.'
Agata called for help and some of her fellow students began CPR as they waited for paramedics to arrive.
Despite the best efforts of medics, and the students attempting to save her, Abigail died a short time later.
Pathologist Simon Kim Survana said Abigail's post-mortem revealed that her lungs had 'aspirational material' in them, but said he had 'no explanation as to why' that had happened.
He recorded her primary cause of death as being Aspiration Pneumonitis, where foreign material is ingested into the lungs.
The secondary cause of death was recorded as idiopathic gastroenteritis, but Dr Survana noted that the internal bleeding Abigail had was consistent with someone who had been repeatedly vomiting and had subsequently died.
Assistant Coroner, David Urpeth, said that over the course of the four-day inquest he would attempt to determine what had caused Abigail to continuously vomit in the days before her death.
The court heard that Abigail, from Doncaster, South Yorkshire, had only just started at Sheffield Hallam University where she was studying biomedical sciences.
She had moved into her student accommodation on the afternoon of Saturday, September 19, 2015, and joined friends out at the Tank nightclub where witnesses described she had a few drinks, and was said to be 'tipsy' but not drunk.
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