Author
Frederick Linden-Wyatt is a happily married man (in his 70’s) with a son and daughter plus two sons (one son sadly died at the young age of two) and grandson by a previous marriage and now lives in Lincolnshire, England. In 2000 he went in to a private hospital in Kettering for a well overdue hip replacement after paying in to BUPA for many years. Before his operation he had risen the ranks in the newspaper printing industry and in the 1990’s he was made a sales director of a leading PLC. In the late 90’s he left the security of a ‘proper job’ to venture on his own as a print consultant and helped fill the new press at the Eastern Newspapers plant at Norwich. Some of his contracts were for some of the UK’s top weekly newspapers such as Motorcycle News which was one of the first newspapers to be printed in full colour on all its 128 pages. He also managed the print procurement for groups such as Home Counties Newspaper which owned popular weekly tiles such has the Ham & High. At the same time, his family also owned a large kennels and cattery in Northamptonshire.
However, on the 7th of April 2000 Frederick’s hip replacement went pear-shaped and he went into a coma. Frederick was in and out of a coma and when awake didn’t recognise his wife Julie or his son Stephen. He had become violent and had to be sedated on several occasions. The coma continued and he was sent to the NHS general hospital for an MRI scan to see if he had had a stroke but nothing showed. He later discovered that he had suffered from fat embolism syndrome (FES) that got into his blood stream and when it reached his brain, most of his memory was wiped out. FES can result in death. Memory loss continued for a few years after and to this day he relies on his wife and son to fill in the blanks. Due to his memory loss he had to give up his print consultancy and sell the kennels and cattery. Frederick had a second hip replacement in 2018 but was assured by the surgeon that they now ‘wash out’ before installing the new hip joint. If the ‘wash out’ had been done in 2000 perhaps the fat embolism could have been avoided.