When a patient died after a delay in treatment, David Sellu was jailed for 15 months. Now, with his conviction quashed, he tells how he found himself in the line of fire. Which is how, an hour or so later, he came to meet the man whose death would turn him into a criminal serving 15 months in a prison cell. His new patient was a year-old who had recently had a knee replacement, but was now complaining of abdominal pain. In Did He Save Lives? Sellu, now in his early 70s, speaks quietly and precisely.
That scan showed Hughes had a perforated bowel and would need surgery straight away. Sellu tried to book an operating slot, but the earliest he could secure a theatre and anaesthetist at the hospital, the private Clementine Churchill in Harrow, was for later that evening.
At the last minute, however, the anaesthetist was delayed with another case. Sellu tried, but failed, to find another anaesthetist. During the operation Hughes bled a lot more than expected and, it turned out, was also suffering from cirrhosis of the liver. By the time the surgery was over and Hughes was transferred to intensive care, it was clear that he had an uphill battle ahead. Hughes died two days later, without ever regaining consciousness. Sellu remembers being told the news by a colleague on the phone.
You agonise about whether you could have done anything different β this happens after every death. He grew up in a village in a rural part of Sierra Leone, the eldest of 10 children. After he started to teach himself to read, his aunt got him a place in the local school β and on the first day, she and the headteacher chose his birthdate.
He boarded a plane for the first time in his life and arrived in the UK knowing no one. The shop was Harrods: an attendant kindly pointed him towards another shop called Boots down the road.
