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babysitters. Husband Finbar didn’t leave most nights until 9pm or 10pm.
    Then, on 9 March, Kayley collapsed with respiratory failure which struck her, without warning, in the middle of the night. She had two attacks in three hours. Her mother witnessed the first at 1am when she saw Kayley lifting herself in her cot and then keeling over. She’d stopped breathing.
    Margaret later recalled: ‘I thought she was dead. I thought I’d lost her.’ Doctors and nurses dashed to Kayley’s side and the emergency team managed to start her breathing again.
    Margaret was in the red telephone box in the corridor at the entrance to the ward, telephoning relatives to tell them of the crisis, when Kayley was struck down again with another attack at 4am. This time it seemed that her heart had stopped beating.
    Margaret rushed back and police were sent to the couple’s home at 5.35am to alert Finbar who, without a telephone at home, had been unaware of Kayley’s fight for life. Again, the nurses and doctors brought Kayley round but she was clearly desperately ill. Her brain had been starved of oxygen, which would become an obvious cause for concern later.
    Kayley was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, twenty miles away. There her recovery was swift. By the time Finbar got to Nottingham, Kayley was breathing quite normally with the help of oxygen. He said: ‘The police had told me she’d taken a turn for the worse and my heart sank to the bottom.
    â€˜I went there fearing the worst and yet when I got there her eyes were open. Within two days she had picked up completely.’
    She was taken back to Grantham after three days and eventually allowed home. Later she went into Nottingham City Hospital where surgeons successfully carried out an operation to repair her cleft palate. But there seemed no explanation for the mysterious two attacks that had nearly ended her life.

    Yik Hung Chan was called Henry by his parents. His father Eddie was boss of Mr Pang’s Chinese restaurant in nearby Stamford, just down the Al. Henry was two years old, a happy child with a boisterous sense of fun, when on Maundy Thursday, 28 March, he plunged twenty feet out of his sister’s bedroom window to the patio below. He was rushed by his frantic parents in their car to the casualty department at the hospital just over a mile from their smart detached home in Winchester Road.
    X-rays showed that Henry had two fractures of the skull and doctors admitted him to Ward Four for observation. His mother Jenny recalls: ‘He wasstill dizzy and had bad headaches. The following day he seemed a lot better and the doctors said they had thought about sending him home.’
    But, instead of getting better, Henry’s condition worsened over the Easter weekend.
    By Saturday he was very ill, vomiting and sleeping a lot, and doctors warned his parents that, if he didn’t improve, they would have to send him to the Queen’s Medical Centre, in Nottingham, just as they had done with Kayley Desmond a few days before. It was a normal precaution for the more seriously ill youngster because Grantham hospital did not have the special facilities to care for critically ill children. The Q.M.C., less than an hour away by ambulance, had a reputation for being one of the finest hospitals in the country.
    By Easter Sunday Henry was worse and started having fits. He had such a high temperature that a fan was placed by his side and he was put on a drip to keep him hydrated.
    One of the nurses on duty remembered the moment when little Henry suffered a cardiac arrest. His pulse was high and he had the arrest soon afterwards. Henry was rushed to Nottingham by ambulance. His parents went too, desperately worried at what might happen. Jenny said: ‘He was conscious, he knew I was his mum, and he seemed slightly improved when he got there. He had a scan that night and the doctors said