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they found a blood clot in his head which they reassured us wasn’t a problem.’
    Henry recovered so quickly that, by the followingFriday, he was well enough to go home. For weeks Jenny and Eddie thought it was the fall that had nearly killed their son.

    It had been a dreadful month for Ward Four as crisis after crisis hit each family.
    In the world outside attention was focused on more pressing events. The Gulf War was over, though the fires in the desert were still burning. Tennis star Steffi Graf’s father Peter had denied he was the father of a model’s love child, the giant Intersun and Air Europe holiday firm had crashed, hitting 500,000 holidays, new Prime Minister John Major announced the end of the failed Poll Tax and Chancellor Norman Lamont had increased VAT to 17.5% in his Budget.
    In America Eric Clapton’s son Conor had plunged 750 feet to his death through a window in his skyscraper home and Mark Phillips was accused of fathering a secret love child in New Zealand, a claim he angrily denied.
    But for more and more parents, nothing was more important to them than what was happening to their children at the Grantham and Kesteven General Hospital.

    Without doubt the luckiest baby to survive on Ward Four was five-months-old Paul Crampton.
    Much later, his escape from the brink of death was to provide the first conclusive evidence that what was happening was no cruel accident, no fluke of nature, no ‘bad run’.
    Blood samples would reveal that Paul, who was not diabetic, had a massive amount of insulin in his body; this had sent his sugar level plummeting. The human body needs sugar, mainly in the form of glucose, to feed the brain. In a normal, healthy child, the glucose level runs between 4 and 6 millimoles per litre of blood. The critical balance is controlled naturally by the body using insulin produced by the pancreas.
    In the case of baby Paul, on three separate occasions in the space of eight days his insulin level suddenly, and with no apparent reason, soared so high that he collapsed with hypoglycemia, a critical lack of sugar in the body. His lips turned blue, he broke out in a sweat and rolled his eyes alarmingly. Luckily, doctors reacted quickly to the emergency and saved his life by pumping glucose into his body in such vast amounts that they countered the effects of the insulin.
    Paul hadn’t been seriously ill when he arrived on Ward Four on 20 March suffering from a heavy cold which had led to bronchiolitis, a severe chest infection. His mother, Kath, told other parents she only expected him to be there for a couple of days. In the ward’s playroom, where her other two youngsters were letting off steam, she announced that Paul was doing so well he would soon be home.
    For three days all was well, then, to everyone’s surprise, other parents found Kath crying by the door to Cubicle Two where Paul had been lying but which was now empty. Sue Phillips, who was in thehospital with her twins Becky and Katie, tried to console Kath and asked what was wrong. Kath told her: ‘It’s Paul. He’s taken a turn for the worse. They have got him in the treatment room.’ Doctors were battling to save his life. Inside, Sue could see paediatrician Dr Nanayakkara and the blue uniforms of two nurses, one of them Nurse Allitt.
    Sue said: ‘I heard Bev Allitt say: “I think I know what’s wrong with him. He is hypoglycemic.”’
    Paul was put on a glucose drip to counteract the shortage of sugar and quickly he showed signs of recovery.
    Sue later said: ‘When it was over, I thought how clever the nurse was to have realised what was wrong with him so quickly.’
    Another nurse on the ward said: ‘He had been fine apart from a slight temperature, which was reported, but then he arrested. Afterwards, when I saw him, he was surrounded by drips.’
    It was several hours before Paul had recovered sufficiently to be wheeled back from the