THE TEENAGER awaiting a transplant after suffering liver failure following a weekend drinking binge left a Belfast hospital for a nearby pub in search of a drink last week.
A director of the Old Moat Inn opposite the Ulster Hospital in Dundonald yesterday said that Gareth Anderson (19) had turned up last Wednesday and asked for a pint, but was refused as he was in hospital clothing and had attachments for a drip in his hands.
“He came into the bar, I was in the office at the time, and the girl behind the bar came in to me and said, ‘There’s a guy here with his robe on and drips in both his hands and he doesn’t look very well’. He had asked for a drink and we refused on the basis that he had obviously walked out of the hospital,” Stephen McMillan told The Irish Times.
“Then he took a soft drink. We read his name off his armband and phoned the Ulster Hospital and after a wee while they worked out he had come over from the hospital, and one of our guys just took him back over again. We offered him a bowl of soup but he was okay. There was no difficulty with him at all, he was very calm.”
Mr McMillan said the patient was in the pub for about 10 minutes while the hospital confirmed he was one of their patients before the pub storeman walked him back over. “We get quite a few visitors over from the hospital – they just walk out, but we never serve any of them. We have quite a good relationship with the hospital, we would ring them up and say such-and-such is here and it’s all dealt with fairly quickly. Patients do walk out all the time, they decide they want a breath of fresh air and end up here.”
Gareth Anderson’s father, Brian, yesterday confirmed the story. “I don’t know what he was thinking about, I don’t think he knows,” he told the Press Association. “He said, ‘I don’t know why I did it, I just walked out and walked across to the pub’.”
Mr Anderson said his son first told him he had a Coke, but when pressed admitted trying to order alcohol first. Mr Anderson said: “I don’t know what is going on in his head, he needs mental help as well.” He is challenging guidelines at the King’s College Hospital in London, to which his son has been transferred, recommending that only liver patients off alcohol for at least six months be included on the transplant waiting list.
Fearing his son may have just weeks to live unless he has a liver transplant, Mr Anderson has said: “I have to take this to the courts, what else can I do?”