Waterford County Coroner's inquests
The case was heard at Waterford Courthouse.
Earlier this month, the Waterford County Coroner held an inquest into recent deaths reported in the South East.
Coroner John P. Goff opened proceedings in Waterford Courthouse, alongside Garda Inspector Shay Keevans. University Hospital of Waterford (UHW) Pathologists Rob Landers and Dr Nigam Shah attended the inquest to give the post mortem evidence.
The first hearing concerned a man in his 50's, who passed away after a night out. The man had attended a whiskey tasting with friends. When he came home, he slept on a couch next to his wife. When she left for work early the next day he was snoring. However, when she came home a few hours later, she discovered her husband unresponsive. Emergency services were called and the man was declared dead by Gardaí. The cause of death was cardiac arrhythmia, or cardiac arrest.
The second hearing concerned a man in his mid-70's who suffered an abdominal haemorrhage and a 9cm wide aortic aneurysm. He died in in the Intensive Care Unit at UHW, the official cause of death being a aortic aneurysm in line with ischemic heart disease.
The inquest heard the details of the passing of an elderly man who suffered from dementia. He was sitting in a chair when his wife went upstairs in their house. She heard a noise from downstairs and came down to find the man had fallen off his chair and his head was against a wall.
She called for an ambulance, which took over an hour to come from Kilkenny and brought the patient to UHW. He was declared dead the next day. His cause of death was craniocerebral trauma, or traumatic brain injury with co-morbidity of ischemic heart disease.
One hearing concerned the death of a middle-aged woman who suffered from kidney problems. She was scheduled to undergo surgery for kidney stone removal but her urine culture showed traces of infection so the operation had to be postponed. Over a number of days her health declined. An examination by the urology team found that her kidney stent was encrusted, which would've made the removal of kidney stones difficult and increase the chances of kidney infection. The cause of death was sepsis.
Another hearing involved a man in his late 80's who had suffered a road traffic accident. According to Dr. Shah, the post-mortem revealed that the patient's heart was twice the average size and showed evidence of an earlier heart attack. At the inquest, a family member said that, despite his age, the man was more energetic than "a man 30 years his junior. He was not a man who was going to leave this earth soon". The cause of death was ischemic heart disease in the background of a road traffic incident.
