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May 19 2011 by David Holmes, Chester Chronicle

CORONER Nicholas Rheinberg said it will never be known what caused a mother-of-two to suffer a heart attack leading to serious brain injuries due to being starved of oxygen.

Andrea Salkeld, from Sussex Road, Newton, was on holiday on the Costa Brava, Spain, with mother Carol Jones and brother Wayne when she began to feel unwell and started vomiting in the night.

The doctor was called the next day and injected her with an anti-sickness drug and prescribed antibiotics but told Mrs Jones not to worry.

The medical notes later showed he suspected she had bronchitis.

While fetching the medicines, Mrs Salkeld, a divorcee, appears to have fallen from her hotel bed and hit her head on the hard tile floor.

Consultant physician Dr James Finnerty, from the Countess of Chester Hospital, said the bump could have exacerbated a weak pulse.

He could not rule out the possibility Mrs Salkeld had suffered an allergic reaction to the anti-sickness drug but said the one believed to have been injected had ‘a very good safety record’.

Speculating about her illness, he said: “It may just have been a bad viral infection.”

After the Spanish doctor had gone, Mrs Salkeld lay down on the bed but Mrs Jones noticed her legs beginning to shake and her face was mottled.

She ran down to the hotel reception but when she returned to the room it appeared her daughter had stopped breathing. Her son Wayne gave heart massage until paramedics arrived.

They used a defibrillator which seems to have caused Mrs Salkeld to begin breathing again on her own.

The critically-ill patient was taken off to a local hospital and then transferred by helicopter to a Barcelona hospital, leaving the family frantically trying to find out where she was.

The case hit the headlines in the UK when a mix-up with the details given to the insurance company meant it was initially unwilling to pay for her to be brought home by air ambulance.

But Mrs Salkeld did eventually come home and was first treated at Aintree University Hospital but later transferred to the Countess of Chester Hospital where she died on November 29, 2009, after suffering several chest infections from which she eventually succumbed.

The coroner recorded an open verdict.