A healthy mother-of-two collapsed as she taught at an infants’ school and later died of a brain haemorrhage. Helen Hipkiss, 39, was working as a teaching assistant at Brisbane Park Infant School in Barrow, Cumbria when she was taken ill. Despite the best efforts of the medical team at Furness General Hospital over the next 24 hours, the decision was taken to turn off her life support machine.
Helen’s husband, Jason, and their two children, nine-year-old Adam and Yasmin, seven, have been left devastated. Mr Hipkiss said: ‘I was at work and got a phone call to say Helen had collapsed. She had the car at school so I ran and went to the hospital in the ambulance with her. ‘I stopped with Helen on Wednesday night and on Thursday afternoon the consultants carried out formal tests which confirmed she was brain dead. ‘Helen was kept on life support in order for the organ donations to take place on Friday.
It’s what she would have wanted.’ The family, of Walney Island, Cumbria, were meant to travel to Belgium on Monday for a week’s holiday. He said: ‘That’s what’s so shocking about all of this, she’s never had anything wrong with her. She never smoked, didn’t drink a lot… she really looked after herself. ‘She’d carried a donor card since Adam was born, we’d talked about it quite a lot and I countersigned the card. ‘When it became clear she wasn’t going to come back, the doctors said they wanted to talk to me about something and I knew what it would be so I told them ‘Helen carried a donor card’.
