![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/https:\/\/prod.static9.net.au\/fs\/33afd430-f049-430c-ab6e-d08ba2a49237.jpeg\")
Brooke Tiddy was admitted to St George Private Hospital in Sydney on September 19, 2018. (Supplied)<\/p>\nThese were the last words spoken to a father by a young woman who died within hours of complications arising from elective weight loss surgery.\n<\/p>\n
Brooke Tiddy was admitted to St George Private Hospital in Sydney on September 19, 2018 for bariatric surgery recommended by her doctor, who assessed her as “super super obese”.<\/p>\n
Brooke Tiddy was admitted to St George Private Hospital in Sydney on September 19, 2018. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
But her hopes for a new lease on life were dashed when the 32-year-old died two days later.\n<\/p>\n
An inquest into her death seeks to assess the effectiveness of the hospital’s processes and prevent similar deaths.\n<\/p>\n
On Monday, her parents and two sisters remembered the mental health support worker as “an energetic and enthusiastic soul who would do anything for anyone”.\n<\/p>\n
Tiddy had been “deeply motivated to improve her health” and was “nervous but excited” when she embarked on the journey “she would never have a chance to complete”.\n<\/p>\n
Her family said the passionate baker’s life was cut tragically short by a failure to investigate her underlying health issues before her surgery.\n<\/p>\n
“This oversight cost Brooke her life and shattered her family’s and friends’ trust in the health system,” they said in a statement.\n<\/p>\n
“We hope (this inquest) will lead to measures that ensure such preventable tragedies never happen again”.\n<\/p>\n
The inquest was told Tiddy lived with an “extremely rare” condition known as sponastrime dysplasia, which affects the muscles and skeletal system.\n<\/p>\n
Her surgeon Dr Vytauras Kuzinkovas said he hadn’t previously heard of the condition and didn’t do any research about it until after Tiddy’s death.\n<\/p>\n
One of the associated features is a narrowing of the airways which was ultimately found to be Tiddy’s cause of death, the inquest was told.\n<\/p>\n
An autopsy found her airways had severely narrowed to the approximate diameter of a drinking straw, which almost certainly occurred before the surgery.\n<\/p>\n
Kuzinkovas said Tiddy downplayed her asthma and depression and didn’t reveal she had croup or narrow airways during an initial consultation.\n<\/p>\n
An in-depth assessment of her medical history would have likely revealed such risk factors, he said, but he hadn’t thought it was needed at the time.\n<\/p>\n
With the benefit of hindsight, Kuzinkovas accepted Tiddy was a high-risk patient whom he would have referred to specialists before surgery.\n<\/p>\n
Intensive care unit staff looking after Tiddy were not informed about her sponastrime dysplasia and its significance, the inquest was told.\n<\/p>\n
If he had been aware of the link between her condition and narrowed airways, ICU doctor Michael O’Leary said he would have called in a specialist.\n<\/p>\n
“This has been the worst experience I’ve had in my career. I felt very alone that night,” he said.\n<\/p>\n
“The only thing looking back on it I would do differently would be to get someone else to give me a hand.”\n<\/p>\n
O’Leary said he wasn’t sure whether a pre-operative assessment would have prevented Tiddy’s death because what they really needed was to access her full medical history.\n<\/p>\n
“In a sense we were set up to fail in this case because there was all of this information that was kept from us,” he said.\n<\/p>\n
The inquest continues on Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"These were the last words spoken to a father by a young woman who died within hours of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":136671,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4740,50],"class_list":{"0":"post-136670","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115009612989813748","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}