‘It’s bad enough losing a loved one,” says Karren Fraser-Knight, a 56-year-old fitness instructor from Cheshire, “but when you lose an identical twin it’s so different. You have such a bond.” Paula Greenhough was the older twin. “My mum didn’t know she was having twins until she gave birth to Paula and my foot fell out,” Karren says. “There were no scans back then!” Paula was also the more dominant twin. “She was more vocal,” says Karren. As teenagers, they fought, sometimes physically. “We were like cats and dogs,” says Karren. “Seriously. Proper fisticuffs when we were younger. We would batter each other. But God help anyone who came between us. We had each other’s backs.”
They were competitive. “If one of us did something, the other had to do it better,” she says, laughing. “We were always trying to outshine each other.” When they were teenagers, they rode horses: if Karren got a rosette in a competition, Paula had to win two. When Karren qualified as a Zumba instructor, Paula got her certificate as well.
Theirs was a ferocious, impenetrable bond. “We were absolutely identical,” says Karren. “We would finish each other’s sentences.” When Paula went into labour, Karren experienced stomach pains. They started their periods on the same day. They went on holiday together. They would talk on the phone every evening, for hours. “My second husband said that, when he married me, he took on Paula,” says Karren. “It was a package deal. He understood that.”
Paula had recently started a job as a conveyancer; she also taught Zumba classes on the side. “She was well known in the Zumba world,” says Karren. The sisters were devotees of the Colombian fitness regime, both dropping from dress size 26 to size 10 after taking it up. Apart from a dodgy knee – she had had a knee replacement – Paula was fit and healthy.
She became ill on 19 March. By 25 March, she felt so bad that she phoned 111. She was told to stay at home. “She was shocked,” says Karren. “She told me that she didn’t understand why they were telling her to stay home, because she felt so ill. She was hoping they would send an ambulance.” Paula spoke to her GP, who prescribed penicillin over the phone and said that it sounded like a chest infection.
On 28 March, Paula could not breathe and called 999. “By this point,” says Karren, “Paula was hypoxic [meaning that her oxygen levels were dangerously low]. She was already dying by the time they took her to hospital.” At Stepping Hill hospital in Stockport, doctors told Paula that she needed to go on a ventilator immediately. She called her sister one last time.
“She was crying,” remembers Karren. “She was upset. She was having difficulty breathing. Her last words to me were: ‘I’m frightened if they put me to sleep, I’ll never wake up.’ And she never did. I think she knew that she wouldn’t wake up.” Paula died on 3 April.
Karren is incensed by what she sees as the avoidable failures that led to her sister’s death. “People have died because 111 did not make the right call,” she says. “How many more people have died who could be alive today?” After Paula died, Karren met with the doctors at the hospital; she says they told her that her twin could possibly have survived if she had received medical treatment sooner.
“That’s what destroys you more than anything,” says Karren. “If the ambulance had been sent sooner, my sister could be alive today. That hurts.”
