Coronavirus: Distraught daughter forced to listen to mom's final breaths over phone as she played her favorite song
A heartbroken daughter listened to her dying mother over the phone as she drew her final deaths after losing the devastating coronavirus battle.
Kay Elmer, 51, listened to her favorite song, Tina Turner’s 'Simply the Best', with her daughter at the other end of the line as she died from the virus in hospital, The Sun reports.
Daughter Sophia Essel, 30, is now angry at selfish crowds who are breaking the government's lockdown rules and is blaming them for "taking the p***" while others suffer.
Elmer went on holiday to Cape Verde once a month with her husband John, 67, but barely left her Merseyside neighborhood otherwise. She had only been to London in the weeks before she developed coronavirus symptoms. However, she succumbed to the deadly pathogen less than two weeks after falling ill with a fever and cough.
Now, her children Sophie and her brother Jamie, 33, cannot even hold a funeral service for their mother due to the strict protocols in place.
"It was really sad. I'm the last person she'd spoken to," Sophie said, remembering her mother's final moments.
“My brother is in the Army and he'd just been deployed the week before," she said. "The next morning she called me crying because she was so scared."
Sophia wasn't allowed to even sit beside her mother when she reached the hospital. She found her mother's condition had rapidly deteriorated in a rather short period of time, with most of her organs shut down and 95 percent oxygen support.
"Her last text said 'I love you, always and forever. Be careful driving and get Jamie home,'" the devastated daughter recalled.
Sophia said she couldn't bear to watch her mother passing away, and so she sat in a waiting room trying to talk to her over the phone.
As Elmer took her final breaths, her daughter played some of her favorite songs over the call, including 'Simply the Best'.
"They offered for us to go in the room in hazmat suits to say goodbye, but we wouldn't have been protected because they are all fitted for the staff," Sophie explained. "I went (to the window of her room) and I saw her. They turned her to face us and it was just too much. I fell to the floor crying."
"My brother walked me out to the waiting room and I asked the nurses to put mom's phone on," she continued. "I called her on her mobile. They answered and we played all our favorite songs to her until she took her last breath."
"She went out to Tina Turner's 'Simply the Best'. It was my nan's funeral song and it always calmed mother down," Sophie said. "In the end, she was really holding on herself, breathing without the machine, so I had to have a word with her and say 'come on now mom, nan's waiting for you'."
Sophia is now urging people to pay heed to government guidelines like social distancing to prevent the transmission of the deadly virus.
"I'm assuming (mum caught this due to) people, at some point, going out when they've had symptoms," she said.
"In Spain, they're role models for this. They had everybody stay in. Everybody is taking the p*** a bit here," Sophie remarked. "It's about getting people to recognize this. The shops are letting people in ... but the aisles are filling up. Social distancing isn't enough. People are taking kids shopping, kids are running off. Others are exercising in groups."
"You don't need three people to take a dog for a walk," she noted, adding that she was "at the anger stage of the grieving process.”