A six-year-old girl begged her mother not to cry after learning that her ‘brilliant’ father’s ear infection had suddenly left him brain-dead – before asking if he’d still have McDonalds in heaven.
Brave Ella Barnard will say goodbye to her doting father Lee, 36, today after his family made the agonising decision to turn off his life support.
Mr Barnard, from Chester, had been suffering from an earache for months, with doctors just telling him to take ibuprofen and ‘get it syringed at some point.’
But the Everton fan was rushed to hospital on Tuesday afternoon after the infection turned into meningitis and he started having seizures.
Mr Barnard was put into an induced coma and his family have now been told the devastating news he ‘won’t wake up’.
His relatives have launched a GoFundMe page to help cover funeral costs and to support his family.
The receptionist’s heartbroken partner Sophie Foster, 38, told how their daughter, Ella, comforted her and told her not to cry as she was told the tragic news.
‘She just took it in and said, “that’s fine, mummy, don’t get upset” and just cuddled me,’ Ms Foster said.
‘I don’t think it’s sunk in. This morning, when I woke up, she was a little bit upset, and I said, “It’s all right to cry don’t hold it in,” and she just said, “Will daddy have McDonald’s in heaven?”
‘I said, “of course he will”.’
Ella and her mother had been ill shortly before Mr Barnard started to feel unwell and so initially Ms Foster believed he had caught the same bug.
But, it soon became apparent something was seriously wrong, ‘He was having a seizure on the bed and he’d been sick everywhere.
‘I phoned an ambulance, but he was just, delirious,’ Ms Foster recalled.
She added that Mr Barnard remains ‘unresponsive’ and doctors have said he has ‘no brain activity’.
Ms Foster said: ‘I’ve just been going back and two to the hospital but every time the doctors come in, they say there’s no chance of him surviving. He’s definitely brain dead.
‘He’s just not responding. There’s no brain activity. I think he’s had a CT scan today just to see if any blood goes into his brain, but it’s not.
‘They’re going to turn the machine off tomorrow’.
Ms Foster described her partner as a ‘brilliant dad’ adding, ‘I’m just coping for my little girl.
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do without him. We did everything together. We didn’t even go out with our friends or make plans at the weekend. It was always just the three of us.’
Mr Barnard’s friend Wayne Elliott, 54, paid tribute to him saying, ‘He’s a lovely lad. He’d literally do anything for anybody’.
He added how Mr Barnard and Ms Foster bought their first house together just two weeks ago ‘but he’s not going to get to enjoy the house with them.’