Sally Adams obituary | Nursing

My mother, Sally Adams, who died at the age of 73, worked for many years at the Papworth hospital in Cambridge, where she was a sister in the intensive therapy unit and was one of the nurses who took care of Keith Castle, the first successful patient of the cardiac transplantation of the United Kingdom in 1979.

She worked in Papworth from 1975 to 1990 (with the exception of a two-year fate at Tréliske de Truro hospital in 1986-1988). She then went to mourning advice until her retirement in 2019.

Sally was born in Royston, Hertfordshire, from Betty (née Pigg), a dinner lady, and Alan Whitmore, a truck driver. Sally attended the local meridian school, where she decided very early on that she had to be a nurse.

After completing her training at the Cambridge Addenbrooke Hospital in 1973, she became a district nurse. She joined Papworth two years later, was promoted as a uit sister in a year and spent a large part of her time in Papworth to take care of transplanted patients.

When the pioneering heart operation of Castle, carried out by Terence English, aroused interest in the world, it had to face the journalists climbing the trees outside the neighborhood, trying to have an overview inside. She also created first aid from Papworth patients to the end of life group with a colleague, Sylvia Reid.

In 1991, Sally received a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and therefore decided to recycle as a mourning advisor, a job that would be less physically demanding. Subsequently, she worked in St Julia’s Hospice, Hayle, in Cornwall, where she was the pioneer of a mourning service for mourning parents and installed the rainbow room, a space for families filled with books, sofas and a PlayStation. While working at St Julia, she studied for a diploma in counseling at Exeter University, which she finished in 2007.

Two marriages – at Tony Hall (1971-74) and Richard Bloss (1975-88) – ended with divorce. Sally was married to her third husband, Ian Adams, from 1990 until her death in 2023. She met Ian in 1989 in a Christian retirement center, where, after hearing her by holding strongly on how to raise children, she approached to inform him that he “spoke a lot of bullshit”. They were brilliant verbal combat partners and had a relationship full of happiness.

She leaves to mourn her three children – Simon, her first marriage, and Marc and I of her second – by the son of Ian, Alex, and by five grandchildren.