Very Severe ME patient 23 year-old Savannah Victora-May is at risk of death in Queen Elizabeth Hospital, in Woolwich, London.
Savannah is being denied appropriate fluids, nutrition and most critically right now, pain relief.
Multiple ME expert clinicians and national charity chiefs have offered the hospital guidelines for safer care. However, her medical team remains intransigent. There’s no other hospital she can transfer into where she’s guaranteed better treatment, and despite huge efforts on Savannah’s part to arrange access to palliative care in a hospice, QEH refused to facilitate a transfer.
Having exhausted all other avenues, we are setting up a fundraiser for Savannah to cover supplementary medical treatment costs, including private pain management, a syringe driver and ME-literate nursing support to try and arrest her decline and prevent death from organ failure. Donations may also be used for legal costs around hospital negligence. If there are any funds left over, they will be passed on via mutual aid to other Severe ME sufferers in crisis situations.
Savannah’s current situation at Queen Elizabeth Hospital:
Since March 2025, Savannah has been an inpatient at QEH. Throughout her stay, clinical staff have subjected her to a litany of dangerous and abusive care decisions including:
Neglecting to clean her Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter (PICC) line for weeks, resulting in blockage, and putting her at risk of infection.
Violently removing sensory protections and ridiculing her use of a blackout tent.
Essentially starving her after withdrawing, in the week before Christmas, a vital anti-histamine medication that had allowed her to tolerate nutrition via NJ tube for the past 7 years. She has only managed morsels since. At the time of writing, Savannah’s last meal was 5 chips, 12 days ago. Eating or drinking orally causes her to pass out with pain.
Refusal to implement TPN (total parenteral nutrition) - despite an ME expert advising this as something she needs urgently as she is now experiencing gastric collapse.
Removing her fluids for days and causing significant decline through the cruel effects of dehydration.
Repeated visits by a psychiatrist interrogating her about her childhood and dismissing the biological neuroimmune basis of ME.
Relentless unnecessary interactions that are keeping her in a dangerous downward spiral of rolling PEM (post exertional malaise) and pain.
Savannah has high hopes for her future, that include A-Levels, university and becoming a doctor. But as it stands, QEH is failing even to stabilise her. Right now, we are witnessing her endure a slow and excruciating death via dehydration and malnutrition without pain relief. As people living with post-viral disease the world over are painfully aware, it wouldn’t be the first time a hospital has killed a Severe ME patient through hubris and negligence. Please someone ask them to google the Semmelweis reflex.
If you are in a position to donate or share this GoFundMe, please show your solidarity with Savannah and your belief in the suffering of the Very Severe in the NHS, and give her a chance to achieve the brighter future she deserves.
Background on the organisers:
Sam Pearce writes for The Sick Times about her work campaigning with the Severe ME Advocacy Group (SMEAG), represents the Severe on the strategic leadership board of the World ME Alliance and is the founder of SICK Pride in South Africa (IG: @sick pride_sa).
Rachel Spalding is also a member of SMEAG, but based in UK (IG: @memyselfandmyalgice) - Rachel will be administering the funds and making payments to the support advocate on the ground for pain relief aids because Savannah is currently too weak.
Savannah Victora-May has expressed her wish that, once she is transferred from QEH to a hospice, any remaining funds should be passed on via mutual aid to other people suffering SevereEMergency.
Hannah Sharland is a journalist with ME who works at The Canary highlighting stories of people with Severe ME.