Caroline Derrick-Gray was working as a model when she first clapped eyes on Nick. Six foot tall and with a smile that lit up a room, he flirted with her – but she had a boyfriend and didn’t take much notice.
So Nick waited until Caroline was single three years later and asked her out. It was the early nineties, and the couple dated briefly before he unceremoniously dumped her and they went their separate ways. That was until March 2013, when a repentant Nick got in touch to apologise for his behaviour and sent Caroline a David Bowie CD for her birthday – a date he’d remembered 20 years on.
‘My friends warned me: “He broke your heart all those years ago. Don’t you dare reply”,’ Caroline tells Metro over Zoom from her home in rural Dorset. However, she ignored them, got in touch, and the pair soon fell madly in love.
Just two months after their reunion Nick proposed to Caroline, who was a photographer working in local politics at the time. Immediately, she said yes – on one condition: that Nick give up smoking.
It was a dealbreaker for Caroline, as she had watched her dad die of a heart attack caused by a lifetime of cigarettes and she didn’t want to relive that trauma.
Nick swapped his cigarettes for a vape instead and the pair spent the eight years enjoying married life together, often walking and camping along the south-west coastal path and building a life in Dorset, 150 miles away from Caroline’s home in Tunbridge Wells.
They were happy. Nick worked as a handyman and Caroline trained to be a nutritional coach.
‘Nick was a powerful, fit man. He was a farmer’s son, served in the army, had run three marathons and had cycled across Canada twice. He had a presence about him,’ says Caroline.
‘And he was a good man. He was the type of person that if he went to your house and saw the gate was swinging, he’d fix it there and then.’
On Friday 8 December 2023, Nick began couging up blood.
Alarmed, the couple immediately went to the doctor, where a locum GP told Nick he likely had a chest infection, prescribed antibiotics and advised bed rest.
‘The day before, he’d been at work, digging a pond. It was such a big hole that the client suggested a digger, but Nick said: “What for?” He cycled to and from work, come home like normal, drank a pint of water, I cooked an evening meal and we watched TV,’ remembers Caroline.
However, resting didn’t make a difference and by the following week Nick had become weak and breathless, so he returned to his GP who sent him straight to hospital in Dorchester, 40 minutes away.
‘I was thinking, this sort of thing doesn’t happen to us. We’re fit people. But then he told me they were keeping him in, because he had pneumonia,’ Caroline says.
Although Nick was admitted to the lung specialist ward and given oxygen, he was more irritated by the fact he had to stay in and take more time off work. Meanwhile, Caroline went home to get his things.
‘The consultant told me: “Your husband’s in a really bad way. This is very serious.” My mind went blank as he told me about all the tests they were doing, but he said it was down to vaping,’ she remembers.
Nick was adamant that Caroline go to Tunbridge Wells to be with her mother and that she come back the next day with books to read and some chocolate Hobnobs.
She complied, but her husband continued to deteriorate. Within days he had been admitted to intensive care and Caroline received the distressing news that he needed to be ventilated.
‘The nurses told me: “If there’s anything you need to say to your husband, you should say it now. We’re going to do the best we can, but he’s really poorly.”’ I was just in total shock’, Caroline recalls. ‘I was thinking that I could lose him – but it just didn’t make sense.’
All Christmas plans went out the window as she was sent home and told to await news.
Remarkably, Nick rallied and by Thursday 21st December – to her disbelief – he was sent home. Caroline was taught how to become her husband’s nurse; when to administer drugs, how to turn him to prevent bed sores and how to measure and record his heart rate and blood oxygen levels.
With Covid, Norovirus and winter flu bugs flying around, Caroline took them into a lockdown to give Nick the best chance of recovery. They spent a quiet few days, talking about when he might return to work and enjoying a roast lamb for Christmas lunch.
‘To look at him, you wouldn’t know anything was wrong. His colour was fine, he looked like himself. But his breathing was so laboured. I remember coming into the bedroom one day and he was sitting on the edge of the bed and he told me he’d never been so disappointed in his physical health in his entire life.
‘I was angry that they’d sent him home at the time, but now I realise it was because they knew he would be safer from infection with me. And at least it meant we got to have Christmas Day together,’ Caroline remembers.
Despite the doctors’ warnings, Caroline still believed he would recover. ‘Nick did too. We knew he was very ill, but we were making future plans. He said: “By the time my birthday comes on 21st of June, my aim is to be back at work. Even if I can’t go do heavy stuff, I’ll be able to do painting and decorating”,’ she remembers.
By Boxing Day, Nick had coughed up more blood and two days later he woke Caroline at 4am to tell her something wasn’t right. Discovering a large blood clot in the toilet, she took him straight back to hospital.
Late at night on the 29 December, Caroline received a heartbreaking call.
‘I had been asleep on the sofa when Nick called breathless from his hospital bed. He shouted down the phone: “I’m not going to make it, I love you” and the phone went dead.’ By the time she arrived at hospital, her husband’s bed was surrounded by medics and she received the devastating news that he would not survive.
‘I was pleading with the soldier in him to rally. I told him that the boys – our cats, Pins and Needles – were waiting for him. But then the doctor touched my arm and she said, “Caroline, I think you need to call this”.’
Holding her husband’s hand, she said her goodbyes and told Nick what a wonderful husband he’d been. She was still clasping his hand as the doctors ceased heart massage and called out the time of death: 12:48am.
Caroline sat with Nick for a few hours, until she noticed his hands changing colour. With no-one to drive her back, the nurses tried to get her to eat digestive biscuits for the shock. She returned to their empty home and sat in her coat in the cold, dark night, flanked by the cats as she waited for friends and family to wake up so she could deliver the news.
‘I had been sleeping on the couch since he came home on the 21st. It took four months before I could bear to get back into our bed. The place just felt so empty. I couldn’t cope with the door not opening and him coming in calling “Hello Gorgeous!”. His presence was just gone.’
Nick’s death certificate says he died of a cardiac arrest caused by pneumonia, while his medical records list ‘possibly vape-associated pneumonitis’. After conversations with his doctor, Caroline is convinced vaping is to blame.
‘A Doctor told me: ‘”Hypersensitivity Pneumonitis is the big clue that vaping was involved”. When he was ill, they did so many tests and they couldn’t find anything bacterial or fungal that was causing the decay of his lungs,’ she explains. The consultant even said that they thought it was vaping induced acute lung injury and reported it as such.’
Nick’s case was detailed on a yellow card report – the system for reporting suspected safety concerns related to medicines, vaccines, and medical devices.
Meanwhile, Caroline is furious that something so dangerous is still considered to be safe and wants vapers to re-think their habits.
‘The consultant had said to Nick: “You know this is due to vaping”. And Nick went – “yep”. When I saw the X-ray of his lungs on the computer after he died, they were gone. They were full of black holes. One had a tear, one had collapsed.’
Last Christmas, Caroline locked herself away and let the world celebrate without her. This year, she hasn’t decided what to do yet; but says perhaps she will volunteer.Her main concern is that other people think hard about what they put into their lungs.
‘If Nick had tried gum or patches, I absolutely know he would be here today,’ she says. ‘My mum was made a widow at 57 because my dad had a smoking-related heart attack. I was 55 when I lost Nick. I never in a billion years thought I would be a widow younger than my mother.
‘We were only married eight years and I’ve had to say goodbye. My life has been turned upside down; my whole world has gone. I don’t want anyone else to sit at a hospital bed holding their husband’s hand at just 57.’
