On the way home from hospital for lingering headaches, George Diamond told his dad he was being overprotective and needed to have more faith in the doctors treating him.
Two months later, the 18-year-old boxer was at Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital from bleeding near his brain, with an autopsy revealing an older subdural haemorrhage.
An inquest investigating the links between the head knock George suffered in October 2018 and his death in February 2019 after collapsing at his gym found doctors missed several opportunities to detect the bleed as they did not order brain scans despite his ongoing symptoms.
“We’ve gotten some justice but we’re also really sad and angry knowing that if the doctors had did [sic] their job our son would still be alive today,” George’s father Victor (Vlasis) Diamond told Neos Kosmos.
George visited two GPs with his father after being punched in the groin and head at the Cranbourne West gym on October 25.
Both doctors sent him away without ordering a CT scan or MRI.
When the symptoms persisted Victor took him to Frankston Hospital on November 5, begging emergency physician Dr Yigal Reuben for a CT scan or MRI for his son.
“I actually asked him twice because the first time he told me no and I said to him, ‘no, you need to do one because something’s not right here, please do one’ but he refused to and said I was being an overprotective father and it’s not necessary.”
“He knows best was his words.”
Dr Reuben diagnosed George with concussion but said the scans were unnecessary and recommended against playing sport while the symptoms continued.
George told his father the trainers at the gym and the multiple doctors had cleared him.
The teenager was medically suspended from the Sting Gym after the October concussion but returned to regular training in late December 2018 or early January 2019, before increasing his intensity after receiving a certificate of fitness from Dr Hajbabaie.
On February 18, 2019, he collapsed at the gym and died in hospital three days later.
Coroner John Cain last week delivered his findings that Dr Hajbabaie and Dr Reuben should have ordered George to undergo a CT scan on multiple occasions.
“The coroner said that going by the evidence that we have, if the doctors had performed a CT scan when he was presented at the GP the second time or at the hospital, George would be alive today,” Victor said.
“That is really hard to accept,” he added that the whole ordeal has taken 10 years of he and George’s mum Shayla’s lives.
“Our family has been really torn apart.”
“Shayla has suffered a heart attack because of it. We’re on so much medication now. The kids are on antidepressants. They’ve gone from going out with their friends to not wanting to leave home.
“They’ve got permanent damage now for the rest of their lives. They’ll never be the same. So that’s breaks our heart even more.
“Pappou George, who George was named after, he’s devastated.”
“We had five children, but we also had nine miscarriages along the way, so family means everything to us. When one of them gets taken away, it’s just torture.”
The boxer’s mother Shayla remembers him as a caring and happy person who was there to support others in tough times, opting to go live with his elderly grandfather after his grandmother had died.
It has been years of legal battles which will continue as the family are suing the gym, the hospital and the GP.
Mediation is coming up which Victor thinks will be done before Christmas.
Coroner Cain has called for new national guidelines to treat patients with head injuries resulting from potentially dangerous mechanisms, such as being struck in the boxing ring.
He urged for mandatory training for the necessary bodies in medical clearance for people beginning or returning from injury to combat sports and guidelines on the appropriate threshold for undertaking brain CT scan or MRI following a boxing or mixed martial arts injury.
George’s family has welcomed the recommendations, with Victor adding “there should be laws that if your trainer puts you in the ring knowing that you’ve got an injury, that should be a criminal offence automatically.”
“No one knows their child more than a parent, that should matter too when a doctor’s making their decision.”
*With AAP
