Paul was in agony from paracetamol overuse

In October 2022, Paul McHugh scrawled a note on a piece of paper. “Something is happening to me and I don’t know is very very bad [sic],” it read.

Two months later, he died on his 47th birthday.

A coroner this month found McHugh’s death could have been prevented, after his pharmacy gave him an ultimately fatal maximum daily dose of paracetamol for months on end.

He complained in the 12 months before his death, “why don’t the doctors believe me when I tell them I am in excruciating pain”, his mother told a coroner.

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Around the time he scrawled the note, McHugh described his symptoms to a doctor, and paracetamol-induced liver failure was likely to blame for some of them. But they were misconstrued as being caused by other conditions.

“These symptoms included difficulty breathing, anxiety, ‘bad thoughts’, incoordination and dizziness, constipation, abdominal pain, difficulty urinating, inappetence, fatigue and difficulty swallowing,” Coroner Ingrid Giles said in a decision published last week.

“By this time, Paul would have been consuming the high-dose paracetamol for 10 to 14 weeks beyond his discharge from [Frankston] Hospital.”

Throughout his life, McHugh had lived with intense trauma from childhood abuse, substance abuse, multiple “extremely significant illnesses”, “untreatable pain”, an acquired brain injury from a car crash in 2011, suicidal ideation and several psychiatric diagnoses, the coroner said.