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Former model Jennie Gunhammer |
Photographer died after long lupus ordeal
Ex-model weighed less than five stone
A PHOTOGRAPHER who weighed less than five stone died after a seven-year battle with lupus, an inquest heard.
St Pancras Coroner’s Court was told how Jennie Gunhammer, 34, was found unconscious by her partner Andrew Clinch at her Maitland Park Road home in Chalk Farm in June, after phoning him to complain she could not breathe.
Earlier Jennie, originally from Sweden, had gone to bed convinced she was suffering from food poisoning after eating fish with her identical twin sister Jessica, who also suffers from lupus.
But she was actually in cardiac arrest, which led to her brain swelling. Jennie was taken to the Royal Free Hospital but pronounced dead on arrival.
Mr Clinch told the inquest on Tuesday how he found “her stiff and cold and she had glazed eyes. I didn’t know what to do.”
In 2002 Jennie was diagnosed with lupus when she suffered a near-fatal flare-up of the condition, in which the body’s immune system attacks its own tissues and organs.
Speaking outside the inquest, Mr Clinch said overcoming that attack had left the former model with a new-found determination to realise her creative dreams. He also paid tribute to her academic success – she gained a degree and two masters’ qualifications between 2002 and 2007.
In earlier years Jennie had been diagnosed as suffering from anorexia but had overcome the condition and went on to “compulsively” eat and take nutrition drinks in an attempt to try and put on body fat, according to her sister and doctor.
But the inquest heard that instead of gaining weight, she lost another seven kilograms in the last two years of her life due to chronic diarrhoea. Coroner Dr Andrew Reid accepted evidence from Dr Munther Khamashta that the underlying cause of her death was lupus and not anorexia.
“Since I met her two years ago I trusted she was eating properly – I think she had overcome her original problem,” he told the court.
Dr Reid recorded a verdict of death by natural causes.
Praising Dr Khamashta outside court, Jessica said: “He was one of the few doctors who really took care of her and listened to her as a person.”
Jennie recently had a solo exhibition at a West End gallery and published her first book, I Have Never Travelled Gladly Beyond, in April.
Dedicated to her sister, it was an intimate portrait of the life Jessica led with her partner who suffers from Parkinson’s disease.
Mr Clinch said: “Recently, a London curator said her work is of museum quality and should be hung in a major international gallery. Jessie and I will ensure that happens.”
He added: “Jennie was an amazing woman in many ways. She was extremely stunning and beautiful, highly intellectual and astute in all elements of life.” |
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