Nurse Mairim Cespon today took the jury in Patterson’s trial back to her interactions with the mushroom cook at hospital on July 31, 2023.
Patterson, 50, has pleaded not guilty to three murder charges and one attempted murder over a lunch she cooked at her home two days earlier, on July 29.
Three of her lunch guests – Patterson’s former in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, 70, and Heather Wilkinson, 66 – died in hospital days after consuming the meal.
The mother-of-two claims it was a terrible accident and she did not intentionally poison any of her guests, including Heather’s husband Ian who survived the meal.
The jury has been told Patterson suffered diarrhoea after eating the beef Wellington and took herself to her local hospital at Leongatha in regional Victoria on July 31, where she initially appeared for a few minutes before discharging herself.
Cespon, who had also treated Heather and Ian, said she let Patterson back into the hospital when she returned less than two hours later.
“She was nauseated, she had diarrhoea, but she wasn’t vomiting,” the nurse told the jury of 14.
Cespon said she was settling Patterson into a cubicle in the hospital’s urgent care section when doctor Chris Webster came in and had a conversation about her two children.
Webster told Patterson the kids needed to be medically reviewed as they might have ingested toxins since they ate leftovers from the meal, Cespon said.
“Erin became emotional, she was crying, she was saying is it necessary if her kids didn’t eat the mushrooms, they didn’t have any symptoms,” Cespon said.
“She didn’t want them to be stressed or panicked … for the kids to be pulled out of school to be assessed.”
The nurse said she helped Patterson go to the toilet several times and asked her to use a pan that looked like a “witch’s hat” to catch her bowel movements.
“When I was about to collect it she did mention ‘it does look like it’s wee but it was a bowel motion’,” Cespon said.
“I told her that every time she goes to the toilet just let me know, so I can have a look.”
After her first bowel movement, Patterson told the nurse her pain was “seven out of 10” and she felt cramping before she opened her bowels each time.
Under questioning by defence barrister Colin Mandy SC, Cespon agreed it was not unusual for a bowel movement to look like that in a patient who had been suffering diarrhoea for some time.
Cespon also said she handed Patterson the phone when police called after arriving at her home for a welfare check, and Patterson told officers they could break into her home to retrieve leftovers from the meal.
“She mentioned that it would be in a bin, it was food scraps from the meal, it would be inside a Woolies paper bag in the bin,” she said.
“She mentioned the food scraps was the meal that she scraped from the kids’, because the kids don’t eat mushrooms.”
The trial before Justice Christopher Beale continues.
