A distraught wife told a 911 operator her suffocating husband was turning blue and would die if an ambulance didn't get to him quickly but when it arrived a "fiasco" ensued, an inquest heard yesterday.

Kathleen Palmer told a hearing into the death of her 57-year-old husband Norman that the emergency medical technicians (EMTs) dispatched to their Paget home struggled to find the address, did not use a siren or flashing lights and were truculent, unpleasant and lacking in compassion on arrival.

Mr. Palmer, a Brit who ran his own excavating business in Bermuda, died shortly after arriving at the King Edward VII Memorial (KEMH) on April 12 last year; many of his body parts were later found to be missing by a UK pathologist.

Mrs. Palmer told Coroner Khamisi Tokunbo yesterday: "I wake up every single morning in disbelief that Norman is not here with me. I have cried myself to sleep every night for the past nine months.

"I will never come to terms with the fact that Norman need never have died and what was done to his precious body after his death."

Earlier, the inquest heard a recording of the distressing 911 call made by Mrs. Palmer after her husband, who had been feeling unwell, went into the shower and "suddenly started making a terrible noise from his throat".

"We need an ambulance; my husband can't breathe," she told the operator, as Mr. Palmer's desperate attempts to get air could be heard in the background.

The female operator told her to keep him calm and asked for directions to the house, which Mrs. Palmer provided. "I need help," she told the operator. "What can I do?" Moments later, she asked: "Where are they? I can't hear any ambulance coming. He is going to die."

Coroner's officer Sergeant Adrian Cook told the court he timed the recording and it was seven minutes from the start of the call to the moment when Mrs. Palmer ran out to meet the ambulance.

During her evidence, the widow told the court she lived "two minutes" from the hospital. She described hearing a diesel engine outside and expecting to see the ambulance turn into the driveway.

When it didn't, she ran along the lane to see it going in the opposite direction. "I ran after the ambulance, in my bare feet, waving my arms and shouting, trying to get their attention," she said.

She told the court the vehicle reversed into the lane and into her driveway, had trouble manoeuvring and got stuck twice on an embankment.

Mrs. Palmer said she banged on one of the doors and told the female EMT to get out as her husband was in serious trouble. "Only then did she get out, with a very truculent attitude."

The male ambulance driver, she said, swore after getting a stretcher stuck in the doorway of the house, had "no sense of urgency" and was a "very unpleasant character".

"During the course of this fiasco, both with the 911 operator and the ambulance, I was unable to give Norman the reassurance and comfort that he so badly needed from me," she said. "I was watching my husband slowly suffocate to death."

Asked by lawyer Allan Doughty, representing Bermuda Hospitals Board, if in hindsight she thought things could have moved further if she'd waited in the roadside for the ambulance, Mrs. Palmer said: "That's absolutely ridiculous."

Mrs. Palmer accused pathologist Kared James of "brutally mutilating" her husband's body after his death and said she would not have agreed to an autopsy.

The inquest, which is aimed at determining how, when and where Mr. Palmer died, heard that his physician diagnosed him with asthma and that he also had shrapnel in his throat from a 40-year-old gunshot injury.

Less than a week before his death he saw a doctor at KEMH for breathing difficulties, who told him it was not asthma and he should see an ear, nose and throat specialist "sooner rather than later".

He refused to see the on-call specialist, because of a previous bad experience, and went home, planning to get an appointment with a different specialist as soon as possible.

Mrs. Palmer said had they been advised of the seriousness of his condition, her husband would have seen the on-call doctor. "Norman loved his life," she said. "He did not want to die."

The hearing continues today.