No end to my pain from Spain

Karen Hughes: Spanish dream became a nightmare

AN Oldham woman who dreamed of life in the Spanish sunshine saw the dream collapse after suffering an injury at work.

Karen Hughes and her husband left England in 2000 to lease the exclusive Country Bowls Bar and Restaurant. The pair enjoyed a hectic lifestyle on the popular Costa Calida when Karen slipped and broke her hip.

Karen was the bar’s chef and couldn’t work after the accident. That and the economic downsturn saw the couple struggle to make ends meet: “We couldn’t afford to pay staff and we had fewer and fewer visitors.”

A year later the restaurant’s kitchen burned down, leaving Karen and her husband with no choice but to abandon their bar and move back to Oldham. The pair, penniless, now live apart, Karen at her parents’ and her husband with his father.

Karen is still wheelchair-bound and desperate for a hip replacement operation the Spanish health service refused to give.

Despite paying into the Spanish health service for 12 years, Karen has had no financial help and is struggling to get back on the NHS register back home.

She said: “I’m living in a wheelchair and we can’t get any help. We’ve had to take out a crisis loan from social services because we have no money to live on — but all they gave was £43 between us to live on for 10 days.

“We don’t want to live apart. Our parents are elderly and they can’t put us up for ever. We worked hard every single day we lived over there, and now we have nothing.”

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