A BASINGSTOKE mum who has invented a life-saving piece of medical equipment wants to show how ‘being glamorous doesn’t make you stupid’.

Fran Sawyer, 52, created a unique ACE stopper dressing for people with stomas, which is now being sold to hospitals across the world.

Inspired by the needs of her 17-year-old son, for whom she is a full-time carer, Fran has spent the last five years developing a “medical plaster” which has a flap to allow for stoma washout procedures to take place without removal for up to five days.

Fran, who lives in Beggarwood, spent the final three months of her pregnancy with her son in Southampton hospital.

Already knowing she was carrying a baby with cancer and other likely health complications, she then hemorrhaged, meaning both she and her son ended up in the ICU.

Her baby boy was born with a six pounds teratoma [tumour] on his back and has been in and out of hospital ever since.

“This opened my mind. I spent 17 years in and out of hospital. I sat there and thought about how the medical plasters still weren’t up to scratch,” the mother-of-two told the Gazette.

Fran describes her medical dressing as suitable for anyone with a stoma [hole] in their body. She says that, previously, patients like her son would have to replace the plaster seven times a day.

He also has an ACE stopper, which he would worry about falling out as it would mean he couldn’t empty his bladder and has led to having to rush to hospital in the past. Fran’s dressing holds this in place.

“He used to get really really sore. So I started reading and looking into other ways,” she said.

“He says ‘It’s less stressful Mum’. He used to go to bed and hold his hand over the ACE stopper.

“I got a cardboard box, cut a hole in it and held it up to him to see how it would work.”

Not having any medical background, Fran says she battled her way to seeing her idea become a reality, studying from 12 -3am around her carer responsibilities.

She said: “I worked so hard on this, it’s hard to get a drug tariff and I’m not medically trained, but it was a brilliant idea.

“I actually sold my earrings and jewellery to change people’s lives.

“It took a long time, but I designed this. I went to lots of meetings with medical professionals but, because I’m not medically trained, they weren’t interested.”

Fran says she was told things like ‘Maybe your sexiness will sell it’.

“Everyone said I couldn’t do it. Because I am glamorous, I had a gypsy father, and I am dyslexic, I’ve been put in a box,” she said.

“But because of my dyslexia I think outside the box, I’m a logical thinker.

“My father always said ‘You are mentally strong. You are on this earth to help other people’ and that’s what I did.”

She listened carefully at every meeting and gathered a bit of knowledge from each person along the way.

“I was using them all along, and they thought I was an idiot. When people think I am the underdog, I am actually two steps ahead,” she said.

The product is now being pitched and sold by Medicina.

It's already been sold privately to 17 hospitals but, five years on from the initial idea, Fran has now got a patent and drug tariff which means it will be able to be prescribed through the NHS.

Due to its five-day durability and role in avoiding emergency admissions, Fran says investing in this product will save the NHS money in the long-run.

Now, Fran hopes to be able to continue improving the lives of people with stomas.

“This woman sent me a message and said this has really helped her son, and that’s like winning the lottery for me,” she said.

“It’s so lonely being a carer. We lose our only friends. Disability, like glamour, it’s a big hoo-ha and people need to understand that they don’t have two heads!

“It’s all about mental attitude. I like to make people really strong mentally.”

She says that, when it comes to underestimating someone for the way they look, it’s like “something out of the 1940s” and needs to change.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover. I don’t get this stigma,” she said.