Joelle was 27. She was a gifted musician, a self-taught coder, funny, generous and deeply loved. ​ She had an aggressive lymphoma that almost always curable when treated as a medical emergency. A bed was available on the cancer ward when she arrived at Wolverhampton NHS Trust. After staff saw that she was a trans woman, she was removed from the ward and placed in a side ward on the other side of the hospital.

She suffered 16 days in this room, deteriorating in agony, without cancer pain management. Joelle and her mum Jane were told emergency chemo could not start until she was in the right ward and there was not a bed. She explicitly pleaded for a bed on either the male or female ward. Because she was trans they made her wait for a rare single room.