A GREAT-grandmother was so determined to celebrate her 70th birthday with a huge family holiday that she headed to Portugal despite being in severe pain, an inquest heard.

Vivien Chaisty began having pains in her abdomen a week before she was due to fly to Albufeira with 15 members of her family in August last year, Bolton area coroner Alan Walsh was told.

Trips to her family doctor and the Royal Bolton Hospital resulted in her being treated for constipation.

The day the holiday was due to start, on August 8, Mrs Chaisty, who worked as a cleaner, was too ill to fly and so she and her partner Ernest Pearcy stayed behind.

But the mother-of-four was determined to go and so the next day the couple took flights to join the family, despite her still being in pain.

Mr Pearcy said: “I had to push her round the airport sitting on suitcases on the trolley.”

Still unwell, the next day Mrs Chaisty went to the resort’s health centre, where again it was thought that she was suffering from constipation.

But in the early hours of the next morning her family heard her shout and found her collapsed in the kitchen of their rented villa in a pool of blood.

She died, shortly before the an emergency doctor could arrive, from bleeding of her stomach and septic shock as a result of infection and inflammation of the gall bladder.

Mr Walsh’s verdict was that Mrs Chaisty, of Castle Crescent, Horwich, died from natural causes.

He said: “Mrs Chaisty was anxious and desperate to attend that holiday to celebrate one of her monumentous birthdays with her family. She clearly wasn’t fully fit to travel. For the benefit of her family she made the supreme effort.”

After the inquest Mrs Chaisty’s daughter, Lynn Tatlock said: “She was a wonderful person and very family orientated. She is very, very missed.”