IT took Elaine Oswald 25 years to understand why she had been treated as a drug addict at Burnley General Hospital -- she believes she had been the first intended victim of evil doctor Harold Shipman.

She now believes the doctor she trusted and later befriended had given her an overdose when he visited her at her then home in Todmorden in 1974.

He then accompanied her to Burnley where he visited her each day she remained in hospital.

Mrs Oswald is now a teacher living with husband Peter, an engineer, in Knoxville, Tennesse, in the United States.

Her mother-in-law Nellie Oswald still lives in Todmorden. She said Shipman's conviction for killing 25 elderly women in Hyde brought Elaine to suspect that she had been Shipman's intended first victim.

Nellie Oswald said: "It has been very distressing. All this about Shipman has brought it all back. It was terrible at the time.

"I don't know what he told them at Burnley hospitaI but they thought she was a drug addict and they treated her very strangely and off-hand. It really was a terrible time."

She added: "At that time she had not been married to my son Peter for very long and it was terrible for all of us. Now with all this news about him it has all erupted again." Elaine met Shipman at his surgery on August 21, 1974.

She and Peter were working hard with two jobs each to get out of Todmorden. Peter was an engineer and she worked for the Department of Social Security. In the evenings both worked in a bar.

When she went to the doctor's because of a pain in her side she was met by an attractive man in a white shirt and a dark suit. He was easy to talk to and she felt as though she'd known him for years. She trusted him immediately.

He gave her a prescription for a painkiller Diconal and told her to take two tablets and go to bed. Later at her home he took some blood from her left arm.

"I averted my eye from the needle. When my consciousness returned, I was lying on the floor at the foot of my bed. Dr Shipman and a woman and child were watching as a paramedic took my pulse," Elaine said.

Shipman told her an extreme reaction to the two tablets and said he'd never seen anything like it in medical history.