A creative director who was “really, really struggling” with severe pain accidentally overdosed on medication at his Chesham home - and was tragically found by police several days later.

Lee Wheatley, 49, had not been heard from for a number of days before police found his body in bed at his Higham Road home on March 27 last year.

Having recently been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, Lee was taking a number of medications - including Tramadol and Morphine - to cope with the severe pain, which had left him “frustrated”.

Senior coroner for Buckinghamshire Crispin Butler said at an inquest into Lee’s death on Wednesday that he passed away as a result of a “very, very sad tragic accident”.

According to reports from his GP at New Surgery, he had made a number of emergency appointments in the months before his death because he was struggling with pain in his shoulders, hands, feet and elbows and had been prescribed a number of different pain relief medications to cope with it by different medical professionals.

He was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis on March 5.

On a number of occasions before his death, Lee admitted to his GP that he had taken more prescribed medications than he should have - but he needed to “control” the pain he was suffering.

On March 20, he asked his GP Dr Andrew Ram for more Tramadol and codeine, but said codeine was not helping the pain.

Dr Ram said: “I declined to to issue more codeine and he was unhappy about this. He said he was struggling with the pain and he knew he had taken too much but he needed to treat the pain.

“I advised him to stop taking the codeine if it was not helping. I had no concern about his mental health - he didn’t seem suicidal, more fed up with the discomfort he was in.”

He was instead prescribed oral morphine that day - a dose that was supposed to last two weeks.

But sadly when his body was discovered by police at around 8.30am on March 27, the bottle was empty.

Mr Butler recorded Lee’s death as being drug related.

He said: “He died as a result of consuming fatal levels of Tramadol and morphine. He was taking this with the intention of pain relief.

“It is a very, very sad accidental death that has occurred here. I will ask the surgery to write to me to acknowledge learning from this.”