Never Say Die

I tried to keep focused on what I was seeing and hearing, but the velvety blackness kept rising to engulf me, cloaking all sensation, all thought. I seemed to be almost floating above my own body, riding turbulent air, surveying my situation and, strangely, finding clarity in distance; in one single precious moment almost all became clear. This was real. It had happened. I was badly, badly damaged. My life as I’d known it was over.

The kind voice intruded and I was back in my broken body and lying on the sodden turf. He had yet another question. A strange one, to my mind. ‘Melanie,’ he was saying. ‘What’s your date of birth, love? What’s your age?’

‘I’m fifteen,’ I told him finally, my voice thick and strange. How did he know who I was?

Neath General Hospital was situated about a mile to the south of the town centre, on a steeply sloping hillside, facing west. The journey from Aberavon beachfront would, under normal circumstances, take about a quarter of an hour. What happens in the first ‘golden’ hour following an injury can have huge consequences on the outcome so it’s an important chunk of time for an accident victim.

But nobody seemed in much of a hurry. I must have blacked out again at this point because I have no memory of being loaded into the ambulance. But somehow I was in one. And so was Juli. I hadn’t a clue where Aldo and John might be—only that Juli had told me Aldo was OK.

I could hear someone talking on what must have been the radio. ‘We’re bringing in a teenager with a serious injury…’ Juli became agitated. If that was the case, then why were we travelling so slowly? No speed, no sirens, no nothing.

‘Because with a spinal injury,’ they told her when she asked, ‘smoothness is of the essence. We have to go slowly so we don’t do more damage.’ The atmosphere was tense, their words hanging heavily on the air. They seemed all too aware they had two terrified teenagers on board, and the fate of one young life in their hands.

By the time the ambulance had entered the outskirts of Neath, almost a whole hour had apparently passed. I’d spent much of it drifting in and out of sleep. I dreamed turbulent dreams. I dreamed about the princess in Arabian Nights, who’d defied her parents and fallen in love with a poor boy, with whom, despite their anger, she’d walk the beach at night. She’d been cursed by a sorcerer. He told her that if she continued to defy her parents, he’d turn the sand on the beach to knives beneath her feet. She didn’t believe him but it happened even so. Her life had been ruined. Had my life as well? Had my stubborn refusal to stop seeing Aldo brought a sorcerer’s curse upon me?

Consciousness returned as we neared the hospital. And with it, I began to feel increasingly agitated. I knew I was in big trouble. What would Mum and Dad say? Had somebody already told them what had happened? Would they be standing at the hospital entrance, waiting? Would they give me one hell of a row? For the first time in a long time I really felt my age; I was every inch a vulnerable child.

The ambulance had by now been reversed up to the entrance and the double doors opened to a hubbub of noise and activity. So many people. So much chattering and noise. So much sense of everyone knowing what they were doing. I felt almost as if I was some sort of celebrity. All this industry and attention focused solely on me. The feeling of relief was overwhelming. I heard a voice—‘On my lift’—and the next thing I knew I was lying on a hospital trolley.

I was here. I was safe. I thought I might leave them all to it and go to sleep now, but nobody around me seemed to want that. I was asked my name repeatedly, encouraged to stay conscious. The questions I’d been asked when lying on the petrol-soaked grass were all trotted out once again. Could I feel this? Could I feel that? Could I try to move my legs? But my own head was buzzing with entirely different questions. Could they please not tell my parents that the motorbike had crashed? And, most importantly, when could I go home?

When I asked, nobody seemed to have an answer for that one.

Eight miles away, in the small valley town of Pontardawe, an orthopaedic surgeon by the name of Mr R. M. Davies was finding excuses not to do the gardening. It was, he knew, a good day for gardening, and the garden, he conceded, needed doing.

Thirty-seven years old and at the peak of his career, he’d been appointed consultant surgeon at Neath General thirteen months earlier, and moved his wife and young family down from Cardiff; thirteen months during which the garden of their beautiful stone house had become more than a little overgrown.

They’d chosen their new home with care. After years of leading the nomadic lifestyle of a surgeon in training, this was finally a chance to settle down permanently. To reestablish old roots and also put down some new ones. Stability for the three children at last.

The house, which had been originally built in 1912 for himself by a local builder, was perfect for a growing family. Solid and spacious, it was set into the western slopes of the Swansea Valley, from which vantage point it enjoyed magnificent views across to the east, towards Neath, and looked down benignly on the road to the hospital; a place he’d already come to love.

But, fine though the afternoon had shaped up to be, somehow gardening didn’t much appeal. Nor, particularly, did the thought of washing his car. But the driver in him invariably won out over the gardener and, short on excuses to get out of either chore, he was busy with his sponge when the call came.

Back at the hospital, it having been agreed that my life was not in immediate danger, the on-call registrar, Mr Sam Kamal, had asked that I be taken down to X-ray for a series of films. I was by now not so much under the knife as the scissors; everything metal had to be removed, so they’d set about—literally—chopping it all off, from the studs on my precious jacket and my jeans and my T-shirt, right down to the wires in my bra.

The results of the X-rays confirmed the doctor’s fears. There was crushing and deformity to three of the vertebrae in the middle of the dorsal part of my spine. This was the reason why it continued to feel as though everything below mid-chest was missing.

This was the sort of serious accident that needed senior input. Mr Kamal had already rung and alerted his consultant, so that by the time the seriousness of the situation had been confirmed by the X-rays the man himself had dropped everything, thrown on a jacket and, his post-car-washing snooze and family supper now mere wishful thinking, was already en route to the hospital.

Being called in on nights and weekends was as much a part of life for a doctor as the nine-to-five routine, but as he never knew exactly what sort of trauma would be awaiting his attention when he got there Mr Davies did what he always did: he mentally prepared for what he might find. The situation was serious and the possibilities were many. He knew the patient was fifteen—not a lot older than Lizanne, his own daughter—but little more than that. How was she coping? Did she have any idea just how bad things were? Was there any chance that the situation might be reversible? On the basis of what he already knew he thought it unlikely, but could there be even the smallest hope? On a practical level, were the family present? Stoical? Hysterical? Expecting the unrealistic? And, as Neath Hospital served a very close-knit community, did any of the staff know the family?

He parked in his space behind the ward block at the bottom of the hospital building and hurried up to find out what was in store, little knowing that he was in exactly the right place at the right time, in ways that would only become clear decades later.

I have no memory of the first meeting I had with the man who was to go on to figure so prominently in my life. Perhaps, by that time, the staff looking after me had all but given up in their ongoing quest to keep me lucid. But my consultant apparently introduced himself and explained that he’d been warned that I’d had a serious injury to my upper back after being involved in a motorcycle accident. He said he needed to examine me himself to confirm this, and also to check that the X-rays gave him all the information he needed. But he could have been speaking to me in Swahili. By now I’d been introduced to the mesmeric joys of morphine and found them a great deal more deserving of my attention.

My parents both worked full-time at the offices of the steelworks: Mum as a shorthand typist and Dad as a clerk. Weekends were a time for catching up with chores and relaxing; so, not unusually, at the time of the crash, Mum was cleaning the house while Dad was down at his old cricket club, Cwmavon. Later, they’d planned to head down town to watch a performance by a local male voice choir.

But then the call came that would turn their arrangements on their head—both for that Saturday night and for many years to come. Ironically, it was an old Cwmavon friend of Dad’s who rang Mum. The friend lived, by what seemed another remarkable coincidence, on the corner where the crash had happened. She had witnessed the accident, and established my involvement. I’d had a bit of an accident, she informed Mum, and was about to be taken by ambulance to Neath General Hospital, ‘just to make sure nothing’s wrong’. My mother was obviously shocked and concerned, but reassured to some extent by what the woman said. She went upstairs to get ready to go to the hospital, reasoning that the cricket would just about be finished, so by the time she’d got changed Dad would be home and they could go together.

Neither was in any way prepared for the gravity of the situation that would greet them.

By the time Mr Davies had finished his examination, however, my parents—who had arrived not long after I had—had been advised of the reality by Mr Kamal, and were now waiting to speak to him, desperate for news. News it was his task, as my consultant, to give them, however sad or unpleasant that task was going to be.

He found them outside the resuscitation room, standing stiffly in the corridor, obviously anxious to hear something but at the same time fearful of what that something might be. They were frozen with fear but still clinging to hope, and my father found it in the sudden realisation that here stood a man he held in high regard. Mr Davies was his beloved rugby club’s honorary surgeon, a young man who’d done great things with injured Aberavon players. Surely he could do the same for his daughter?

For Mike Davies, however, the feeling wasn’t mutual. No doctor wants to find himself too close to a patient. Detachment and clear-headed thinking are too important for emotional involvement ever to be a good thing, particularly where serious injury is concerned. But standing before him was one of his fellow rugby club stalwarts. A man with a pretty fifteen-year-old only daughter who’d suffered the most appalling catastrophe, and whose future (all their futures) had, bar some improbable miracle, been utterly turned upside down.

It seemed a member of staff did know this particular family. He just wished it didn’t have to be him.

Even so, the task at hand was to be honest and realistic with these two distressed people and, as delivering bad news was best not done standing, he invited my parents to go into the sister’s office and sit down. He began with the best part—that my life wasn’t in immediate danger—but said that the injury to my spine would probably take a few days to declare its intentions, as it were. His assessment of my prospects was not encouraging, sadly; they would need to prepare themselves for the real possibility that I would spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair. He would also need to operate to stabilise my back, to avoid a progressive deformity. If, as he expected, I would have to spend many months in hospital, a stable back would make rehabilitation easier. The only glimmer of light he could offer that day was that should the unexpected happen and there be an improvement in function, we would see it in the next forty-eight hours.

For my parents, this would be the hardest two days of their lives.

For me, however, things were almost too surreal to register. I would come to terms, in some ways, in the days that were to follow, but mostly my youth and optimism would win out. It would be another three weeks before reality bit and the stuffing would be knocked out of me.

chapter 3 (#ulink_1bfcd747-9fe5-50fa-9ee9-10613328733b)

I was five when my parents told me I was adopted, and I was sitting then, as now, in a hospital bed. I was eating ice cream and jelly at the time, on account of my recent tonsillectomy. I was theirs but not theirs, I remember them saying. They were my mother and father, but not my real mother and father. This wasn’t, however, important. All I needed to know, as is still the case now, was that I belonged to them both, that they loved me very much, and they would take care of me always.

My birth mother was an unmarried teenager from Plymouth, in the days when to be so was tantamount to a criminal offence. She had even named me Caroline—I was Caroline Sandford. Nothing was ever said, or known, about my father, and she had, we were told—and had no reason not to believe—been pressured to give me up for adoption. Luckily for me, over in Wales, a married couple who were unable to conceive and who were by now in their early thirties had decided to register with the Western National Adoption Society. Thus, at five and a half weeks of age, as a result of my suitable colouring and complexion, I became Melanie Bowen, whereupon I was taken to the family home in Port Talbot, there to live with my new parents, Dewi and Margaret, and also Margaret’s mother, my new gran.

I have no memory of how I responded to this news. In actual fact, I don’t think I did, very much. It registered. It sank in. It meant little more. All that mattered, aged five, was the jelly and ice cream. That, and how soon I’d be able to go home.

It was early on Sunday. The morning after the accident. And going home wasn’t an option today. Or any time soon, for that matter. Late the previous evening I’d been transferred to a two-bedded side room, attached to Ward Eight, and separated from it by double swing doors. This, I learned, was to facilitate my care without causing too much disruption—I needed to be turned at least two-hourly to prevent pressure sores developing on my inert lower body—and also to afford a modicum of peace and privacy from the other, mostly elderly patients, some of whom were frail and demented.

Mum had been installed in a camp bed beside me, the second proper bed in the side ward having to be kept free for emergencies, and it was here that she would sleep for the coming three weeks. Soon the room would be overwhelmed by what would feel like my own body weight in flowers and chocolates and cuddly toys, not to mention visitors, but for now it was just the two of us—Dad had gone home to get some sleep—while the very big thing that had happened to our lives was taking its time sinking in.

Mum was stoical. And possibly thinking about family too. Had it occurred to her that the dependent baby they’d adopted fifteen years back had now, in many practical ways, become one again?

‘You know what?’ she said to me, perched on the chair beside my bed and looking as if she understood exactly what I was thinking. ‘We’re going to cope with this, Mel. Just think of your gran.’ I often did. She had died of kidney failure when I was ten. It had been I who’d come home to find her collapsed in the bathroom. She’d passed away in hospital a few days later. Mum smiled. ‘Well, she managed, didn’t she?’ I nodded. She then grinned. ‘Went up and down stairs on her bottom for years.’

This much was true. Riddled with arthritis, my gran had spent the last few years of her life doing just that. I could see her doing it now. And the thought, bizarre to contemplate as it might be, was a comfort. The idea of not being able to go to bed in my own bedroom was one that had preoccupied and upset me very much.

Mum squeezed my hand and looked at me with clear, unblinking eyes. Then she said, her voice strong, ‘And you will do the same.’

Stairs were, however, for the future. The here and now consisted of the bed that I lay on and my total dependence on everyone around me—a very alien state of affairs.

I was scheduled to see Mr Davies later that morning and, if my first encounter with my consultant was too hazy for recall, my second was anything but. From the moment Sister announced his impending visit to see me—he was doing his Sunday ward round—my every waking thought was focused on what he might say. As the hours ticked by with no miraculous improvements forthcoming, I had a question no one so far seemed able to answer properly, namely, would I ever walk again? If anyone could tell me that, surely he could.

Everyone has a stereotypical image when they think the word ‘doctor’, and mine was, I imagine, no different from that of most teenagers. He certainly ticked all the important ‘doctor’ boxes. Tall and imposing, with a habitually stern expression and the sort of aura that only comes with that cocktail of great intelligence and lofty status, my consultant entered the room—I was alone at this time—and all at once I felt intimidated and slightly in awe. He sat down on the edge of my bed, looked me straight in the eye, and when he took my hand in his I knew, without question, that things were every bit as bad as I’d feared.

And I was right. He confirmed, via a clearly worded runthrough of the facts, that he seriously doubted I ever would. I felt the wetness of a single tear tracking a course down my cheek, and the pressure on my hand as he tightened his grip. ‘Will you be all right?’ he asked me quietly, his face full of concern.

I bit my lip and blinked to try and indicate yes, all the while wrestling furiously with my face to hold back the flood I didn’t want him to see. To this day I don’t understand why it was so important he didn’t see it, only that some force inside me felt this overwhelming need not to break down. To keep a grip on myself. To appear strong: the legacy, in hindsight, of a childhood full of school bullies, and a mechanism for survival that was almost instinctive. It was only once he’d left to continue his ward round and Sister O’Rourke had swept in—she must have been waiting outside because she did so immediately—did I lower my defences enough to let the tears flow. And flow they most certainly did.

I simply couldn’t seem to banish the negative images from my brain. I had become a cripple. Not only would I never walk again, but I would be unable to stand up even for a second. I would live in a wheelchair, the focus of ridicule and scorn. I would be totally vulnerable. Would the bullies gain the upper hand again? Would I end up in an institution? Would people think I was brain-damaged? Would I become brain-damaged, have a breakdown because I couldn’t cope with my new situation? Now I’d started crying I wondered why I hadn’t cried before. Now I’d started, would I ever manage to stop?

This situation taught me a very important lesson: that crying as a paraplegic while flat on your back isn’t something it’s safe to try at home. I imagine one of Elaine O’Rourke’s sharpest memories of that time was of me nearly choking to death on my own snot.