Never Say Die

The operation was scheduled for the major theatre list on Tuesday afternoon—a wait that for many might have seemed interminable, but because of the constant nursing attention, the two-hourly turning, the plethora of visitors and the regular morphine, it actually came very fast. Too fast, perversely, where Mum and Dad were concerned, because its coming so speedily effectively saw off the cherished forty-eight hours in which they’d allowed themselves the luxury of hope. As for me, I continued to feel cut in half, in my head every bit as much as my body. A spell of oblivion, however frightening the prospect of surgery, would probably be no bad thing.

Surgeons are, both by profession and by nature, inveterate fixers of things. Of bones and ligaments and tendons and unruly bits of body; the natural habitat of the surgeon is doing engineering work on interior structure, the desired state of affairs, always, success.

Mike Davies was every inch the surgeon. He had eleven letters after his name to testify to the fact that fixing things was what he was trained to do. Fortunately, for most of the time, this was what happened. His speciality, orthopaedics, involved dealing with the treatment of a large number of chronic conditions, sometimes non-surgically, with varying success, but surgically in a majority of instances, and for the most part with gratifying results. Only in a very few situations and patients would the outcome be distressing or critical.

He got upset, then, if faced with the unmendable. And that was exactly what I was. Which meant that what had seemed to me to be a rather marked detachment in his manner was both to preserve his professional distance and also the manifestation of his very real frustration that this was a patient he couldn’t fix, even with the best will and expertise in the world.

Once I was on the operating table, he was struck by my almost-six-foot height; in bed, I’d seemed very obviously young and slim, but this—as is often the case when patients are in theatre—was something he’d not so far noticed. Similarly striking, and highlighting the sense of tragedy around me, was the total absence of external signs of damage. The only scar on my body would be that made by his knife: the nine-and-half-inch vertical incision that he was, this very moment, about to make.

I was to become fashionably bionic. Though it had by now been established that there was little hope of my ever regaining the use of my legs, there was something he could do: that was to ensure that, for both health and aesthetic reasons, my slender young back would remain straight and undeformed. The object of surgery, therefore, was to fit me with a pair of stainless steel rods, which would lie along the length of my spine, hooked in place under the arches of my top and bottom vertebrae.

Called Harrington rods, these two had been pilfered. Ordered in by neighbouring Morriston Hospital in Swansea, they had been earmarked for correcting spinal deformities in children. This was quite an expansion to their orthopaedic service, and they were rightly proud. However, as they’d not yet admitted their first suitable patient, they could put up little argument against Neath acquiring them now. Thus they were, and continue to this day to be, mine.

If surgery was to mark me physically, it was also to be a benchmark. Coming around after the operation, I soon became aware that what had previously been a generalised ache in a band around my chest—and for which I’d been knocking back all that morphine—had been replaced by something entirely different. My pain was now specific to the site of the surgery, though obviously—and curiously—in only half of the scar, the part that lay above the level of the spinal cord damage. I grew to be comforted a great deal by my pain. It seemed proof, at least, that my body was fighting back. And comfort was something I needed in quantity. There were no more ‘what ifs’ or ‘perhapses’ or ‘maybes’ up for grabs. This was the situation. These were the facts. The time for wishing and hoping was unequivocally gone. It was time to start addressing reality.

There is a reason why nurses are called angels. It would be a bit bizarre to describe my circumstances as heaven but there were, even so, definite parallels. I had exited one life and started another, and my guides, at least through this transition period, were the closest thing to angels I’d seen.

Sister Elaine O’Rourke affected me particularly. Up until then, though I’d had many moments of lucidity, she had been little more than a presence drifting in and out of my morphine mist. A beautiful presence in a navy blue uniform, who’d come to my bedside, wipe the mucus from my nose, rub my hands, speak to me and wash the tears from my cheeks.

Now, coming round and feeling someone massaging my arms and hands, the presence became a real, and familiar, human being. Striking green eyes. Chestnut brown hair. And lovely open smile. She was smiling at me. I smiled too, and said hello. Her smile widened further. ‘Hello back,’ she said, squeezing my hands.

And so began a relationship that was to guide me through the darkness. I remain devoted to Elaine to this day.

Not that I was going to let the darkness overwhelm me, in any case; I owed it to everyone around me to, at the very least, try my very best. I soon developed an unconscious strategy: a selective approach to the English language, both as spoken to me and as said myself. Given the words ‘can’ and ‘will’ and ‘want’ and ‘able’, I could function. Given ‘can’t’ and ‘won’t’ and anything prefixed ‘will never’, and my eyes, treacherous and untrustworthy organs, would let me down every single time.

As a system, this seemed to work well. Following the example set by both my parents, Elaine and her wonderful nurses, I concentrated, with every single fibre of my being, on all the positives of my new situation: the things I could do, the things I might soon do, the improvements and adjustments and successes, small and large, which meant that every day things would get better. In this I had not just mindsets but role models too. Mum and Dad never seemed to falter for the tiniest instant. Their optimistic demeanour was unremitting, and their attention to attending to the tools I’d need for progress gave me every bit as much back-bone as the rods I had inside.

At night, however, my system faltered, and I floundered. With the rest of the patients, plus Mum, fast asleep, I had no one to beat off the clamouring demons. Alone and afraid, all the positives eluded me, crowded out and chased into corners by the negatives, which mushroomed in the darkness to mammoth proportions. I was terrified of dying but could see no life either. No future, no nothing. No point to my life. How could I ever be in control of my life again? I would be totally dependent on others for ever. And as for dependents of my own—what now? All the parts of me necessary to create life could still function. I couldn’t feel them but they could still do the tasks they were designed to: accept manhood, then support and cherish a foetus to term. But I knew there was no way I could look after a child now; after all, my own birth mother, able-bodied as she was, had been acutely aware that raising me was beyond her—and I was a paraplegic of fifteen.

Thus I cried and I prayed to God that as I’d never, ever asked him for anything surely he’d listen and do something for me now? I cried till it hurt and then carried on crying. The only thing that would stop me was when the nurses came to turn me. It was almost as though if I let them see me crying, it would unleash a despair of such devastating power that I’d never be able to stop crying again.

But dawn came, every day, and chased the bad things away. They were borne on what seemed an unstoppable wave of people and happenings and endless activity. If life on Ward Eight could have been bottled and sold as a tonic, it would have flown off the supermarket shelves. Seeing all my classmates was a tonic in itself—particularly Juli, with whom I shared an unspoken pact that my injuries were not to be dwelt on. I was also aware that whingeing patients probably didn’t get any visitors, so I made sure none of mine would ever leave my bedside having found it a miserable experience being with me.

And if the nurses—my beloved Elaine, and the night-watch of Pat, Audrey and Ruby—were chief among my rescuers from the dark well of self-pity on whose rim I often teetered, there was someone else with more prosaic matters in mind.

My Auntie Madeleine made it her mission to feed me—me and most of Neath General Hospital, it seemed. A busty blonde bombshell from Belgium, she had met Dad’s brother Elwyn in Mons, just after the Battle of the Bulge, and he’d brought her home and married her after the end of the Second World War. And it seemed bulges, right now, were her raison d’être. Auntie Mad liked to bake, and in quantity, too, so there was hardly a day that went by when she didn’t sweep onto the ward with a hat-box full of bounty: choux buns, éclairs, apple turnovers, rock cakes…All were fallen upon in great raptures of longing by both patients and ward staff alike. I always, quite properly, got first pick of the spoils, but it would be some days before I could eat one.

My desire to eat, it seemed, had gone AWOL. Between the accident and the operation I had no food whatsoever, my shocked body having little in the way of nutritional needs. I survived with nothing more substantial than a saline drip. Post-op, however, it was clearly important that I recommence dealing with proper food. This was something about which I had grave reservations. I well remembered almost choking on my own blood after the accident and so had little confidence about eating while lying on my back. More importantly, though, I didn’t feel hungry.

Denied the sensation of hunger in my stomach, I had absolutely no appetite at all. What would my body do with it once it was in there? How would it process it? Could it even do so?

Drinking was easier—and came a great deal more naturally. My mouth was dry from the op so I actively needed liquid, but even then, once aware, I became seriously agitated, having visions of lying there in a great pool of wee. Elaine O’Rourke, however, was quick to reassure me. She showed me my catheter, plus the drainage bag that hung at the side of my bed.

And I was reassured. Until another thought hit me. On the day of the accident I’d just started my period. Had anyone noticed? Had anything been done? Was I right this minute lying in a pool of blood instead of wee? I’d been plagued by the stress and monthly hassle of heavy periods since I’d started them, horribly early, aged ten.

If wee was an issue this was infinitely more so. Cringing with embarrassment, I asked Elaine.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s all stopped. It often tends to happen in cases like yours. The body goes into a state of spinal shock which can stop a period dead in its tracks.’

As positives went this was a seriously good one; the first bit of really encouraging news I’d heard. Was there any chance that this could be permanent, I wondered?

Er, no, Elaine explained. Only temporary, sadly. Something a month later I was to find out. And how.

At the moment, however, food was the issue, and if prizes could be awarded for cake-related effort, my Auntie Mad would have scooped the Gold.

And perhaps all that exposure to the joie de vivre-inducing properties of cream cakes paid off. Because, one evening, I finally felt hungry. I didn’t know where the sensation had originated from, but it was definite, and it made me feel happy. It was Mum who fed me my first meal; not a cake, as it happened, but a supper of cheese and tomato quiche. She’d been told to take care; I was still flat on my back and had to take it very slowly, but once the floodgates opened I was a keen and speedy learner—once I’d started to eat, I didn’t stop. Mealtimes were no longer a challenge but a highlight. It’s a universal law that hospital food must always be unpalatable, dreadful and bland. Nobody had thought to tell anyone at Neath General, however, and as a result, quite in defiance of orders, they continued to serve meals that were delicious.

What goes in, however, has to come out. I don’t recall consciously considering that aspect overmuch, perhaps because if the concept of plumbing was sensitive, my fifteen-year-old self simply couldn’t countenance the thought of anything food-waste related. Way too gross.

But I was not to remain in ignorance for long. I was lying on my side one morning, at the beginning of my second week in hospital, engrossed in Peter Benchley’s Jaws. I’d seen the film in the cinema several years earlier, and in my current situation a long meander into others’ fictional misfortunes was turning out to be just the sort of diversion that appealed. My pressure care areas had been done and dusted—all around was the scent (still evocative today) of the Johnson’s Baby Powder they always used. I became aware, though, that the staff nurse, Angela, was still nearby.

She was doing something behind me and humming a tune. Knowing I’d been ‘done’ now, I lowered Jaws and asked her what it was.

‘Me, love?’ she answered. ‘Oh, just building a wall.’

‘A wall?’ I asked, stupefied. ‘What do you mean?’

She paused in whatever it was she was up to. ‘I’ve given you a suppository,’ she explained. ‘And now I’m, well, shall we say, dealing with the result.’

When you are fifteen almost everything has the potential for embarrassment of such magnitude that you want the ground to swallow you up. Just existing on the planet can be reason enough if it’s a bad hair or double-zit sort of day. I was frozen with horror and excruciating mental images of what scene would greet me had I been able to see. Not only the sight, but also…ugh. Ugh. It was simply too terrible for words. As if it might help in any way, I lifted the book back to my face. Could this nightmare be happening? Yes, it could. It clearly was. Clearly had been before now, if my biology was sound. And no one had told me; no one had even mentioned it. I had never felt such acute mortification in my life. Yes, I knew people had to do things to keep my body working, but could I really cope with this thing for the rest of my life?

Angela, experienced nurse that she was, remained completely and utterly unfazed. I heard her chuckle. ‘It’s just a part of my job,’ she said conversationally.

This didn’t help. ‘But you run a pub!’

She did, too, with her partner. The Railway, in Neath. She’d told me early on, when we’d chatted. In no way did that and the fact of what she was doing for me now make any sort of comforting sense in my brain. It wasn’t that I expected her to regale her regulars with details of my bodily functions—I didn’t think that for an instant—it was simply that she did that and also did this. It just seemed so unutterably mad. And we’d become friends, hadn’t we? How could she bear it? Having to stick her fingers in my backside?

But she knew what I was thinking. ‘And I’m also a nurse, dopey. And this is what nurses do. And anyway,’ she said, her voice full of smiles and flecked with laughter, ‘it’s a very good wall. Want to see?’

No, I absolutely didn’t want to see. I’d have nightmares. I retreated to the safer world of sharks.

Not all the manifestations of my new situation would be quite so challenging to confront. Less life-and-death important but equally memorable were the small things that really did matter.

If Elaine O’Rourke had claimed number one place in my affections from day one, when she popped in to see me one evening before a night out, she refuted all other claims to it. She was, quite simply, one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. Teenage crushes take many forms, but few can be more intense than that between a young patient and her nurse. She looked beautiful in her uniform. Tonight, in a red dress, with her hair flowing down over her shoulders and her make-up all done, she looked beautiful beyond belief. So much so that I realised that was what I wanted—not to be looked at with pity but as the young woman I used to be.

I told her, the following day, on the ward.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘there’s no reason why you can’t make up your face if you want to.’

I could? This thought had not yet occurred to me, because I stopped seeing myself as a pretty young woman the moment I learned I couldn’t walk. Aldo, who’d broken his collarbone I now learned, had come and been sent packing by my auntie. Not because I blamed him—to climb aboard the bike had been my choice—but because whatever we’d had left between us was now gone. As for John, he’d been attracted to a functioning young woman; I absolutely did not want to see him like this, and I certainly didn’t want him to see me. But Elaine knew a lot more about self-esteem than I did.

‘Of course you can,’ she said. ‘And you should. You can use your arms, and we have mirrors we can fix to the bed so you can see. Why don’t you have someone fetch your cosmetics for you? I know you use lots of mascara,’ she said, grinning. ‘Because it was me who had to wipe it all off when you came in!’

She leaned down beside me and picked up the small hand mirror that lay on the cabinet beside my bed. We looked into it together. She smiled. ‘See?’

She had her hand on my head and was stroking my hair as she spoke. ‘And this,’ she decided, pulling on a strand of it, ‘needs washing.’

Having a makeover when you are a newly post-surgery spinal patient who is required at all times to lie supine, or prostrate, or on one side, is no mean undertaking. Sister Elaine O’Rourke, however, wasn’t one to let a technicality thwart her ambitions, so once she had dismantled the head of the bed, rustled up the requisite three nurses to shimmy me up it till my head hung over the edge and—crucially—hold me in place there, found several bowls, a plastic cup, three plastic aprons and (this the most testing) a quantity of shampoo, my transformation from the dragged-through-a-hedge look to glamour-puss could begin.