Never Say Die. Lynne Barrett-Lee
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.
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