Never Say Die. Lynne Barrett-Lee
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.
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