Never Say Die. Lynne Barrett-Lee
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