A DEATH TO DIE FOR

by Geoffrey Wilding

I woke fairly early after a short spell of deep sleep with a very stiff neck and shoulder from laying with my upper body prone on the bed, at first in the half grey light I wasn’t sure where I was but the awfulness of the previous day came readily to mind, I straightened up and determined to give my brain something else to do I set about ‘discovering’ my new room.

  Just then the functioning of the hospital began in earnest with the ‘early’ nurse coming into the room, first she carried out the ceremony of opening the curtains which let in the day, then she checked my saline drip, when she saw that bag was empty she removed the line and I was left sat on the edge of the bed free from attachments so I started to examine the detail of my surroundings for the first time.

  The room was basically square and with the curtains opened I was able to see that the window looked out onto a closed roof top courtyard area and although it faced onto three red brick walls if I laid on the bed I could see the sky and today was looking like it was going to be bright and sunny.

  It must have been about 3.5m x 3.5m and in the wall facing the foot of the bed there was a door which lead into the ensuite shower room, on the wall opposite the outside window there was another window which overlooked and gave borrowed light to the corridor and the bed head wall had all the paraphernalia of a hospital ward with the pipes, sockets, switches and lights you would expect plus an angle poise flat screen television, each of the windows had sets of curtains so privacy would not be a problem.

  The colour of the room was generally a mid blue, there was the high backed arm chair that I had slept in along with the over bed trolley table and a cupboard under the window to the corridor, altogether I thought that it compared favourably with some of the hotel rooms I had stayed in over the years and I came to the conclusion that if I had to die somewhere then this small warm private cocoon of a room would be better than some places I could think of and I took a strange kind of comfort in this thought.

  I managed to get myself through my ablutions without having to drag the wheeled drip stand with me and avoided knocking the cannula in the back of my left hand which was still quite painful, I then changed into a clean nightshirt, put on my towelling dressing gown and sat back down in the bedside chair and waited for Helen.

  I looked down and saw the blue script ‘HHH’ on the breast pocket of the gown and fond memories of the wonderful weekend Helen and I had spent at the Hartwell House Hotel in Buckinghamshire came to mind, I had bought the robe as a memento and smiled as I remembered that no sooner had I brought the garment home than the ‘HHH’ had become the families acronym for ‘His Holy Highness’ whenever I wore it.

  Apart from the bed making duo I saw no-one else, so time dragged by until Helen arrived, I could have texted her about the new room but I wanted to see if the change of location could even for a brief moment help to lift the hollow eyed expression that haunted her face.

  After her initial surprise she managed a smile and asked how it had come about, I explained what had happened and she said that she was so glad that we would have privacy over the coming weeks and that later she would try and find out the name of the nurse in the white uniform so that we could thank her.

  Helen told me that she had managed to get hold of our other daughter Kate who had emigrated to New Zealand with her husband Gary and our two grandchildren Ruby and Ivy, she said that Kate was extremely upset and was making arrangements to fly over to see me as soon as she could.

  Helen asked whether had I managed to get any sleep and I told her how I had sat in the chair with my upper body laid across the bed which had allowed me to get some fitful dozing between the coughing, but that now after nearly five days of not having a drink I felt so very thirsty and was worried that I might lose the ability to swallow altogether so when the tea trolley came she suggested that maybe I should try to have some milky tea to see if I could swallow that, after all I had managed to swallow the jam yesterday.

  With a mug of warm tea in hand there followed a period of what can only be described as extreme tea drinking with me attempting all sorts of contortions with the cup even to the extent of trying to drink out of the back of it as you do when you have hiccups, but all to no avail.

  Every attempt ended in a coughing fit with tea dripping off my chin and hands and leaving a large stain on my towelling dressing gown and night shirt, Helen caringly wiped the spilt tea from me each time with tissues from the ever present box, I explained that I could not feel where the lukewarm tea was in my mouth and throat so she suggested that I try some cold water which although I could feel where it was proved every bit as impossible to get down my throat as the tea.

  After a few disastrous minutes it was decided that tea drinking was not the best of ideas and we gave up, I changed out of the tea stained dressing gown and night shirt and had to put on one I had worn the day before so that Helen could take the dirty ones home for washing.

  I got back onto the bed and Helen sat in the chair, there was a knock and the door opened, the consultant came in and said that it was the start of his rounds and that he had called in to let me know he would like to run some more tests to see how things were progressing he also said that he had arranged for me to have a nasogastric tube inserted so that I could be fed using a pump which would give me sufficient nourishment plus all of the fluids I would need.

  He then left and we were on our own again and after skirting around each others emotions with small talk it came to the point where the conversation had to deal with the serious matters that lay ahead of us, Helen said that every time she left the hospital her mind was all over the place and so to make sense of things she was going to have to make lists of what needed to be done, with that she reached into her voluminous handbag and pulled out a lined note book and pen.

  I first told her that I needed to see Matt my business partner to discuss what was going to happen to the company, I then said that I needed to see my good friend Bill as he had offered me a senior position working together in our Masonic Lodge for the year starting in December which I would not now be able to fulfil.

  Helen was leaning over the pad as she wrote and I saw a tear fall from her eye onto the page as she started to consider the awful task of having to talk to the extended family, our friends and the people we were linked with through our work and my masonry, I reached over and took her hand she looked up and her eyes were brim full, she leaned forward in the chair and placed her head on my arm and quietly sobbed, as we carried on producing the list I too started to fully appreciate the way that my life was going to peter out, the plans that would not be fulfilled, the people I might never get to see again, we stopped and sat in reflective silence for a few seconds, but then we realised that we had to continue.

  The next two items were the worst of all to list, firstly I asked her to make contact with our solicitor and ask if he would come into hospital so that I could update my will and secondly for her to get hold of Alan (P) my friend since primary school who had been several years in the undertaking business, he had at my request and in my opinion valiantly undertaken the responsibility of preparing my son Justin and officiating at his funeral some 15 years previously in consequence of an incident with a car and I hoped that he could find it within himself to do the same for me.

  With that Helen put the pen and pad back in her handbag, she had no wish to check the list twice, she then leaned over so that her head was just under my chin I put my good arm across her shoulders and we again stayed like this in quiet contemplation until a there was a knock at the door.

  Helen said “Come in “ and the door was opened by Gordon who ran the clay pigeon shooting club I belonged to and who also worked for the facilities management company that ran the hospital, he had just started to ask how I was when a nurse came in saying that she had to do my ‘obs’ but that she could give us some time if we needed, Gordon said that he would come back later and Helen said that this would be a good time to go home so that she could put the washing on and make a start on some of the phon
e calls, I asked her if she would be OK, she sighed that she would and left as the nurse completed noting the relevant data on the bed chart.

  I was on my own again and the earlier listing of requests and the inevitability of the outcomes had markedly changed my mood, I blanked out the normal hospital noises around me and my thoughts turned once more to trying to envisage how the end would come, how much pain I might be in and most of all how would I know when it was over, I puffed up the pillows, laid out on my left side and closed my eyes.

  I came to sometime later, I could see the clouds against a blue sky through the courtyard window and for the briefest of moments I felt that I must have been having a bad dream but then as I looked around at the hospital paraphernalia that surrounded me I quickly fell back into the dark mood I had earlier.

  There was a knock at the door and Richard, a friend from the village came into the room, but I said that I wasn’t really up to seeing anyone at the moment, he said he understood and placed an envelope on the over bed table said his goodbyes and left, when later I opened the envelope I found contained a lovely card with kind comments referring to an ongoing village project which I had been involved with in my role as Chairman of the Parish Meeting.

  Later in the afternoon two people in white coats entered the room and stood at the foot of the bed, they introduced themselves as trainee doctors, one was a shortish, about 5’6”, a stocky man of Asian extraction with a round clean shaven face whose spoken voice made me think that he had probably been born and educated in the UK while the other was taller probably 6’0” plus, he was thinner with an accent that made me think that he was probably an overseas student from India or Pakistan, he wore glasses with thick black rims and he had quite an exuberant moustache.

  Both wore stethoscopes around their necks seemingly as a badge of recognition of their status as doctors, but in all the time they dealt with me I never actually saw either of them use the instruments for their intended purpose.

  They confirmed that they had come to fit the nasogastric tube which they had brought with them along with an open cardboard box containing a pump and some see through plastic packs of what seemed to be liquidised porridge which they placed on the over bed table that they had moved to the end of the bed, they asked me if I would please move onto the chair which I did.

  The taller one of the two seemed to want to take control, he cleaned his hands with alcohol gel and then opened one of the packs taking out a coiled thin plastic tube which he unrolled and placing one end in my lap he proceeded to measure what length was required by holding it against my stomach and then my chest followed by my neck and cheek up to my nose, I can’t remember if or how he marked the tube, he may have just held the position with his thumb and forefinger.

  With the shorter doctor bent forward close into me staring up my nose the other doctor squeezed some lubricant from an applicator onto the end of the tube and then also leaning in close he proceeded to insert it into my left nostril and very slowly and tentatively started to push the rest of the tube into my nose, from the corner of one eye I could see that Helen had arrived and was watching most amused at the scene before her and as I turned my eyes forward all I could see was the sleeve of a white coat, a slowly moving hand, three wide open eyes, half a pair of glasses and a moustache all in very close proximity as progress of the tube became a very intensely observed operation.

  All the time the tube was being inserted I was asked to please keep swallowing and whether the process was at all uncomfortable or did I need them to stop, but things went fine and once they got to the predetermined point on the tube they both stood upright and smiled first at me then at each other, obviously very pleased that the tube had been inserted without incident, then with a small plaster the tube was stuck to my left cheek.

  They said that they now had to take me to the X-ray department to have a picture taken of my abdomen to see that the tube was in the right place, the taller doctor asked the other one to go and locate a wheelchair and he disappeared out of the door to return with one a short time later, he looked at his colleague, then the wheelchair and then at me, the look on his face suggested that he was quite pleased with himself that he had found one so quickly.

  They helped me transfer from one chair to the other and then with some gusto they pushed me at fair speed down the corridor to the X-ray department where I was taken straight into a room while the doctors waited outside, I was asked to stand in front of a vertical panel and the radiologist moved the equipment into position then stood behind a screen, I was told to hold my breath.

  There was a quick humming noise and then it was over and I was told I could sit back in the wheelchair, the radiologist called the two doctors into the room and they all studied my insides on a screen and once satisfied that the tube was sited correctly they took me back to my room.

  It took a little while for the trainee doctors to work out the correct way to fit up the electric pump, food bag and line to the drip stand and to get the pump working at the correct speed but when completed they stood back to admire their combined efforts, once satisfied they said their cheerio’s and left the room.

  Bizarrely they seemed to remind me of Tingha and Tucker, the two little Koala bears from the 60’s TV show, the smaller doctor being Tingha and when I later recounted this to Helen, she smiled and these nick names became fixed with us from that moment.

  The consultant called back to see me before he went off for the day to check that the food pump was working OK, he said that he had prescribed me an injection of diazepam to help me sleep and some atropine skin patches which would help dry up the saliva in my throat which was causing my coughing fits so I should be more comfortable, he said the nurse would give me the injection and apply the patch when she came round in the evening with the drugs trolley to give me my regular penicillin injection.

  It must have been around 6.30pm when Helen and Jim got back to the hospital. Our daughter Alex and her partner Ian followed shortly behind having previously checked with Helen that I felt up to seeing visitors. The nightshirt and towelling robe had been washed and tumble dried while Helen was at home and she laid the folded garments on the cupboard under the window to the corridor.

  Jim was by now getting used to seeing me in hospital but the sight of the NG tube up my nose caught him off guard and all he could think to ask if I felt anything as the food was pumped down, but poor Alex looked so pale and drawn, this was the first time she had seen me since she had been told about my condition and what was going to happen, she came and sat on the chair next to the bed and took hold of my left hand, she said that she didn’t know what to say other than she loved me and that she felt so sad for me and Mum.

  Helen had hold of my right hand and at this she gave it a squeeze, I could see from the redness of her eyes that Alex had been doing some serious crying before coming to see me.

  We sat chatting for a bit during which Alex asked whether I had watched any TV programmes yet, I said that I had not been interested in anything but I might want to watch it in the coming days, Alex said that she had passed the TV card dispensing machine on her way in and went with Helen to buy a TV card for me.

  I was grateful for their visit by about 8.30pm I had started to feel exhausted and all I wanted was my diazepam and atropine to see if I could get a good nights sleep so when they returned I told Helen and the others that I was very tired and they said that they would go, Helen collected the bag of dirty laundry which was to become a regular chore and after they had said their goodbyes I waited for the drugs trolley to be brought round, I didn’t bother with the over bed TV.

  The nurse with the drugs trolley arrived pretty soon afterwards and gave me my penicillin injection followed by the diazepam injection which she did through a valve in the cannula on the back of my hand and then stuck the atropine patch on my upper left arm, she asked if I wanted to go to bed, I said that I did, so having raised the top end of the bed at an incline she set up my pillows.

  The nurse then
connected me up to the food pump, this would run all night so that I received most bags of NG food while asleep to give me more freedom to move about during the day, she made sure that the food pump was working properly before leaving the room.

  Apart from some fitful dozing I had been more or less conscious now for over 60 hours and I desperately needed sleep so I tried laying in different positions to see if I could manage to be on my back without triggering a coughing fit and after a few attempts I found that if I laid diagonally across the bed from right foot end to left head end and tilted my head to the left that it did seem to be less of an irritation and so in this position I turned the light to dim and with the new atropine patches in place I finally fell into a deep sleep for the first time in nearly four days.

  Well into the night, probably around 2.00am I came to and possibly because of the atropine my throat was very dry and my tongue felt swollen, I was desperate for a drink of water so I decided to get up and go to the shower room to at least try and wet the inside of my mouth.

  I got out of bed and started to walk towards the shower room but I had completely forgotten about the NG tube attached to the food pump which was plugged into the electric socket on the wall behind the bed head and as the tube and electric cable extended to their full limit I felt the sticking plaster plucked from my cheek and before I could react the whole NG tube exited my nose in one continuous motion and fell to the floor.