by Gil McNeil
Sitting there in the foul little smoking room staring at my feet, I realise a young nurse has come in, and is sitting smoking frantically looking shattered. It seems really rude to just sit there, so I say it must be really tough working with children who are so ill. This is a big mistake. She launches into a traumatised speech about having to carry a dead baby girl down to the mortuary on Christmas morning last year, and how the mum ran along the corridor with a special pink blanket for the baby, because she didn’t want her to get cold. ‘It’s weird,’ she says, ‘they often do that, the parents. They don’t want them to get cold.’ I feel my heart shrink, and rush back to the ward. Lizzie and Matt are sitting either side of Charlie’s bed, holding his hands. I take Matt’s place, but don’t share the story about the dead baby with them.
At some point a nurse comes over and says there’s a call for me on the ward phone. It’s Mack. He sounds like he’s a million miles away, and there’s a weird echoing tone on the line so it feels like we’re talking in a cave. Mack says he got a message that his little boy was ill and he was to ring a number in New York. He finally managed to get hold of Leila who explained it was not Alfie but Charlie. He doesn’t say anything, but I can tell he feels guilty about feeling relieved it wasn’t Alfie. He says he’ll fly home if I want him to, and his voice goes all shaky, and I tell him they seem to think Charlie is doing OK, but that it’s the most terrifying thing, and yes, I do want him to come home except that there’s nothing he can do, and actually all I want is to sit with Charlie until he wakes up. I promise to call him with news as soon as I have some, and then he says he’ll let me get back to Charlie, and we say goodbye. I sit thinking that he’s bound to feel guilty about being a tiny bit glad when he heard it was Charlie not Alfie, and I must make it clear to him that I totally understand. I suddenly realise I wish it was Alfie, and feel shocked at how easily I would trade Alfie for my baby.
The nurses are changing shifts, and our new one, Karen, very gently suggests it might be best if Lizzie and Matt went home and got some sleep, which they do. We don’t say goodbye; we just sort of nod. I lie on the little camp bed they’ve put next to Charlie’s bed, but he keeps making little moaning sounds so I decide to hold him; this sets off the alarms on the machines and in the end Karen switches them off. She says she’ll keep an eye on him, and he seems more settled when I hold him. I don’t want to get on to the hospital bed with him as somehow this seems wrong, so I end up with him in the camp bed with me, which is really stupid since it’s tiny, deeply uncomfortable and not very stable. But at least I can hold him. Karen goes off to get me a cup of tea and some toast at about three am, and I eat this lying next to him, dropping crumbs on his head and watching him breathe. The last time I had tea and toast in hospital was the night he was born. I’d like to sleep but I’m too frightened to close my eyes.
Very early in the morning the doctors appear doing their rounds. They all say Charlie has made an extraordinary recovery and we can now move to a side room where they’ll keep him under observation. If he stays stable we can go back to the local hospital in a few days’ time. They’re all terribly pleased, and keep touching his feet and smiling. The faint bruise marks are barely visible now, and he’s almost surfaced a couple of times. I wish they would all go away as waves of relief seem about to overwhelm me and I really want to cry.
I mutter my thanks at them and then stare hard at Charlie, but they don’t seem at all offended and each of them touches my arm before they move off down the ward. Karen smiles at me, and then Charlie opens his eyes and says, ‘Why is Peter Pan on the ceiling?’ I feel sure this is some sign of brain damage, but when I look up I see a painting of Peter Pan, along with Wendy and Captain Hook. In fact the whole room has paintings on the walls and ceiling, but I hadn’t noticed them before. Charlie has gone back to sleep, but he has a tiny smile on his face. I sit and cry quietly, until Lizzie turns up. I tell Lizzie he’s woken up and spotted Peter Pan, and she starts to cry as well.
We move to the side room, and it’s lovely to have a door to shut the rest of the hospital out. We also have a telly and a bathroom, and Lizzie has arranged for a phone. We need bucketloads of change, which she magically produces from a carrier bag, which also contains smoked-salmon bagels and a flask of coffee. Charlie wakes up properly for a bit, weak but determined to sit up. It’s heartbreaking how much this exhausts him, and he falls asleep again almost immediately but looks a much more normal colour. The door opens and a nurse ushers in a motorbike messenger. He has a package from Leila and is under strict instructions to deliver it into my hands only, or she will have him killed. The huge parcel contains two big bottles of mineral water, posh chocolates, a pale-lilac pashmina, miniature bottles of vodka and gin, a water pistol shaped like a dinosaur, a toy machine gun and two packets of chocolate biscuits. Perfect, and I drink the vodka whilst trying out the machine gun. Lizzie goes off to work, but promises to return later.
Another messenger arrives, this time with an enormous grey velvet donkey, with a card from the office sending all their love. The donkey has a name tag round his neck on which Barney has written ‘I am called Wonkey’. I can’t believe he’s remembered Charlie’s favourite joke, and burst into tears. I ring him and discover that Leila tracked him down, and he’s been calling every couple of hours and checking how things were going, but said he didn’t want to bother me. I find myself crying down the phone, which he copes with brilliantly. He says I’m bound to be in shock, but that we’re over the worst and must just get lots of rest. I dimly remember one of his children had some sort of serious illness years ago, which turned into pneumonia and took weeks to sort out. He’s very calm and reassuring, which is just what I need, and says that even Lawrence is upset and offered to go and buy the donkey. And do I realise how many shops you have to go to before you can find a perfectly ordinary toy donkey? I feel much better after talking to him.
I ring Leila’s office and say I can’t work out the time in New York but suspect it’s the middle of the night, so can they call her at a reasonable hour and tell her how well things are going, and thank her for the parcel, and they promise they will. I try to get hold of Mack but his hotel can’t track him down, so I leave a message. Charlie wakes up, and says he wants a drink. I now have nice water to offer him instead of the stale lukewarm tap water in the plastic jug by the bed, and he drinks cup after cup before he spots the machine gun. He’s in bliss with this, and discovers it makes a hideous noise, and then he sees the water pistol, demands it’s filled up and soaks the entire room. He also soaks the nurse who pops her head round the door to see how things are going. He falls asleep clutching the water pistol tightly in one hand, and the machine gun in the other.
Mum and Dad turn up, and Dad is carrying an enormous basket of fruit so we can only see his hands and feet as he staggers in through the door. Mum has brought enough food to feed the whole hospital, and has also purchased the entire nightwear range from M&S. Charlie is thrilled with his new Bart Simpson pyjamas but rejects the tasteful towelling ones as boring. They start to campaign for me to go off and have a break, go for a walk, buy a new car, anything to get me out of there. It suddenly dawns on me that this has been a double trauma for them – not just their grandson but their daughter in trouble – and that it will only be alright when we’re both home and back to normal. They both look totally shattered.
I eventually agree to go out with Dad and get a coffee and some fresh air, while Mum sits with Charlie and he squirts her with his new water pistol. I feel fine until we walk out of the hospital gates and then suddenly I’m overwhelmed. There are so many people rushing about, and I feel a strong desire to start telling them how lucky they are, which thankfully I manage to overcome. I realise now just how easy it is to become one of those people who wander up and down the streets muttering. I want to run back to Charlie, but Dad makes me sit down and eat a sandwich and drink some coffee. Suddenly I find there are tears rolling down my cheeks. It’s almost as if it were happening to some
one else. I’m just sitting there, drinking my coffee, but the tears won’t stop. Dad strokes my hand and says, ‘It’s alright, darling, just eat your sandwich,’ and I do, and the tears gradually subside. Then we go back and find Charlie is asleep again.
He’s much better in the afternoon, and his colour’s almost back to normal, although he’s still very weak and falls asleep after the slightest exertion. He’s got a drip in his hand for them to inject his drugs into every couple of hours, and it keeps blocking which means it’s agony when they push the stuff into it. Holding him down screaming while they do the injections will haunt me for ever. The nurses who pop in every now and again are from the general ward rather than intensive care, and they’re a pretty sour bunch. They rarely bother to speak to Charlie at all, and treat me like a nuisance. Which is odd because the nurses in intensive care seemed positively delighted with parents who sat by the bedside for hours on end, and encouraged them to chat and read stories even if their child appeared to be totally unconscious.
In the evening an agency nurse appears, in a different uniform to the usual ones, and refuses to do the drugs if the drip hurts so much. She says, ‘Never you mind, pet, we’ll get it sorted,’ and calls a doctor who uses an anaesthetic, repositions the drip and the drugs go in fine. I thank her, and Charlie says she can be his nurse for ever. I’m furious that the other nurses didn’t get it sorted out earlier, and even more furious that I didn’t make them. I can only hope that one day very soon someone gives them a huge amount of drugs through a blocked drip and ignores them when they scream.
Charlie’s asleep again. I ring Kate and bring her up to date. She says everyone at school is terribly upset, and Miss Pike is getting all the children to make special pictures for Charlie. She offers to drive up with anything we need, but I tell her we should be back at the local hospital soon and anyway I don’t know how infectious this is. She tells me that the area health people have said that one case is not enough to warrant coming into school and giving everybody mega-antibiotics, and that the inoculations don’t work for the worst kind of meningitis anyway, and have no impact at all on septicaemia. So everyone must just stay calm and watch their children carefully. Which, as Kate says, is so helpful you want to go round there especially to slap them. Our GP has been besieged by anxious parents demanding antibiotics just in case. Kate says she and Sally are both on standby, and I’m to call them as soon as I think of anything I need. I really don’t know how I’d have got through this without so much support from so many people. I feel myself about to launch into an Oscar-type thank-you speech, so I say goodbye and promise to give Charlie a kiss and tell him it’s from James and Phoebe, even though we both know this will annoy him intensely.
There’s a loud knock on the door, and I swear silently and hope it won’t wake Charlie up. I go over and open the door and come face to face with Mack, who’s standing there looking exhausted, carrying his luggage from his trip and an enormous British Airways bag full of toy aeroplanes and a huge teddy in a pilot’s uniform. I burst into tears and become incoherent and have to close the door and stand in the corridor. Mack explains that he simply couldn’t sit in Tokyo and do nothing, so he managed to get on to the first flight home by telling them it was an emergency, and when the woman on the desk heard his story she put him in first class and informed the entire crew, who kept coming up and giving him items of British Airways merchandise to bring to the hospital. Even the pilot had a word, which Mack says was a bit scary even though you know there’s another one actually flying the plane.
Apparently this pilot had a friend whose sister had meningitis years ago, and he just wanted to say she made a full recovery, after terrifying her parents half out of their wits, and is now married with three children and lives in Hastings. Mack says he realises he is babbling, and I am to kick him if I want him to shut up, but he’s just so pleased to see me and the nurse says Charlie’s doing very well. He holds me very tight for a very long time, and then we go and sit by Charlie and wait for him to wake up. We check with a doctor who says that there’s no risk of infection at this stage because Charlie has had so many drugs over the past twenty-four hours he probably couldn’t infect a newborn baby, but if Mack’s worried he can give him a short course of the mega-antibiotics. I’ve been given the same tablets, and so have Mum and Dad and Lizzie and Matt, because we had contact with Charlie when he was first ill, and I insist Mack takes them too, just in case, so he accepts and the doctor says he’ll get them sent up from the pharmacy. I remember to tell him just after he’s taken the first tablet that the nurse warned me they sometimes have the interesting side-effect of turning ‘your water’ orange, and contact lenses can be permanently dyed a new colour. Mack says he doesn’t care what colour he goes as long as nobody else gets ill, and Charlie will wake up and play with his new aeroplane.
Charlie does wake up, and likes all the new toys, but soon falls asleep again. I want to lie down with him and give him a cuddle, and maybe have a quick sleep myself, but don’t want to abandon Mack. Somehow he senses this and says he’ll go home and get some rest and will come and see us tomorrow. Just as he’s leaving Lizzie turns up, and says she’s very pleased to finally get to meet him, and gives him a big hug, which he seems to like. Then she gets embarrassed and says sorry about that, but isn’t it brilliant how well Charlie’s doing, and if you’d seen him last night you wouldn’t believe it, and then she tails off and looks close to tears. Mack says he’s sure they’ll meet again when things are less traumatic, and wanders off the wrong way down the corridor looking like jet lag has just hit him and he’s entered the twilight zone. We steer him in the right direction, and then Lizzie sits with Charlie while I doze in the chair. Charlie wakes me up by squirting his water pistol in my face and shouting, ‘Wake up, Mummy, wake up.’
He’s much stronger now, and sits up for much longer, bossing everyone about. The hospital food is cold and disgusting, so Mum is kept busy rushing backwards and forwards like a contestant on Ready Steady Cook. Watching him take his first steps again on wobbly little legs is almost unbearable, but luckily I walk into the bedside cabinet and bang my knee which diverts my attention.
‘Mummy, you said a swear word.’
‘No I didn’t, darling. Do you want me to help you walk?’
‘Of course not, I can walk all by myself. I’m not a baby, you know.’
‘Yes I know, darling, but you’ve been ill and you might be feeling a bit weak.’
‘Yes, I have been ill. But now I’m better, and I’m a bit bored now, Mummy. Can I have a new Power Rangers Turbo Zord? That would cheer me up.’
He can have the entire bloody Power Rangers collection as far as I’m concerned, but I realise this is a dangerous precedent and so we negotiate for hours about exactly how many toys he can buy when we go home. Leila turns up straight from the airport, and is very good and manages to be very jolly with Charlie. Mack arrives in the afternoon and says Laura has got some special potion for shock, and is making some up for me right now and sends her love, both to me and Charlie. Which is sweet of her, though I’m not sure about the potion as all I need now is an allergic reaction to some weird plant. Apparently Alfie and Daisy wanted to know if Charlie had to have lots of injections, and when Mack said yes they became deeply sympathetic. Mack then comes up with the inspired suggestion of trying to get a video sorted out for the room so Charlie can watch films. He manages to arrange this in under an hour, which I suspect is a record in any hospital, let alone one as busy as this, and then he makes a call and twenty minutes later a messenger arrives carrying a huge parcel of Disney tapes. Charlie is very impressed, and settles down to watch Peter Pan.
Dr Johnson announces that we can go back to the local hospital to finish off Charlie’s drugs, as they need the beds and Charlie is now completely out of danger. I get very tearful, and he gets all gruff and says, ‘Oh well, it’s our job, you know. Good job he got that penicillin so early, that really is vital, well done.’ The awful thing is I didn’t know
it was vital to get antibiotics – I just knew it was vital to get the bloody GP to turn up – and I feel a fraud when they keep telling me how well I’ve done.
Mack offers to drive us down to the local hospital, but apparently we have to use transport arranged by them, and travel with a nurse. Anyway he’s due to have Alfie and Daisy for the weekend and I persuade him to stick to the plan because I know he’s missed them, and they will have missed him, and anyway I want to have some time alone with Charlie. Mum and Dad and Lizzie will be around, and Leila is on standby to come down if I need anything.
The move back to the local hospital descends into farce when it turns out in the morning that there’s no transport available, as Guy’s don’t want to pay for the ambulance and the local hospital is not keen either. I finally call a cab and say I will pay, which annoys everyone and an ambulance miraculously appears. We arrive back at the local hospital and I get flashbacks to when we were here last, which reduce me to a mute wreck. We’re taken to the general children’s ward: the noise is phenomenal and there appear to be hundreds of children running around shouting. A nurse is sitting behind a desk, but she’s drinking tea and ignores us. The nurse who’s come with us from Guy’s is having none of this. She marches up and thrusts a folder of papers at her, and then kisses Charlie goodbye and rushes off back down to the ambulance before it decides to go back to Guy’s without her.