Stanmore had its own resident urology nurses who doubled as sexual-function counsellors, spinal-cord injury having a habit of damaging this as well as bladder and bowel control. One day when I was lying on my bed exhausted after a physio session, one of these nurses came barrelling out of her Viagra-stocked storeroom to tell me about ISC.
‘ISC?’ I asked. I had never heard of it.
‘Intermittent Self-Catheterization. It’s what we encourage all the patients to do if they can.’ OK, so this was a bladder thing, not a sex thing, but I still did not like the sound of it. The nurse had a kind, motherly face and I would much rather have talked to her about almost anything else other than this, but she pressed on.
‘Now, Frank, like most of the patients here you’re finding you can’t urinate naturally any more and I know you have a permanent catheter sitting in your bladder, but in the long term this is not very healthy. The bladder doesn’t like foreign objects and it can give rise to urinary tract infections or even bladder stones and, believe me, you don’t want to get those. So –’ She paused for effect, having softened me up with these dire warnings. ‘That brings us to ISC.’ The nurse now produced a catheter that was – and I am not exaggerating – as long as my arm.
‘I’m going to show you how to use one of these on this rubber model and then you can have a go.’
Oh great, I can’t wait, I thought. I watched in horror as she withdrew the oiled tube from its cellophane wrapping and then proceeded to insert it into the tip of her model penis then feed it all the way up inside it.
‘Now you may find,’ she went on gaily, ‘that you meet a bit of resistance at this point. Don’t worry, that’s the valve at the entrance to the bladder. You just have to keep pushing it upwards and then the urine will start to flow out.’
When it came to trying this on myself I baulked the first time, then on the second attempt I got as far as that resistance at the valve and just could not go on. This was one instance where I was actually at a disadvantage over the other paraplegics on the ward, since unlike them I still had sensation down there, and a year later I still had not steeled myself to start shoving a very long tube up my private parts four times a day.
A few weeks after arriving at Stanmore I was moved on to a public ward, the Spinal Injuries Ward, and started to get to know some of the other patients. Their stories were tragic and moving, made all the more so by the sound of gentle sobbing I could sometimes hear at night; it was the sound of very disabled men mourning the loss of their limbs, saying goodbye to the independent life they had taken for granted and which now they would never have again. There was Robbie, a Scotsman who had been hit by a bus and spun round then almost immediately run over by a car. He lay in bed, smiling apparently cheerfully, yet being paralysed from the neck downwards he was unable to feed or wash himself or carry out any other bodily function. There was Neil, another tetraplegic (paralysed from the neck down), who told me he had been pushed off a three-storey building by someone he knew. He said he had spent eight hours lying in a coma and was only discovered in the morning. ‘I’d give anything to have my arms like you’ve got,’ he told me, ‘so I can get the bastard that did this to me.’ Another patient bent on revenge was John, a tall Vinnie Jones-like character with a James Bond ring tone on his mobile. He told me he had been deliberately run over by his sister-in-law on the gypsy commune they lived on. ‘She hates my guts,’ he said, ‘and one day she just drove her Land Rover straight at me, knocked me down and went over me chest. I had tyre tracks all across me body afterwards.’ There were also two Jamaican friends from north London, one of whom had a bullet lodged in his spine. ‘They’re yardies,’ said one of the nurses to me in a conspiratorial whisper. Every time I wheeled past them they shouted ‘Respect!’ and knocked knuckles with me; I liked to think this was because we had all survived potentially lethal gunshot wounds.
I discovered by chance that there were at least two failed suicides on the ward. One was a girl who had thrown herself under a Tube train in London. The other was Simon H. Tall and powerfully built, he had been a champion martial artist, competing in Taekwondo and Ultimate Fighting competitions at international level. He had fallen in love with a Swedish girl and moved to Stockholm with her, but when the relationship turned sour he returned to England and grew increasingly depressed. Eventually he climbed up on to the roof of the four-storey government building where he worked, tied one end of a rope around his neck and the other to a hard point on the roof, and jumped off. The rope snapped. By chance, just as he was falling towards the concrete, someone happened to open a window below which deflected him towards a patch of grass. He came to, to find himself still alive and now completely paralysed from the waist downwards. Simon H. was a very private person but I discovered he was a talented artist; for hours he would stand upright in the standing frame, held in place with padded straps, drawing brilliant but frightening cartoons of patients cowering in bed while demonic nurses came out of the furniture and advanced on them with lethal-looking hypodermic syringes. Already popular with the nurses, he was elevated to hero status after an incident on the ward. A new patient, Terry, had arrived with a nasty attitude. He openly admitted to having spent the last ten years in a Belgian jail – we never learned his crime – but it was his racism that grated. When one of the nurses told him his racist comments were unacceptable, he threatened to ‘cut her up’, and wheeled himself back to his bedside locker where he produced a knife. Simon, who even in his wheelchair could probably have felled him with a single blow, calmly talked him out of using the knife. The police were called and Terry was taken away.
I had my own demons to fight at Stanmore. Mostly it was the prospect of being confined to a wheelchair for the rest of my life that terrified me. But one day a visiting friend brought me a DVD of the latest Tom Cruise film, Collateral. When it came to the bit where Cruise’s hitman character guns down a gang of thugs in a backstreet, I sat bolt upright in bed. This was suddenly, chillingly familiar: the roar of the pistol going off, followed immediately by the clink of the ejected cartridge case hitting the metalled surface of the road. I had forgotten that, but now Hollywood had brought it back in sharp relief; I could remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday, that deafening roar as the Al-Qaeda gunman’s pistol went off, pointing directly at the centre of my body, the earth-moving thump of each bullet as it slammed into me and then that high-pitched, almost musical tinkle of the cartridge case landing on the tarmac beside me. It was all too real. But I did not want to have a problem every time a gun went off on television, so I ‘inoculated myself’ by pressing pause, rewind, then play, pause, rewind and play, until I was thoroughly bored of that sequence. I don’t have a problem with on-screen gunshots now.
In November I had two major emotional hurdles to get over: my first visit home and the memorial service for Simon Cumbers. Emma, my occupational therapist, warned me that going home for a visit can be quite upsetting. As we drove in her car from Stanmore past the rising skeleton of the new Wembley Stadium, she explained why.
‘When spinally injured patients go home for the first time after their injuries they’re suddenly confronted with a glimpse of their past life,’ she said. ‘Often the house they lived in before is not going to be suitable for them now they’re in a wheelchair.’
I thought about where we lived, a typical late-Victorian terraced house, tall and narrow with thirty-six stairs and lots of half-floors and landings. I had a bad feeling about this. Although I had practised car transfers at Stanmore, it was still a major operation to get me out of Emma’s car, on to a sliding board and across that into my wheelchair, all the while holding up the traffic in our narrow street. I felt intensely self-conscious as I was wheeled up over the kerb, through the piles of dry autumn leaves and up to our front door. One of our neighbours waved cheerfully but I did not feel like talking to anyone. I could not wait to be off the street and inside.
Then it was through the same front door that I had trotted briskly out of, ruc
ksack over my shoulder, just five months before, and into our narrow hallway. Amanda was waiting for us with fresh-brewed coffee and warm croissants. We soon found we could only just turn me round to get into the living room and it took both Emma and Amanda to lower me down the two steps into the kitchen. I felt very much an invalid. We had no bathroom on the ground floor and Emma’s expression was pretty grim. By the end of the visit – which included me having to shoo the others out of the living room so I could go to the loo in a bag – it was painfully obvious: no amount of adaptations were going to be enough here, we would have to sell our family home and move out. We did not break this straight away to the children when they were collected from school that afternoon. Instead, Amanda told them there was a surprise in the living room, where I lay hidden under a rug. Then Sasha spotted a foot and squealed, ‘It’s Daddy! He’s come home!’
The day of Simon’s memorial service was crisp and blue, and London seemed to sparkle in the pale sunlight of early November. The service was to be held in the seventeenth-century St Bride’s Church, the journalists’ church just off Fleet Street, and Louise Bevan, Simon’s widow, had been working on it for months. She did him proud. The service, complete with a choir singing from the Messiah, was by invitation only, yet there were a good three hundred people there, with friends and colleagues having flown in from news bureaux on three continents. There were Simon’s friends from his days at Channel 4, ITN, London News Network and APTV (now APTN), and of course his family from Ireland, whom I had not met before. Louise had organized a tot of Bushmills finest ten-year-old Irish whiskey for everyone in the church, 350 glasses in all, during the singing of ‘Jerusalem’, a touch which everyone appreciated. Afterwards Simon’s mother Brona threw her arms around me and just held me.
Just as everyone was heading from the church to the reception, Simon played his final joke. A rumour came out of Jerusalem that Yasser Arafat had died in Paris, which prompted all the BBC and other news people to dash around with mobiles clamped to their ears. The rumour was false: Arafat still had a week to live.
For all of us there, Simon’s memorial service was very, very hard and I found I was unable to talk about it for a long time afterwards. Orla Guerin, the BBC’s Middle East correspondent who had recently been awarded an honorary MBE for her journalism (like Simon, she was from the Irish Republic), tried to inject a lighter note in her speech. ‘As Simon is probably watching me right now I will try to do this in one take,’ she said from the pulpit as she began listing the many ways in which he had been such a pleasure to work with. But when she remembered how on every assignment Simon had never failed to mention his beloved Louise, Orla broke down and we cried with her. After all my months in hospital it finally hit home hard: Simon was dead, because of the trip we had gone on together. I had survived and he had not. I would have given anything to wake up and realize it had just been a terrible dream, that Simon was still doing what he loved, making superb films or just making everyone around him smile and laugh.
Back at Stanmore Orthopaedic Hospital, the nurses and dinner ladies could see how upset I was in the days that followed and they were especially kind. One of my favourite nurses, Anne-Marie, who confided that she was the daughter of the High Commissioner of Sierre Leone in London, went to a lot of effort to massage my legs to try to reduce the agonizing nerve pain I was suffering. Since on these occasions sleep was out of the question, we would stay up chatting for hours, with her perched on the end of my bed. Another favourite was Eileen, who had grown up tough in rural Ireland in the 1950s. She told me she was one of seventeen children – seventeen! – although five had died very young. She remembered her ten-month-old brother dying of pneumonia because the doctor could not reach their house in time. In rural Kilkenny, she said, they had been desperately poor. Unable to afford a football, they used to play with a pig’s bladder until it burst, a story which somehow made me wince with empathy. Much of the family’s money, she said, used to go to the priests, who would announce in church exactly how much each person had given, thereby shaming them into giving more. Once, a distant relative arrived from America with oranges and the family could not believe their luck.
In mid-November Amanda took off for a well-earned hen weekend in Paris and I arranged with friends to break out of Stanmore for a day and take Melissa and Sasha to the London Wetland Centre in Barnes, a wonderful expanse of lakes and marsh in southwest London where ducks and geese fly in from Siberia to spend the winter. We had brought the girls here before I was injured and they had loved using my binoculars and peering out of the wooden hides, but this outing was to be unexpectedly hard for me. My friends Aidan and Steve were attentive and playful with the girls, who loved them as surrogate uncles, but as I sat in my wheelchair, unable to join in their chasing games, I began to realize what I had lost through disability. Whereas before I would have whirled them round or plopped them up on my shoulders, now I could only watch from the side, feeling like a passive grandparent out for a spin in the park. I thought, I’m forty-three, I’m not ready for this. When I told Amanda later, she sensibly told me to stop being so morbid. ‘Ah, cheap thrills,’ she said. ‘Anyone can whirl them round but they’ll soon grow out of that. You’re their daddy and now they’ve got you back.’ That same week Margaret Hassan, the CARE charity worker abducted by gunmen in Iraq, was murdered by her captors, which rather put my problems in perspective.
Back in the physio gym at Stanmore, I had one more battle to fight. I was determined to start walking in callipers as soon as possible, but the hospital had a policy of not letting patients do this until at least a year after their injury and it had only been six months in my case. I persisted, making such a nuisance of myself that the orthopaedic surgeon agreed to have me X-rayed. When he looked at the results he pronounced there was no reason why my spine could not tolerate my walking in callipers, so off I went to the Orthotics workshop to have warm plaster of Paris smeared over my legs from which they then fashioned the callipers. They were bigger, heavier and clunkier than I had hoped for, with great metal hinges and plastic ridges that came right up to the groin and buttocks, and they were quite a struggle to put on. But when I took my first steps in them between the parallel bars I found it surprisingly easy. The callipers encased my legs like a couple of rigid tubes – without them my legs would have collapsed beneath me – so that, using my hips and thighs, I could move forward one step at a time. It felt fantastic to be up and on the move again, even if it was only a pale imitation of walking.
I must have been so encouraged by this development that when I gave my first interview since the attack, on the Today programme on Christmas Eve, I mistakenly gave listeners the impression that all was going to be well. John Humphrys, after quizzing me about what I remembered of the attack, then asked me how I was, healthwise. Although I replied that I was in a wheelchair, I think most people had the impression that this would be temporary, like someone with a leg in plaster after a skiing accident. Cards and letters started to come in congratulating me on my ‘full recovery’. ‘No!’ I felt like screaming. ‘You don’t understand! I’m paraplegic, disabled, crippled for life. I need to make that clear.’
At Christmas I was allowed home for a few days, reunited at last with my family in our newly rented two-bedroom flat, where Melissa and Sasha were squeezed into bunk beds but where at least I could roll into the room and read them their bedtime stories. My father bought us tickets to Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker and so we headed off to the South Bank, where the disability people made a welcome fuss of me and took us backstage in the interval to meet the ballerinas. The dancers from Moscow greeted our daughters in Russian and let them touch their elaborate lace dresses – at least one experience, I told myself, they would never have had if this whole horrible thing had not happened to us. On Christmas Day my parents came up to join us and we raised a toast to survival, but when we went for the traditional walk after lunch I realized that in my wheelchair I was finding it hard to keep up with my parents, who w
ere nearly twice my age. It brought back distant memories of trying to keep pace with them on walks in the Alps when I was eight, and I thought sadly that my dreams of hiking over mountains until I was well into my seventies were probably not now going to be realized.
In January 2005 I turned myself in to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for a scheduled operation I had been dreading: anastomizing my intestines. It was a five-hour surgical procedure to open up my abdomen yet again, scrape off the scar tissue and reconnect my intestines after seven months. In recovery, I felt that I was right back where I had been six months before, with a nasal-gastric tube down my throat, green bile rising up, and a very painful abdomen where the surgeons had pulled the two sides together over my bowels and stitched them together. A long livid scar stretched from my chest down to my groin, but there was a welcome bonus: my tummy button was back in the middle instead of round by my ribcage. The thin pink membrane that had been all that separated my guts from the outside world was now covered with normal flesh, which meant I would no longer have to hide from the sun on holidays. But I had terrible nausea, and when after a few days I tried some soup I soon threw it all back up. I even managed to vomit in front of my boss, Jonathan Baker, nearly causing him to follow suit.
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