The Million-Rand Teaspoon

by Nikki Ridley

  I had no idea how he was going to survive. He wouldn’t be able to hold down a job while he was still drugging, and I did not doubt the ease with which he could continue to do so in Cape Town, but I left it alone. I’d given up. I wanted to give up. I didn’t want to hope any more. There was no point. It did nothing.

  He quickly met up with Kate again, so I suppose she supported him while he was there, as she would continue to do in the near future in Jo’burg, working while he got high. Working for her future while Paul finally threw his away.

  The Call

  Val

  PAUL AND KATE DROVE UP TO JOHANNESBURG IN JANUARY 1995.

  My husband and I were most concerned about Paul being back there. It was worse than Cape Town for him, because there he was in the heart of Wellconal territory. He had Kate, but we knew better than to think that having support would deter him from further self-destruction.

  Nevertheless, we saw him at my nephew’s wedding later that month, and I was once again encouraged. He seemed to be doing so well. He didn’t look like he was using. He looked healthy and together.

  Paul and Kate told us that they were going to work and save money to go to the UK.

  Did Paul actually ever believe that himself? Possibly Kate did. Paul did actually get a job, but then he left after just a few weeks (after having been promoted), and we heard that he was frequenting the seedier parts of town once again.

  Kate had got herself a waitressing job, and they stayed with her father.

  He must have been charmed with the situation – his daughter out working and supporting her drug-addicted and jobless boyfriend, but we didn’t get much time to dwell on our disappointment.

  We got the call on the 22nd of March 1995.

  Paul had overdosed just three months after his return to Johannesburg.

  Apparently he and Kate had argued that night before she went to work, about his drug taking. She wanted him to stop and help her save to go to London.

  Paul has no memory of the night he overdosed. Kate returned home from work to find him already in a coma. How long he had been like that, we will never know.

  Kate told us that it took a nauseatingly long time to get Paul to the hospital. The ambulance drivers wanted all sorts of details and forms filled in before they would take him.

  She called Mark, Paul’s brother, and he in turn contacted us. He told us he would go and see Paul and then let us know what his status was, as this had happened before.

  The second call came from the hospital. Mark told us that we had better come up as quickly as possible, because this looked very bad.

  It had happened. The inevitable.

  We rushed up to Johannesburg, all the time thinking that this was it. It. He was going to die.

  The scene that greeted us when we walked in was horrific. There is no other word for it. My son was lying in a cot bed, his arms and legs tied to the side because he had been thrashing around, and there was dried blood everywhere.

  The nurse told me he had been bleeding from the nose.

  He was in a coma.

  I couldn’t bear the blood all over his face, and so I took a washcloth and tried to wipe it away. As I touched his mouth, he suddenly moved his head as if trying to grab the cloth with his mouth. I got such a fright! I hadn’t expected the movement, and I thought he was trying to bite me, but then it occurred to me that he must be thirsty and he could feel the moisture on the cloth.

  I told the nurse he must be thirsty or his mouth must be dry, and he needed water, but she said that he was getting enough liquid through the drip in his arm. If I wanted to give him water, I was welcome to try, but ‘it would be on my head’.

  I was a little taken aback by her attitude, but not surprised. Why should they care? They probably saw a spoilt little Northern Suburbs boy who’d messed it all up on drugs and they had so many other patients to care for.

  Still, I had been given the go-ahead, and I wet a cloth and started squeezing the water into his mouth. As I did so, he began desperately mouthing for the water with his lips – like a little bird. I’d been right. He was thirsty, and I knew something else then too. I knew that he was there. He’d responded, whatever his official status might have been.

  When he stopped reacting to the water drops and lay still, I took the cloth and wiped out the inside of his mouth. It was caked with blood. I thought that he must have bitten his tongue.

  I remembered reading years before (I don’t remember where) that one should never leave a comatose person alone, that they can hear, and that you should talk to them. So I did.

  I’d sit with Paul and chat to him about anything and everything. I’d tell him about the family, about his niece and nephew – anything that came to mind. When Mark or the others sat with him, they would do the same.

  I was careful never to ask any questions, though. Never ‘What happened?’ or ‘Can you hear me?’, even though those things were constantly on my mind. He couldn’t answer, and it would have put him under stress.

  That was when we could talk to him – when he wasn’t screaming. That started very soon after we got there.

  The screaming and the violent thrashing.

  When we visited, we could hear him screaming even before we got out of the car. He was going through withdrawal, even in his comatose state, and that is when we first knew for certain that he could never have got clean if this hadn’t happened. He could never have got through that fully awake and aware and in control of himself. He wouldn’t have been able to.

  The doctors initially told us that it was unlikely that he’d live. They gave him a 5 per cent chance of survival.

  After seven days, they said that they didn’t know when, or if, he’d wake up.

  Mark had business to take care of back in Ballito, so we decided to go home for a while. We felt we could – he was in good hands. After five years of no contact, Savannah had come back into our lives. She and her mother, Wendy, had come to visit him each day since we’d told them, and they promised to continue visiting daily while we were gone.

  The last time that I sat with him before we went back to Ballito, I was the only one there and the ward was quiet. He was all hooked up, tubes going into and out of his body, and the only noise was the hum of the machines and beeping of the heart monitor.

  As I sat with him, the rhythmic beeps faltered and slowed. I immediately thought to myself ‘Oh, what do I do?’ in that instantaneous and panicked moment that takes your breath. Then I stopped and relaxed a little. Relaxed is the wrong word. I let go. In that same instant, I decided that I would not call a nurse. If it was his time to go, it was his time to go. I did not want him to live out the rest of his life on machines, so I gave the decision to do something away. I just sat there, closed my eyes and prayed, ‘Lord, either he must go, or he must live,’ and the beeps picked up and steadied again.

  I knew then that it would be okay. How okay, I didn’t know. They’d said at the hospital that if he made it out of the coma, he’d be a vegetable. That it was unlikely that he’d walk or talk again. They’d told us not to hope for too much. I was not unrealistic, but I knew then that there was a life for him.

  I could go home, because I knew I’d be back to visit, and I was, only a day later, when he woke and asked for his mom.

  If only someone had been there when it happened, he could have been given oxygen sooner, and the damage might not have been so extensive.

  Perhaps he could even have been revived.

  If only … perhaps. All what-could-have-beens.

  What is certain, though, is that if Paul had recovered completely, he would have continued on exactly the same path as before. Nothing would have changed.

  He had overdosed before, and that had not deterred him in the slightest. If anything, he had actually got worse after that.

  His destination was eventual death, and if he had not overdosed this time, or if he had been given oxygen before any serious brain damage could result, he would be dead now. I am sure of
that.

  I am also sure that if he had gone overseas with Kate (if she had earned enough for them both to go, of course), he would have died there and we would most likely have been the last to know about it. I would never have seen my son again.

  I have him now. So sad that it had to be this way, but I can honestly not see how else it could have come to pass.

  Paul has asked me if I was relieved that he ended up in hospital and so disabled that he could not continue taking drugs.

  It is a difficult question for me to answer. Relief is a happy emotion. How could I possibly feel happy that this happened to him? Yet it meant that it was all over. Finally. His drugging. The not knowing – where he was, how he was, how long it was going to be before I got the call to say he was dead.

  Now I knew. I had him back, but it is hard to see your child so damaged. It’s heartbreaking.

  Yes, I am relieved that he is alive, and I am relieved that he did not end up in the UK to die unknown and alone in a gutter from a heroin overdose, with no one to help. With no family to fall back on, or to mourn his loss before his body turned cold.

  I am relieved that I have not lost him, that through this we have been spared the ordeal of what we believed was inevitable for a Wellconal addict.

  But I am not happy that the ‘relief’ had to come the way it did. It has been a bitter pill to swallow, and it has left us with an uphill battle of a different kind.

  A child on hard drugs, or lying in a hospital, destined, according to doctors, to be a vegetable for the rest of his days. It’s just one rotten apple weighed up against another.

  Relieved that he overdosed – no. Relieved that he didn’t die – yes. Nothing is absolutely black and white, but life demands that you stop examining the shades of grey in between and move on to deal with reality. There is no time for self-pity. Why me? Why my son? Why not? No one is so special that they can be confident they will be spared pain and hardship. You just have to get on with it. At least we had something to get on with, instead of a diary full of misdemeanours and a photo album full of loss.

  Paul was alive. That’s all that mattered. Relieved is the wrong word. Grateful for small mercies, perhaps.

  Part II

  A Second Chance

  A Hand for the Damned

  Savannah

  IT WAS 1995 WHEN PAUL CAME BACK INTO MY LIFE. I had not seen him for five years, when I came home one day to find his mother at my house with the news that he had overdosed.

  She told us it was serious, and we left immediately to see him.

  By this time, Paul had already been in the hospital for about three days. He was still in a coma, so I walked in expecting him to be, well, like a person in a coma. Just lying there in the bed. All hooked up and still.

  Well – much later for that, because he was screaming and shouting and wriggling. Yelling out strange and disturbing things. It was awful. The reality of what had happened to him sank in then. It hadn’t really hit me when his mother first arrived at the house. It had been so long since I had seen him – and then to see this. It was shattering.

  There are different levels of coma, which I hadn’t known until then. Technically, he was classified as being in a coma because he was non-responsive, but where one might imagine a comatose person to be basically unconscious, Paul was clearly conscious of something, something horrible. There were things going on in his head. Things that scared him. He was locked up in his own nightmare world.

  We knew it was frightening because of the things he was constantly shouting out. It was very distressing for us to see. Terrible.

  ‘Please, please help me. Help me! Let me out! Get me out of here! Please!

  ‘Oh. Ouch. Ouch! Gotta go! Gotta go! Ouch! Eina! Please HELP ME!’

  I’d ask him, ‘Paul. What do you want me to do?’ But he couldn’t show it if he heard me. He couldn’t acknowledge any of us. Knowing he couldn’t connect with us was heartbreaking. Could he even hear us? He seemed so panicked and so desperate, and we couldn’t help him!

  He was also very, very thin. He was obviously already thin from the drugs at the time of the overdose, and had lost even more weight since. He couldn’t eat, and the nurses could not put in a nasal feeding-tube, as they were afraid it would interfere with his breathing. I don’t remember now exactly why, just that it had something to do with his asthma. A glucose drip provided his only sustenance.

  He looked like he had come out of a concentration camp.

  Seeing him like this absolutely ripped my heart out. Having known him for so long, and remembering what he had been like, I couldn’t believe that this is how he would have wanted to end up. I remember thinking that he would surely prefer to be dead than be like this.

  My mother and I continued to visit Paul from that first day on – twice a day during visiting hours. I also took him a radio, hoping that the music might penetrate his consciousness and perhaps calm him.

  Paul had always loved music. When we’d been together he had never been without it, so I thought that that might be something that could reach him. That it would be something that might somehow infiltrate his nightmare.

  It being a government hospital, I had to chain the radio to the bedside table to be sure it wouldn’t get stolen.

  The doctors were still unsure, at that stage, of the extent of the brain damage that Paul had suffered, because nobody knew how long he had gone without oxygen before his girlfriend had found him. He had massive brain swelling. They needed to do a brain scan, but as the J.G. Strijdom did not have the equipment, the doctors were waiting for the swelling to go down before they moved him to a hospital that did.

  So no one really had a clue what state Paul would be in when he woke up, or even when he would wake up … or if he would wake up at all. We continued to visit each day, waiting and just being with him while he shouted and wailed horribly, writhing and banging against his cot … and swearing.

  He swore a lot, and I remember that this upset the nurses. They were these sweet, genteel nurses from Coronationville, and his cursing distressed them no end!

  After a while it really began to get to me too – all of it. I was frustrated at not being able to do anything for him or get to him, and the constant shouts and begging for help didn’t make it any easier. It was easy to feel despondent.

  He didn’t know I was there. He couldn’t hear me. Or could he? Did he know I was there? Was he aware of any of us? How could we know?

  He couldn’t respond. He couldn’t let us know if he could hear us or feel us. He was gone.

  Or so I thought.

  Paul had been in a coma for eleven days when he woke up.

  At the time I remember feeling that I had had enough. He was rolling around and thrashing and wriggling, and you can’t do that when you are all hooked up with drips and catheters and tubes. I was holding his hand, trying to stop him from hurting himself, when I just reached the end of my patience. For all the good that it would do, I couldn’t stop myself. I yelled at him.

  ‘PAUL!’

  And he sat up.

  He just sat straight up and yelled back at me, ‘What! What’s up?’

  I tell you, I got the fright of my life!

  ‘I dunno, Paul,’ I said, gathering myself. ‘You tell me what’s up.’

  It was amazing. Truly amazing, but the elation and astonishment we all felt dampened quickly.

  He couldn’t see.

  Reality bit again, with the realisation that things were about to get very difficult for all concerned, but especially for Paul.

  He was out of the coma, but, although he was aware now of what was going on around him and able to respond to it, he was still distraught and confused. He couldn’t remember what had happened, he was blind, which of course made everything ten times worse, and he had absolutely no short-term memory.

  He’d ask what was going on, and I would explain – over and over. We went through what had happened about ten times a day – and this was only during visiting hours.
/>   At least he had stopped thrashing and screaming.

  Trying to communicate with someone with no short-term memory is very difficult. For instance, I would ask him to try to remember the number 3, and then I would immediately ask him what number I had asked him to remember, and he would say, ‘Ja!’

  Despite the gravity of the situation, not to mention the difficulties involved in dealing with someone in his state, Paul managed to be quite amusing at times, because he had this way of speaking that was very funny.

  We’d say, ‘Paul, you are in the hospital,’ and he’d say, ‘What the fuck has the hospital got to do with it?’

  ‘Um. You ODed, and Kate found you, and now they have brought you here. You’ve been here for about four weeks.’

  ‘What the fuck has four weeks got to do with it?’

  ‘This is the nurse, Paul, and her name is …’ whatever it was.

  ‘What the fuck has whassername got to do with it!’

  Or the doctor … anything and everything elicited the same nurse-upsetting response.

  ‘What the fuck has anything got to do with anything …’

  Then he’d sleep, and when he woke up, it would all start over again.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘You are in the hospital’

  ‘I CAN’T SEE!’

  ‘I know you can’t see.’

  ‘I can’t see!’

  ‘I know that, Paul.’

  ‘NO. YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND. I CAN’T SEE!’

  He was completely frazzled about not being able to see. As one would expect – it would have been very confusing and disorientating even for someone with no other brain injury.

  ‘I know you can’t see, Paul,’ I would say. ‘The doctors say it will come back. You’ve just got to wait for the swelling in your brain to go down. You must be patient.’