Tomorrow morning, all being well, L is having an S-ICD fitted. They’ve put the operation off a couple of times already but it does look like its going to go ahead now. He’ll be in theatre for an hour or so and then back on the ward for 24 hours. That means he should be home on Friday – a month after the heart attack that did its level best to try to kill him.
If I’ve already told you some of this then I’m sorry – some of it I’ve said out loud, some I’ve Facebooked, some I haven’t actually said at all so it might not come out right.
The day after it happened, and the doctor told me that he might not wake up, he also told me that because L had not been breathing and the only thing that was keeping him alive was the CPR, (if he woke up at all) he might be brain damaged from the lack of oxygen when he was unconscious. If there was no major damage then there might be other, more subtle changes, that other people who hadn’t known him ‘before’ might not notice.
For the first week he was in ICU, I was wrestling with the fact that (first) he might not come back at all and (second) that if he came back he might not be all that he had been. While he was unconscious I sat by his bed the whole time, singing to him and holding his hand – I knew he couldn’t hear me but I did it anyway, it was for me really – but I didn’t want him to wake up and me not be there. As it is, he doesn’t remember waking up so it kind of didn’t matter that I wasn’t there when it happened.
He doesn’t remember being in ICU at all now, not any of it. We kept a book, wrote down all his visitors, what had happened on each day. He can’t remember any of it. After a week or so, when he seemed more lucid, he was telling me he wanted his phone and his bank cards and all this kind of stuff and he was so nasty to me the whole time, even when other visitors were there. A couple of times I just couldn’t bear it and I cried, out in the corridor, sometimes on my own and sometimes with one of his friends patting my arm. All I could think was that this was my life now, with this nasty, mean old man who was sweetness and light to the nurses and to his friends, but spiteful and cruel to me. He argued with me constantly, refused to believe anything I said and tried to conspire behind my back – he wanted to go home and couldn’t think of any reason why he was being kept in hospital. He blamed me entirely for that and thought I was conspiring with the doctors, who all ‘talked shit’.
I didn’t want him to have his phone because I knew he would see all the messages on Facebook (and there were SO many – hundreds and hundreds!) and, at a time when he couldn’t remember if he’d had coffee or tea with his lunch, it might be a bit overwhelming – especially as he still could neither remember what had happened, nor what I had told him each day (over and over) about what had happened.
In a fit of despair, I wrote in his book “Yes, you had a heart attack” after the tenth time Id told him that day and the tenth time he’d said “Well, no, it wasn’t actually a heart attack. They’re just saying that – it’s more just a routine monitoring check thing, really”.
Once they’d moved him to the Cardiac High Dependency Unit, the fun really started. His short term memory was improving, but so was his manipulative and conniving behaviour. For about a week he would have said black was white if he thought that was what you wanted to hear. I had to let him have his phone – he hounded me night and day about it – we looked at some of the messages together and he cried a little bit, but half a day later he’d pretty much passed everyone off as ‘over-reacting’.
I begged the doctors not to let him out, nor to believe anything he was telling them. They told me he was ‘perfectly rational’ and that they couldn’t physically restrain him. He started to unplug his heart monitor and wander off – at first, just along to the shower room along the corridor, but then one afternoon when I went in, they told me he’d ‘disappeared downstairs’ and they’d had to chase after him. He was so horrible to me that I told him I wasn’t going to go and visit again unless he actually requested to see me.
Next morning I got a text telling me to bring ‘tobacco and cigarette papers’, followed by a winky face. I rang the nurses’ station and they told me that he’d unplugged himself and disappeared again and when he came back he ‘smelled like smoke’.
just a quick sidebar while I explain that, outside Southampton General Hospital, are a thousand and one No Smoking signs and, leaning against them, are visitors and patients alike – some in their pyjamas and attached to drips (and even the occasional oxygen tank!) and other apparatus – hacking their lungs up and wasting NHS money. They have a crafty smoke and they’re back on the ward before you can say ‘why the fuck can you not see the irony in that?’
I know L, and I knew that he’d cadged a cigarette from somebody so, despite saying that I wasn’t going back, I drove straight to the hospital, went into his room and checked his phone. I could see several texts he’d sent, asking people to bring him tobacco. He was obnoxious and said I was ‘accusing’ him of all sorts, which was ‘just bullshit’. I closed the door to his room so the nurses wouldn’t hear me and I let him have both barrels.
I told him what it was like to stand on a stage in front of a room full of people and look down at the face of your dead husband. I told him what the doctor had said about coming out of the coma and being brain damaged. I told him Id been there every day while he was unconscious, singing and holding his hand. I told him about all the ICU nurses and all the other people who had worked so hard to save his life and that he was throwing that back in their faces. I told him I was going to suggest that they didn’t bother with the S-ICD as it was a waste of taxpayers’ money. I said it was pretty likely that if he smoked he’d have another heart attack so I assumed that he was OK with putting me through all that fear and misery all over again and obviously thought about me differently to how I hoped he thought about me.
He was making a shutthefuckup face for pretty much all of my ranting. When Id finished, there was an awkward silence. Then I started crying. And I couldn’t stop. And it was noisy and there was wailing and sobbing and all the other noises that people make when they don’t care who knows that they’re crying.
After a really long time, L put his arm around my shoulders. He said ‘I’ve been a bit of a cunt, haven’t I?’
We talked for a while, then he lay back on the bed and I lay down with him and I was the little spoon. Its not OK to have two people on one NHS bed, even if one of them is a bit of a cunt and the other one doing two weeks worth of saved-up crying so when the nurse came in she told us off a bit. But it was only a bit, and she did it nicely seeing as NHS walls are thin and she’d been sitting only about two feet away from the door for the whole time.
I’m tired now and I need to pick Jooj up from the station. She’s been doing exciting Game of Thrones stuff today – I’ll tell you about it later.
More soon