‘No way. See?’
Another police car sat in the lay-by ahead, this time with the markings of the Northumberland Police. ‘Come on, Norrie, let’s get you swapped,’ the officer said as he grabbed the spare oxygen bottles out from the back seat, letting in a rush of cold air. Norrie quickly tried to climb in the back of the next car but the door wouldn’t open.
‘No, Jock,’ said the driver, an Englishman on his own in the car. ‘You sit up front with me.’ Norrie would have got cross if anyone else had called him Jock, but he wasn’t going to argue with the only man who could get him to his son. The ambulance had disappeared over the hill but the driver saw him looking after it and grinned. ‘Don’t worry, Jock, we’ll catch them.’
What happened next was a shock, says Norrie. ‘I swear it was like being in a plane. We nearly took off. I thought, “My god, he’s bombing it!”’
They had been going fast before, north of the border, but this was something else and it made Norrie laugh. He was getting hysterical with the grief, the stress and the fear, but he was elated, too – they were doing something for Marc at last, going somewhere fast, getting the best help they could. At least they were trying, all these people – the doctors, the nurses, the paramedics, the cops – all on his son’s side. They were hurtling through the dark again now, but he knew they were heading down through the open country of the Northumberland National Park. ‘I could see the ambulance far off in front, but there were hills, so the tail lights would pop up red in the distance then they’d disappear.’
The lights started to get closer but Norrie suddenly began to feel really sick.
‘Are you all right?’ The driver must have heard him groan.
‘Not really. Can I have a cigarette, to settle my nerves?’
‘What? No, pal. You’re in a police car!’ The driver was concentrating on the road but he must have thought about his passenger and how there would be nobody else to clear up the sick, because he changed his mind. ‘Special circumstances? All right, you can.’
The window next to Norrie opened just a crack and the wind raged in his ear, but it was clear what he was expected to try and do. So he lit his fag, took a drag, craned his neck and tried to blow smoke out of the window. They were going at more than 100 miles an hour. The wind blew the smoke back in his eyes and the ash in his mouth, all over his face. The driver laughed. ‘Nice one, Jock.’
Norrie laughed too, high on adrenaline. It felt like seconds before they were in among houses and street lights again and the shop signs suggested they were on the edge of Newcastle, where two other patrol cars joined them. ‘My mates are going to play tag,’ said the driver, meaning that one car would race ahead and block off the road for the ambulance to pass through, then the other would accelerate away to the next junction to do the same. ‘I felt like I was in a movie,’ says Norrie, who had never seen such driving. Jock or not, he was grateful. ‘I couldn’t thank those guys enough for what they did that night.’
Still, when they got to the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle the distractions of the drive fell away and he was hit again by the full force of what was happening to his son. Norrie expected to walk into the hospital and be told that Marc was dead, but there was nobody there to meet them. The English policeman led the way up the stairs, but as they were going up he saw the doctor and nurses who had ridden with the ambulance coming towards him. There were four women and the older man, the medic he recognised from before, looking exhausted now. The man’s face was wet with tears, and Norrie felt a rush of despair, as he realised what that meant. It had all been in vain. Marc had not made it.
But as they passed on the stairs, the man reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. Norrie braced himself.
‘Your son’s a fighter. He’s still with us in there …’
Eight
When his phone rang at home at five-thirty on the Wednesday morning, the doctor who would take charge of Martin’s care at Nottingham was already awake. Harish Vyas was an early riser, no matter what time he had gone to bed. He answered quickly, so as not to disturb his wife and four sons asleep in their home in a village to the north of Nottingham. This was his sanctuary, the place to which he came home after the long days and nights that so often ran together on the ward, but he was always ready to return to the hospital at a moment’s notice. If there was one thing you could say about this comfortably built man in his mid-fifties with his swept-back hair and greying brush of a moustache, it was that he really cared. Other doctors knew how to detach themselves from work and walk away at the end of the day for their own survival, but not him. ‘I am an emotional being, that is who I am. I have chosen not to fight it. I cannot help becoming involved.’
Dr Vyas was in charge of the children’s intensive care unit at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, with a dozen patients at any one time, and he felt for every family. He knew the names of mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers, grandparents and carers and sometimes even pets, and once he was involved in an urgent case he found it hard to leave the hospital. ‘I could go on without much sleep for five or six days at a time, easily. This is really personal. You talk to the family, you stick with them and you don’t want the baton to be passed on to somebody new, for their sake.’
The unit required hard work and very long hours and needed a certain stamina and commitment. Working together in this environment produced phenomenal loyalty among the doctors and nurses. The ward sister knew he would come. She had only called because it was really important.
‘A young man of sixteen is coming to us from Grantham with significant neurological features. It could be a bleed on the brain. He is going straight for a scan and then to theatre.’
Sixteen years old. The same age as one of his own sons, sleeping safe. Harish Vyas thought of that as he drove up the hill away from his village and down to the hospital, through the dawn. It was only three hours since Martin’s collapse. ‘The brains of children are very different from adult brains,’ the doctor says now, looking back at that moment. ‘They have such amazing resilience. I saw a young girl who was brought in after a wardrobe fell on her and she was crushed. She had multiple fractures and a bleed in the brain. When she came to the emergency department, she was squirting blood from her nose. After surgery, I brought her over to our unit and ventilated her and, to cut a long story short, she is now back to normal. So children do surprise me. But Martin was, perhaps, a bit old.’
The brain is a fragile thing. Squishy to the touch, it looks like half a ball of fatty, uncooked sausagemeat bound up in clingfilm. It weighs three pounds, the same as a big bag of flour, but doesn’t feel that heavy in your head because it actually floats around, suspended in a salty fluid. This odd lump of white and grey matter is – by some miracle – the place where our thoughts and feelings occur, but it is also the beginning of the central nervous system that controls every part of the body. From here, the orders go out to make the heart beat, the lungs breathe, the tongue taste, the eyes see, the nose smell, the ears hear and the skin feel.
All this is done by 100 billion nerve cells which need oxygen to survive and thrive. Without it they begin to die, and that can cause headaches and seizures, take away the ability to speak, paralyse the body or ultimately kill. That vital oxygen comes from the lungs and is carried in the blood pumped up by the heart, through the neck to the head, where the arteries wrap themselves around the brain like an intricate cradle of incredibly thin fingers. At the tip of each finger is a patch where the blood gives up the oxygen and takes away carbon dioxide, turning purple in the process. Then the old purple blood is carried away by a spidery network of veins, back down the neck to be pumped again through the heart and lungs and refreshed.
Sometimes, disastrously, the arteries or the veins just burst. The blood floods between the brain and the skull. This bleeding is what the emergency