There was no time to waste: it was three or four hours since Sue had seen Martin collapse and the surgeons suspected his condition was getting worse by the minute. They could not wait for his mother to arrive at the hospital, to explain to her what the scan had shown and to ask her permission to act, so they took Martin straight to theatre. There, the surgeons drilled a hole in the skull to let some blood flow out and to relieve the pressure and they sucked out the clot as best they could, hoping that the brain would stop swelling. If it did not then it would continue to get bigger, pressing upwards against the inside of his skull and downwards through the brain stem, the three-inch stalk that connects the brain with the spinal cord and controls vital functions like the heart rate, breathing and sleeping. Drugs were used to paralyse Martin and keep him from writhing about, because any movement was going to make things worse. A very high dose of morphine stopped him feeling any pain. He was being kept in a coma for his own good.
When Martin came back from surgery, he was put on his own in the room nearest the entrance to the intensive care unit. Reserved for the most serious cases, Cub 2, as the little sign with a cheeky monkey said, was away from the rest of the ward so that fretting mums and dads whose sons or daughters were close to death did not have to see the other children, who were mostly getting better, and the other children and their families did not have to see them. Sue and her parents were shown a kettle and supplies in the family room for hot drinks and a microwave to heat up food if they felt like eating, which they did not. They sat on two sofas staring at the television without seeing anything, minds hazy with the interference of anxiety and fear. Harish Vyas could see the distress on their faces as they stood up when he entered the room.
‘Would you like to sit down?’
He introduced himself and offered tea and biscuits, knowing that even in moments of high anxiety, people often have an urge to sip a drink and perhaps taste something sweet. There were no takers this time.
‘Can I ask what else you have been told?’
Something about a bleed on the brain said Sue, and the doctor agreed.
‘The most likely event is that the blood vessels in his brain have burst. The extra blood has caused pressure to build up inside his head.’
A registrar who had come up from the operating theatre two floors below explained what had been done in surgery, and that sickened Sue. Then Dr Vyas took over again, gently but firmly. They needed to see how he would settle down and do some more tests before they could be sure what had caused this and what might happen next.
‘If I can just prepare you a little, Martin is still very poorly. He has a tube in his mouth and there are various lines into him. These things are all part and parcel of his treatment here. You will notice that he isn’t moving, this is because of the drugs we give him to prevent any more problems. Would you like to see Martin now?’
If Martin had been awake he could have looked out of the window and seen the early morning sky. The pale blue curtains were drawn back, offering a grim view of air conditioning units and the flat top of the next hospital block, but the sky was out there too, distant and hopeful. But this handsome young lad could see nothing with his eyes closed and there was no prospect of them opening soon, not even when his mother entered the room. He lay flat on his back on a white iron bed with his head in a support block and a white, corrugated plastic pipe going into his mouth and down into his oesophagus for the ventilator, feeding air into his lungs to help them work. The monitors behind him showed a series of squiggly lines, changing all the time: blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels and the reading from a gauge on the end of a hairline wire going into his head. Half a dozen pumps sent drugs into his body through a single feed in the groin – ‘the hosepipe’, as the staff called it when there was nobody else around. Martin wasn’t moving, except for the rise and fall of his chest.
‘You can touch him,’ said the nurse gently, feeling Sue hold back. ‘It’s okay.’
She went closer then, feeling the warmth rising from his body, or maybe it was the warm air under the blanket, but it was suddenly hot in that room, stiflingly so, prickling her neck. Sue kissed the tips of her fingers and placed them on his forehead, pushing them through his hair.
‘Oh, Martin. What are we going to do with you?’
‘Call for you,’ said a nurse at the door and Sue went to the desk confused, but it was Nigel on a crackly line from Las Vegas, sounding far away. She was just about able to hold it together and describe the situation, as much as she had been told and could remember, until she had to tell him the condition Martin was in, right there and then. ‘He’s got a bleed in the brain. We don’t know what the outcome is going to be, we don’t know …’ Her voice cracked and Nigel also struggled not to lose control. ‘I’ll get there as soon as I can.’
Sue put the phone down and turned back to the reality of the ward, momentarily thrown, before being overcome by a rush of concern for her other son Christopher, aged twenty, who had arrived with his girlfriend, Ashley. ‘I was split between the two boys, divided between thinking about Martin on life support and worrying how Chris was coping with it. Christopher was very angry that he couldn’t do anything to protect Martin. He was very angry that Nigel wasn’t there. I think he felt he had to be the man. He kept having to go out to go off for a walk. I think he was letting himself vent that anger by storming around outside the hospital, rather than actually sitting with Martin and showing his emotions.’
‘Ashley stayed with him the whole time. If he moved, she moved. I was aware that he was a very angry young man right then and I wanted her to not have to deal with that, so I said to Ashley, “If he gets more angry and you need anybody, just fetch my dad.”’
Back at Martin’s bedside, for the sake of something to say to the young nurse in blue who was moving around her son, Sue began to ask questions. ‘What will happen now? If everything is for the best, how long do you think it might be before Martin could come home? We’ll do whatever is necessary for him, obviously …’
The way the nurse responded made Sue realise with a lurch that she might be getting this wrong. Everything she was fearing and dreading might actually be too much to hope for.
‘We’ll wake him up slowly,’ the nurse said cautiously. ‘Then we’ll wait and see.’
Nine
Somewhere south of the border, Linda was struggling too. She was in her own car with Leasa travelling to Newcastle when she felt her tongue swell up inside her mouth until she couldn’t talk. Her lips ballooned and her eyes became raw, weeping like they were full of grit.
‘Oh my God, what’s happened to you?’
The nurse who met them at the Freeman was shocked and treated Linda straight away. She had been given a couple of pills for a headache by a paramedic up in Scotland and was suffering an allergic reaction. The symptoms were dramatic but they would pass away with the right drugs. Linda was weak though and she needed to be put under observation. A porter pushed her to a ward in a wheelchair.
‘I was sedated and they kept me in overnight, with large doses of antihistamines. That was a really bad start, I just wanted to be with my boy.’
Norrie was already at the hospital and couldn’t believe it when Leasa found him and told him. ‘Seriously, that could only happen to Linda. Unbelievable.’
She was going to be okay though,