Lucky

by Ed Jackson

  Mr Barua came closer as he explained that he wanted to create an incision in my throat to perform surgery on my spine. He would then insert a cage around my spine and remove the shattered disc.

  I’d had six previous operations due to rugby injuries, so I was familiar with the possible risks of a general anaesthetic. But the way Mr Barua relayed them to me was new – he meant it when he told me that I might not wake up again.

  As I lay in my hospital bed, all I could do was stare up at the tiled ceiling. Even if I wanted to look away I couldn’t: my neck was still braced and a white chest plate had been added that made me look a bit like a Stormtrooper. All of this was designed to prevent any movement of my spine.

  I had been in the same position for five days. The only way I could change my view was by closing my eyes. These were my options – stark white ceiling, or the back of my eyelids.

  The first few days after the operation were a bit of a blur. A constant stream of nurses, doctors, friends and family rotated around my bedside as I tried to put on a brave face and take everything in. They were all welcome distractions.

  At least I no longer had a drain and tube running down my nose and throat. Coming around from the operation on my second day in hospital with those in place had been terrifying. Multiple wires and tubes had snaked out of my body and I couldn’t remember why I was in there. Worse was to come. I hadn’t been able to cough after I had lost the power in my chest and abdomen. This meant that every time fluid had lodged in my throat, I had started choking. The panic of not being able to breathe again had taken me straight back to the pool. Straight back to drowning.

  Friends had popped in and out during visiting hours. They had been wide-eyed the first time they registered all of the wires and beeping machines surrounding me, trying to mask their shocked expressions. This kept on happening. People would walk into my room and their faces would betray them; the colour would drain. I couldn’t see myself, couldn’t see the tubes, so I used their reactions to try to monitor my situation. It soon became a scene I would have to play out, over and over again. A friend would enter with a fixed smile, which would slowly slide away, shock would take over, and I would spend the next hour reassuring them that I was still me.

  My rugby friends were different. They instinctively knew that normality was needed. My former teammate, Si, decided to cheer me up by buying me a present. On his first visit he chucked three juggling balls at my bed. I watched, unable to move, as they bounced off my chest onto the floor. ‘There you go, pal. Seeing as you’re going to be here for a while, you might as well learn a new skill.’ Some people would think this was insensitive; I thought it was hilarious. And I needed to laugh.

  These welcome visitors had brought with them gifts of food and were eager to distract me from the static hours lying in a hospital bed. I was being fed through a tube, so I couldn’t sample any of their edible offerings, but I was happy to watch them tuck in – room 11b had turned into an all-you-can-eat buffet.

  I was only allowed two visitors at a time. Lois and my old school friend, Tom Souto, had been keeping me company on the morning of my fifth day in hospital. Everything in my room was new. The white fittings were scuff-free and the grey laminate floor looked unblemished by the patients who had come before me. I was still getting used to living on the set of an American hospital drama – it was so different to the ramshackle wards I’d been in before. They had used as much glass as they could wedge in and it was clinical to the point that I didn’t want us to make a mess of their shiny new intensive care department. Every evening, my mum would circle the room and tidy up, so that we could reset for the next day.

  ‘You’re doing great,’ Souto said for the third time. He was picking his way through a giant hamper at the end of my bed. With a grunt of approval, he pulled out a bag of salt and vinegar crisps. ‘Do you mind if …?’

  ‘Course not, it’s not like I can eat them,’ I said over the beeping machines that surrounded me. I still hadn’t got used to them and found them distracting, especially when they sped up or slowed down.

  ‘You’re much better than two days ago,’ Souto said, between mouthfuls of crisps. ‘Doing really great.’

  The sharp tang of vinegar hit the air and my stomach rumbled. At least I hadn’t lost my sense of smell.

  ‘Thanks, mate.’

  ‘It’s the truth, you really are.’

  Mum popped her head around the door to tell us Mr Barua was on his way and she was going to find my dad. That day was the day we’d been focusing on for the past seventy-two hours. I’d been instructed to wiggle, clench and stretch for the last five days. Below my neck, everything remained still, apart from some slight movement in my right arm.

  Souto said his goodbyes. Through the glass wall of my room, I could see him greeting another of our friends, Jack, who had come to visit. The door hadn’t quite closed behind him and their voices drifted through to me.

  ‘How’s he doing?’ Jack asked Souto.

  ‘Oh God, he’s absolutely fucked!’

  Lois glanced over at me and I rolled my eyes. ‘I can still hear you, Souto!’

  There was silence. Souto popped his head around the door. ‘You’re doing great, Ed. You’ve got this.’

  I grinned at him. ‘If you say so.’

  Unless you know someone who has been through a similar situation, you are rarely prepared for the curveball you’ve been thrown when the unexpected happens. You are at a sudden low point, probably mentally or physically at your weakest, and then you are supposed to make some of the most important decisions of your life.

  The first challenge when these curveballs happen is therefore finding the one thing that will steer you through these unfamiliar waters. My paddle came in the form of knowledge; if I knew what I was facing, then I was better armed to deal with it.

  Early on in my hospital stay, my younger brother, Josh, helped me immeasurably with this when he came into my room one day carrying an iPad.

  ‘I know I don’t have much to update you on,’ I teased, ‘but I don’t think my conversation is so poor that you’ll have to watch films during your visit.’

  ‘Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong,’ Josh responded, as he started clipping the iPad to the extendable arm that hovered over my bed. ‘This isn’t for me, it’s for you.’

  ‘So, you’ll put the film on for me?’

  He gave me a look that told me that I didn’t understand much. ‘No, you can put it on yourself using only your voice.’

  And he was right. Within an hour I was able to do nearly everything someone with a working finger could do.

  In the quiet of the evenings when I didn’t want to be lying in silence, I would research my situation using voice-activated commands. These are some of the bits I found out in the first few days:

  It’s estimated that 50,000 people in the UK are living with a spinal cord injury. This meant I had a fair few co-conspirators to track down.

  Each year, approximately 2,500 people in the UK are newly injured. That’s about a 1 in 27,000 risk of suffering a spinal cord injury.

  The most common causes of spinal injuries are falls, road traffic accidents and sport. Diving into the shallow end of a swimming pool, because the ripples from a water feature make you think the water is deeper than it is, falls into ‘unclassified trauma’. (A couple of years later, I met a man in a spinal unit I was visiting. He told me that he’d been left paraplegic when the bus he’d been on had fallen into a ravine after a bridge collapsed. ‘Now that’s a proper way to get a spinal injury,’ I thought.)

  The higher up on your body your spinal cord injury is, the more movement you will lose.

  People with spinal cord injuries to their back have paraplegia. This affects the movement and sensation in their legs. People with spinal cord injuries to their necks are quadriplegic. Quadriplegia affects the movement and sensation in both your legs and arms – a ‘2 for 1’ in the neurological condition’s aisle.

  As I read about these in
juries late at night, the glow of the screen my only company through the long night-time hours, I slowly came to realise that I wasn’t alone. Learning about my injury helped me understand that however bad I thought my situation was, there were thousands of people the same or worse off.

  Mr Barua was a busy man, but one to whom I owed my life – for seven hours he had picked parts of my exploded disc from my spinal cord using a magnifying glass. So, I didn’t mind that I’d had to wait for him as he checked on his other patients.

  A couple of medical students trailed in after him, always two steps behind. They stood in the farthest corner, there to observe rather than assist.

  ‘Ed, how are you feeling today?’ Mr Barua asked, after he had inspected the chart at the bottom of my bed.

  ‘Stronger … I think.’

  ‘Good. I’m glad to hear it.’

  He circled around the bed and Lois pushed her chair back so he could stand next to my head, where I could get the best view of him. It was touches like this that made me like him.

  All eyes in the room were trained on him. No one spoke, as if they were encouraging him to fill the silence.

  ‘So, we have compiled the results of the American Spinal Injury assessments.’

  I blinked, unable to nod encouragingly. This is what I’d been waiting for, the outcome of this mess. Would I ever be able to move again? Would I ever be able to walk again? And, most importantly, would I ever be independent again?

  ‘I am sorry to say that you are ASIA Category A.’

  I had no idea what he meant, but from his tone I could tell that this was not the outcome we had been hoping for.

  ‘What about the bit of movement I’ve got in my right arm?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but that doesn’t change our findings.’

  ‘What am I looking at then?’

  ‘It’s likely that you won’t be able to walk again.’

  ‘So … paralysed?’ I asked. I felt that this was important enough to need complete clarity.

  Mr Barua nodded.

  Mum burst into tears.

  ‘And best case?’

  ‘We’re hoping you get the use of your arms back so you can use a wheelchair.’

  Lois was crying now too.

  ‘If there’s hope for me regaining the use of my arms then … maybe, one day … my legs?’

  ‘Ed, I’m very sorry, but that’s not likely to happen here. The tests show no sensory and almost no motor function below the site of your injury. With this type of quadriplegia, regaining the use of your arms would be considered an excellent recovery.’ He looked around at the rest of my family before his gaze settled back on me. He wanted everyone to be on the same page. ‘It’s unlikely you will ever walk again. You need to come to terms with that.’

  No one wanted to be the first to speak.

  ‘I’ll be back again tomorrow,’ Mr Barua said, nodding at his two students to follow him. ‘And, Ed, I really am very sorry.’

  That evening, after the visitors had left, I gave myself time to digest what the doctors were trying to tell me. I had to set the tone of this thing, because these injuries hadn’t just happened to me; they had happened to everyone who cared for me as well.

  I allowed myself to reflect for a moment. How could this have happened to me on 8 April of all days? It was supposed to have been a good day; it had always been a good day. So much for my lucky number …

  It’s unlikely you’ll ever walk again. You need to come to terms with that. That phrase kept circling around my mind.

  ‘Bollocks to that,’ I concluded. If there was still even a tiny chance of me being able to walk again then I was going to take it.

  With sudden clarity, I realised that if 8 April had not been a good day, it had been a lucky one instead.

  The bottom line was that the day I’d dived into the pool I got lucky. I got lucky that people were there to pull me above the water. I got lucky that my dad is a doctor and knew to keep my spine straight. I got lucky that I was only ten miles from one of the leading neurological centres in the country. I got lucky that I was operated on within seven hours of the injury.

  I was lucky to be awake and talking. Now I was lucky there was a chance that I would regain the movement in my arms. I had asked myself whether I was a lucky or unlucky kind of person. The answer was that it was entirely up to me – it was just the way I looked at it.

  Luck had got me this far, but I was still paralysed and immobile on a hospital bed.

  My journey had only just begun.

  Chapter 2

  The Finger

  ‘How about now?’ I asked, opening my eyes.

  ‘Nope, nothing happening here, bud,’ said Murph, my friend from Cardiff, as he peered at my big toe. ‘Try giving me the finger again.’

  I closed my eyes to allow myself to really concentrate, really focusing on firing the signals to my right middle finger. It was my sixth day in hospital, and nothing had changed. No movement from the neck down, apart from my right arm, despite practising all day.

  The news that I was unlikely to walk again had spurred me on. Having lost the movement in my right side last, I was concentrating most of my efforts on my right big toe and right index and middle fingers. I’d been told that if movement was going to come back, it would start with the side that last had it. My right arm was becoming stronger, but there was still no movement in my hand. Heck, sometimes I tried to move my whole left leg, just to mix it up a bit, but only when I was feeling particularly ambitious.

  I shot another message down to my middle finger. The problem with doing this was that, with my eyes closed, my mind would trick me. I would send the signal and I’d feel a twitch. We’d quickly learnt that it was better that I waited for the opinion of an independent adjudicator.

  ‘Nothing, bud,’ Murph said. ‘Why don’t I scratch your foot again?’

  This was something that Murph excelled at. If someone ran their fingernail along the base of my right foot, my whole leg would spasm. I loved it. It was the only time my legs would move. Murph, good friend that he was, would spend hours running his nail up the base of my foot as I grinned at the automated reaction of my leg jerking upwards. It wasn’t a real movement, I knew it didn’t count, but it felt like something was still working down there.

  One of the nurses came into the room. ‘I have a ten-minute break, so I thought I’d come and see how you’re doing.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, as Murph ran his finger up my foot again. ‘It’s aliiiive …’

  She smiled and made a mock jump, before taking a seat. We all chatted for ten minutes. I enjoyed having the company of three people in the room as the hospital’s two-person rule was wearing a bit thin. It meant that, if a couple came to visit, Lois would have to leave and sit outside, even though she wanted to see them as much as I did.

  Throughout the day, a rotation of friends and family came in to check on me, update me on the outside world, steal my food and keep my spirits up. Not that I needed any buoying; I felt it was my duty to be upbeat. It wasn’t all about me; this accident had affected every single one of them. All day long, as these visitors trotted in and out, I would send the signals to my body to move, hoping that one would reach its target.

  That word, ‘independence’, stalked me every hour of the day. I wanted to regain a degree of independence so that neither Lois or my mum would have to spend the rest of their lives caring for me. If in six months’ time I hadn’t made any progress, I could live with that if I knew I’d given it everything. But what I couldn’t live with was knowing that I’d only given it half a go – I wouldn’t be able to look either Lois or my mum in the eye.

  So, I spent every second I could firing those signals and making jokes. By acting positively for other people, I was also starting to feel positive.

  The last of my visitors had left. I strained to hear their voices fade away down the corridor, before the ward door slammed behind them, sharply cutting them off.

  It was 8 p.m. and the next twe
lve hours stretched in front of me. Every day, time slowed at that point. It no longer clipped along at a steady pace; instead, it had some fun with me. ‘So, you thought that was thirty minutes?’ Time asked. ‘You lose again; it was closer to seven.’

  I stared around my overwhelmingly empty room. The helium balloons in the corner didn’t seem to sit right anymore and jarred my line of vision. I nudged my eyes towards the door, unable to move my braced neck even a millimetre to the side. The chest plate always felt heavier at this time of night.

  Intensive care units are not like other hospital wards. When I’d previously stayed overnight in hospital for one of my various rugby injuries, I’d been monitored but also encouraged to rest. Lights had been switched off at what was deemed bedtime and my carers retreated to the nurses’ station at the end of the ward. Intensive care has one sole purpose: to keep you alive. Everything else fits around that single commandment – and rightfully so.

  At night, the door to my room was always wide open and the medical staff would regularly pass by, talking amongst themselves. At all hours, patients would be rushed past my doorway, flat out on a hospital bed, sometimes a team of doctors doing everything they could to save a life. This was never a place of silence.

  As I stared at the door, one of the machines in the room next to me sounded out. Alarms blared along the corridor and I frowned at the noise. Something wasn’t right. Within seconds, two nurses ran past my room, followed by a couple of doctors a few minutes later. I rolled my eyes up to the ceiling and hoped that my neighbour would make it.

  I had to distract myself. I asked my iPad, which was hanging over my bed in front of my eye-line, to play a film. I hoped I’d lose myself in it for a couple of hours. If this didn’t work, I could always record my diary.

  I’ve always found having distractions is one of life’s most important hacks. As a kid, it was easy; everything was a distraction. I would finish school and become a dinosaur for an hour, and suddenly all the stresses of being a 7-year-old were a thing of the past. Then as I got older, and schoolwork became more significant, it was sport that became my sanctuary.