Kieran had been unemployed in Belfast when, almost without warning, he had decided that London would offer them more opportunities. She had not wanted to leave, but she knew she would follow him to the ends of the earth if necessary. Three years ago they had made the break. If she were honest with herself, she had never really settled in East London. The sagging terraced house in Leyton was damp and dismal. Belfast, especially a Belfast no longer at war, was infinitely better. She missed her family, especially her mother, who was devastated when they left. Her father had died absurdly of a heart attack at forty. Perhaps that was why she had married someone ten years her senior.
She clung to him more tightly and brushed her lips against his cheek.
‘Kieran,’ she said weakly, ‘I want us to return home. I want to be near my family. It would mean so much to me.’
Kelly quivered. He had dreaded these words ever since the birth of Patrick. How could he deny her when he loved her so much? And yet he knew that to return would probably mean his death. There was a contract out on him, peace or no peace. Teresa knew nothing of his extracurricular activities, nor anything of the double life he had lived for the ten years prior to the Belfast Agreement, which had at last brought a semblance of peace to Ulster. He would happily have killed any man who told her, but he knew there would be no whistleblowers amongst his comrades, for each had sworn to take his secret to the grave. Even if an enemy would somehow divulge the truth to Teresa, he would deny it and that would be an end to the matter. He knew that she had more faith in him than she had in God. In fact, he doubted whether her faith, once so vibrant, was still intact. Whilst he still was a believer, after a fashion, she had decided that God had forsaken her and no longer was deserving of her faith. All suggestions of having a priest visit were swept aside by an expletive; so unlike her, yet so understandable. Pain was like that, whether it was the physical torture of her illness or the sort of mental anguish associated with being a despised minority in one’s own land. The Irish always won by sacrifice. It was in their genes. Yes, he knew pain, and he would gladly have sacrificed his life for her and the children. Not like a Protestant. The Protestants had a horror of death. Death was the end of everything for them, whereas for Catholics it was only the beginning. While the Catholic fought for the future, the Protestant was immersed in the past. The Catholic had the confession, the opportunity of forgiveness, of the sacrament that they didn’t have. The Protestant had not the resources to get rid of his guilt and know that his repentance had been accepted. It must have been a lonely thing to be a murderer if you were Protestant. Yet he himself now felt more alone than at any time in his life. For the first time he felt truly afraid for the future.
‘Kieran,’ she groaned, shaking him from his morbid mood, ‘I want to go home.’
‘Of course,’ he lied. ‘Of course we will.’ She was bent double with pain as he led her carefully to the toilet. He gently lowered her knickers and sat her down. ‘Call me when you’re ready, my love,’ he said, before closing the toilet door. She deserved the dignity of being left alone there; at least that.
Teresa gasped. The medications she was taking caused her severe constipation. But at least this was one place where she found she could think more clearly. It was womblike, safe and free from the prying eyes of those whose unswerving love only emphasised her own feelings of guilt and worthlessness. Kieran’s and the children’s very goodness made her feel even more inadequate. She had noted the inflection in his voice that told her he did not mean for them to return home. But she had said nothing. She knew it was wrong to inflict more upheaval on their lives. The children had made new friends, especially Sian. Her daughter was so vulnerable, and she could see the pain in her eyes, the hurt and guilt that came with having a mother who was a cripple. The children, apart from the baby, who was too young to care, were living a daily nightmare. How desperate they must feel when they hear their mother screaming the house down. She didn’t know what was worse, the spasms that locked her into a foetal position, the nerve pain that felt like being devoured by millions of ants, or when she showered, the beads of water that flayed her legs like air rifle pellets. Then there was the numbness in her pelvis, the chronic pain in her rectum, and, finally and not least, the affect all this was having on her concentration. Some days she could barely think straight, fighting to find words that came out only as gobbledygook. Although Kieran said that this was the effect of the painkillers, she knew differently. He was right when he said that the whole of her central nervous system was shot to pieces, and that no one apart from her loved ones really cared. No one deserved this merciless cruelty.
Several miles south-west of the epicentre of Teresa Kelly’s torture, the man ultimately responsible for public health in the United Kingdom was in a hurry. Stephen Sellars slammed the door of his chauffeur-driven Jaguar and strode purposefully through the portals of Richmond House. Under the right arm of his ample frame was an early edition of The Times, which he had picked up on his way to the office. It was his newspaper of choice, and he always liked to read it on his way into town from his Buckinghamshire home. The rest of the papers could wait. He could rely on the mandarins of Whitehall to have outlined any stories that might have remotely interested their Secretary of State for Health.
‘Have you read this, Richard?’ boomed Sellars, thwacking his desk with the rolled up newspaper. ‘Bloody Times again.’
Richard Whiting, his principal private secretary, and a man not noted to fluster under pressure, surveyed his boss with tired grey eyes. He was an able young civil servant. While still relatively junior, he knew he was marked out for rapid promotion. The Department of Health was all about putting out fires, and this one would be no different than the rest. While the NHS was in constant disarray, the beef fiasco had come and gone, and the possible detrimental effects of genetic engineering were simmering on the back burner. ‘It will blow over soon enough, Minister,’ he said soothingly. ‘It’s not as if it’s of major interest to most people. It’s not like thalidomide.’
True, thought Sellars, babies being born with no arms or legs was about as emotive as one could get, while this thing was an intangible. Everyone suffered pain at some time in his life, but pain was something you felt rather than saw. It was different with missing limbs. Nevertheless, it paid to be prudent about matters of public health. He would hate to be put in the same position as Stephen Dorrell, a former health secretary who had been forced to admit he misled the public about the dangers of beef and bovine spongiform encephalopathy. He also knew that he must keep a tight rein on the wannabe mandarins, some of whom had admitted shredding incriminating files. ‘Maybe it will blow over, Richard,’ said the Minister, pointing to the broadsheet, ‘but this rag has a habit of getting its teeth into things. The Opposition might table a question in the House. I want a meeting fixed for eleven o’clock. Round up the usual suspects.’
Whiting winced. He hated getting the circus involved. As far as he was concerned, the plethora of other private secretaries, special advisers, and even the Minister of State, just got in the way. Although he was very much the servant of both political and official heads, his access to the boss gave him opportunities to acquire information and influence. It was his job to preview all drafts and memoranda and offer suggestions to make them more acceptable or convincing to ministers. He prided himself on being his chief’s eyes and ears, an efficient link to the government machine. He knew that Stephen Sellars was a man in a hurry and was already being touted as a future prime minister. Thus a certain Richard Whiting was not going to do anything that might loosen his own grip on the big man’s coat tails.
It was almost midnight when Kieran Kelly arrived at the BBM building in London Wall for the overnight shift. He was an hour late. Fortunately, his colleagues understood. They knew what had happened to Teresa. He nodded to his colleague, Bill Parsons, and sat down beside him at the bank of screens that gave coverage of all twenty floors.
‘All action tonight,’ said Parsons jokin
gly.
‘You mean same as usual – half a dozen offices ransacked, the vault broken into, and the chairman’s love letters to his mistress stolen.’
‘Got it in one, Kieran.’
Kelly slumped in his chair. How he hated his job. The routine was always the same: arrive – read a couple of newspapers – check the outside of the building – check the inside of the building – read a couple more newspapers – check the inside of the building – read some more newspapers.
It was about five o’clock in the morning when he began flicking through the previous day’s copy of The Times. The new day’s papers did not usually arrive until after he’d clocked off. It was the only way he kept himself abreast of events. He hardly watched television, his off-duty hours being devoted completely to Teresa and the children. Suddenly a headline caught his attention. Unusually for The Times, it bore just one word in large bold letters: OUTRAGE.
Kelly folded the broadsheet in two and began reading.
‘Thousands of people in the UK continue to be maimed through the use of invasive spinal procedures, writes Robert Robinson. These carry a high potential risk for a public that continues to remain uninformed.
This is indeed an outrage that must be addressed in a proper manner by a government that should know better.
I am a former foreign correspondent who has covered wars in central Europe and Asia. Now, as a newly diagnosed sufferer of the spinal disease arachnoiditis, I am currently engaged in my own battle to force the government to compensate the disease’s victims and set up an inquiry into what I believe is the greatest medical tragedy of the late twentieth century. Along with twenty-five million other people in the past fifty years, I have had an injection of an iophendylate oil-based dye in order to discover whether or not I had suffered a slipped disc. Now, eighteen years later, that x-ray procedure has come back to haunt me. An innocuous slip on the stairs apparently caused the dye to leak onto the arachnoid membrane around my spine. Suddenly, normal life was replaced by incessant pain.
It can be any time of the day that the soldier ants begin their attack. Voracious of appetite, they brook neither opposition nor offer even a modicum of mercy, their little jaws working ceaselessly to tear my flesh apart. No amount of flailing on my part has any chance of halting their advance. At first, they begin circling my waist. Then, with the diligence of an army well versed in the art of blitzkrieg, they strike out along my limbs. Within seconds they reach the soles of my feet. Worse is to come.
Not satisfied with torturing my lower extremities, they head for the very core of my manhood. My genitals are being eaten alive. No, these soldier ants are not real, but then they aren’t exactly imaginary either. They are just some of the symptoms of a disease named after a creature not so far removed from the insect world, the spider. Adhesive arachnoiditis, in the words of a leading spinal surgeon, is a cruel spinal disease that produces the pain of cancer without the release of death. My life will not necessarily be cut short by the disease, but knowing that I must suffer it the rest of my days is the hardest thing to accept. On ‘flare-up’ days I may burst into tears, not only because of the pain, but also because of the quality of life I have lost; because at the age of fifty-two, life’s dreams are mainly redundant. Because of its constancy, pain from arachnoiditis is uniquely more depressing and debilitating than more intense pain that is short-lived. Outwardly, I look ‘normal,’ a picture of health, while inwardly, I die a little every day. Only fellow sufferers and the few doctors worldwide committed to our plight really understand the effects that this awful disease can have on the human body and psyche.
I am the victim of an iatrogenic (doctor-caused) tragedy. No, I am not one of those high profile victims of a misplaced scalpel, oxygen starvation or transfusion of the wrong blood type; cases in which compensation for disability and suffering can sometimes run into the millions. I am one of the many uncompensated victims of perhaps the greatest international disaster in the history of medicine. I suffer from an iatrogenic disease that has been perpetrated on the unsuspecting, and of which, I guarantee, most of you have never heard (even my own GP professed ignorance). I also guarantee that many who read this will one day experience some form of this disease. In most cases it will be put down to a bad back, rheumatism, bad circulation, or maybe even just plain old age. The number of these sufferers probably runs into many millions, and the numbers who will be completely disabled over the coming years may well run into hundreds of thousands. Arachnoiditis has been an ongoing epidemic, a social catastrophe by which other similar tragedies of life pale in comparison.
And yet to all intents and purposes, this entity barely exists! There are few papers written about it, and none printed in lofty publications such as The Lancet or the British Medical Journal. No money is being allocated for research into it. In fact, many so-called physicians will throw you out of their surgeries claiming it’s all in your head. The reason why so few of them admit it exists is that to do so would mean admitting that they have been culpable in creating the tragedy. The Government declines to act, maintaining that it does not have the necessary statistics to do so. Because so many doctors either cannot or do not wish to recognise the symptoms, arachnoiditis is probably the most under-reported of illnesses. The tobacco fiasco has ably demonstrated that where there is culpability, there is cover-up, and that where there is cover-up, there is denial.
Hundreds of thousands of sufferers now demand that their anguished cries be heard so that the carnage can be truly recorded, in order that future generations will not be subjected to the catastrophic application of dangerous spinal procedures.’
The article captivated Kelly. There was so much that now fitted into place. He learned that arachnoiditis was the inflammation of the fine and fragile arachnoid membrane surrounding the spinal cord and brain; that it was this membrane that produced the spinal fluid to keep the central nervous system nourished and healthy. He learned that diagnostic dyes had crippled more than a million people. But his eyes were transfixed by two paragraphs:
‘Still more people, pregnant mothers, are offered an epidural to ease birth. When my wife was about to give birth to our daughter (now aged twenty-four), she was offered an epidural. She was about to agree when, at the last moment, a nurse told her that it carried a risk that could be serious. My wife had second thoughts and declined.
Most anaesthetics and painkilling steroids contain preservatives that have the potential to be highly toxic. An injection in the wrong place (and we are talking millimetres here) and the patient may never be able to experience another peaceful moment for the rest of his or her life. The victim will suffer the unrelenting agonies of arachnoiditis. He or she will also have a hell of a time getting an accurate diagnosis. This is the biggest insult. I, myself, was turned away by one such specialist, who maintained that my symptoms were psychosomatic. Another arrogant physician scratched his head when he saw my plight. ‘What should I do?’ I pleaded. ‘Ambulatory and perambulatory,’ was his cynical reply.’
Kelly learned that while oil-based dyes were no longer used in the West, their legacy lived on in the guise of steroid preparations, the most dangerous of which appeared to be a drug named Triamerol made by a company called Parados Pharmaceuticals. His ire increased as he read on.
It took Parados Pharmaceuticals at least twenty years to finally warn doctors in the US that the steroid should not be injected into the spine. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands are likely to suffer a fate worse than death, because its effects can sometimes take years to appear. The profit motive means that Parados have so far resisted calls for this explicit warning to be traded in the UK, Australia and elsewhere.
The drug is banned for use on dogs and horses, but doctors can use it if they believe it will be of benefit to their patients. At a few hundred quid a shot, it can also be of benefit to their pockets.
The evidence on Triamerol is not hard to find. Much of it has been uncovered by Dr David Wellington, who is a world-renowned neurologist and
one of America’s leading experts on the uses of the drug. He says: ‘No doctor should ever use Triamerol epidurally.’ He has been warning about the drug for nearly 20 years.
Cry of the Needle Page 2
