Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  The nurses were nearly all angels. They seemed to have infinite patience with everyone, including me. Most were from either the Caribbean or Africa, part of the resource drain that is bleeding that continent of its most qualified medical staff. One girl was from Rwanda, and she told me how being half Tutsi and half Hutu had been no protection against the carnage and bloodlust that had rampaged through her country a decade ago, eventually killing 800,000 people. She and her family were lucky – they got out just in time, fleeing eastwards to Tanzania where they started a new life.

  One of the first people to come and see me was the Saudi ambassador to London, Prince Turki Al-Faisal. I had already read the comments he had made to the press when we were attacked and it was obvious that he was personally aggrieved by what had happened to Simon and me. It was, after all, he who had given us visas at short notice and encouraged me to go, although of course he was in no way to blame for the attack. Unlike most other Saudi officials, Prince Turki had taken the view that his country had nothing to hide from journalists and they should be encouraged to see Saudi Arabia for themselves. It must have been very embarrassing for him that when we did just that, we got shot.

  As Prince Turki walked down the hospital corridor to my room, escorted by Jonathan Baker, two of the nurses told me later that they noticed he was clutching a gift box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates. ‘Ambassador, you are spoiling us,’ they whispered, mimicking the television commercial, not knowing who he was. They could hardly believe it when Jonathan waved him into my room, saying, ‘Ambassador, please, after you.’

  For a busy ambassador, Prince Turki still managed to give the impression that he had all the time in the world for me. He seemed as at ease in my shabby hospital room with its peeling walls and faint whiff of urine as in the gilded confines of his Mayfair Embassy. We talked at length about the trip before I asked him if he thought it had been an opportunistic attack or a pre-planned one – in other words, a set-up. ‘It seems that it was opportunistic but the investigation is still going on,’ the prince replied before adding cryptically, ‘and sometimes there are things which people would rather not say.’

  That night a truly enormous bunch of flowers arrived with a courtesy note from the ambassador’s office. It was so big it filled the window, but no sooner had a nurse put it up on the window-sill than two men from hospital security rushed in to check it over. I have no idea what they were looking for – bugs? Poison ivy? Combustible orchids? They would not say – but the flowers were allowed to stay and they lasted for nearly two weeks.

  While I had still been under the surgeons’ knives in Saudi, the BBC had chosen the Royal London Hospital to repatriate me to because it had such an excellent range of care. Sure enough, I had almost daily visits from what seemed like every team in the building. There were neurologists, urologists, orthopaedic surgeons (known unkindly in the trade as ‘orthopods’, as if they were some primitive form of swamp life), nutritionists and physiotherapists all knocking on my door. There was even someone called a Tissue Viability Nurse, who would come and change the dressing on my raw stomach wound.

  My nutrition was clearly a worry since I only had one metre of functioning bowel remaining whereas most adults have seven. Several metres had been so badly shot up they had had to be removed in Riyadh; the rest had been clamped off until I was much, much better. This meant that everything I ate bypassed my intestines altogether, so I was assigned a team of dieticians to keep an eye on me. The team was under the direction of Professor Jeremy Powell-Tuck, the man who helped nurse the American illusionist David Blaine back to health after his forty-four-day starvation stunt in a box beside Tower Bridge in 2003. Powell-Tuck (or Bowel Tuck, as I kept thinking of him) arranged for me to be hooked up to something called Total Parental Nutrition or TPN. This was essentially a three-litre bag full of gunk that dripped slowly into my circulation overnight via the tube in my chest, feeding my body all the essential proteins, fats and nutrients that it was not getting from my meals. I soon discovered there was an entire industry built up around TPN. Small armies of technicians laboured in obscure warehouses to make these bags up, measuring just the right proportions of liquid ingredients. When it came to setting up the bag at night, it always took two specially trained nurses and their conversation was like the pre-flight checks on a 747.

  ‘Patient number 3904556.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘3.2 per cent sodium nitrate.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘2.9 per cent amino something or other.’

  ‘Check.’

  Because of the risk of infection the TPN had to be set up and given under sterile conditions. Each bag came with a ‘giving set’ containing sterile gloves, swabs and so on. Standard procedure was for the nurse to flush through the tube that went into my chest with a syringeful of saline solution. This was intended to wash out any bugs that might have settled there and be starting to make themselves comfortable. But somehow, one of them slipped through the net and in July I contracted an infection on the inside of my chest wall. It was staphylococcus epidermis, a distant cousin of the dreaded hospital superbug MRSA, and I deteriorated with frightening speed.

  As the cards and emails came in wishing me a full and speedy recovery, I began to do just the opposite. I developed a terrible fever that killed my appetite, made me listlessly wave away visitors, and stopped me doing any physiotherapy. By early evening I would be vomiting and shaking uncontrollably. At this stage nobody knew what was wrong with me – they even tested in vain for malaria, not a major problem in Riyadh, a city slap in the middle of one of the driest deserts on earth. For two weeks they injected me and plugged me full of antibiotics, three different types, with needles and drips puncturing my arms, and I was wheeled down time and again to be X-rayed, CT scanned and generally prodded and poked.

  My salvation came in the form of the son of a World War Two Polish fighter ace, Paul Srodon, who was a hospital registrar and took a personal interest in my case from the beginning. ‘The trouble with you,’ he said, smiling at me pityingly from the foot of my bed, ‘is that you are a very complicated patient. Normally when someone is admitted here they have just one thing wrong with them but you’ve got everything going on!’ Mr Srodon now suggested trying nuclear medicine to locate the source of my infection. This did not involve a trip to North Korea, just to a special lab below ground. They drew out 50ml of my blood, dropped in some radioactive isotopes with a half-life of eight hours and re-injected the blood. A few hours later they put me under a device called a ‘gamma camera’ to look for the result. Sure enough, there were the isotopes all clinging to the white blood cells, which in turn had flocked to fight the infection in my chest where the feeding line had been inserted. Twenty-four hours later they beat the infection with the appropriate antibiotic, Vancomycin. Brilliant.

  In the one-sided gunfight in Riyadh in June, both my bladder and rectum had been punctured by bullet wounds. Now, in August, the urologists decided it was time to see if my bladder had healed. I was wheeled down to a lab and my bladder was filled up via the in-dwelling catheter with a liquid that showed up on X-rays. It was a good result, there were no leaks, but that was the easy part.

  ‘They can take out his urethral catheter now,’ I heard the urologist say.

  ‘So, we’ll just whip that out, shall we?’ said the nurse when I got back up to the ward, glancing pointedly at my groin. Gloves on, sheet back, deep breath. But one gentle tug was enough to send me into paroxysms of pain in the genitals.

  ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ I gasped.

  ‘Well, honey, we can take a break for now but I’m going to have to come back and do it soon. You’re just going to have to be strong.’

  I took a gulp of water, ate some Cheddars, flicked between channels on the TV, anything to take my mind off what was to come. When the door opened and the rubber gloves came on again it occurred to me how useless I would be under torture. ‘Just make it quick,’ I said. ‘Ahh . . . Aaarrrggh!’ I could hard
ly believe what came out. The far end of the catheter looked like a folded-up cocktail umbrella!

  I still had the other catheter attached to me, the one that had been inserted during surgery into the bladder through the abdominal wall, and since my genitals were in shock after the cocktail-umbrella treatment I decided to keep peeing through the catheter. After a few days I woke up one morning with a full bladder, as one does, and reached for the cardboard urine bottle. To my huge delight, a few drops came out from where nature intended. I was so excited I even rang my parents, who really ought to have been spared such details, to tell them the news. But the following morning the ward sister burst my bubble, so to speak. ‘I’m afraid if it was only a few drops that was just stress from a full bladder. It’s very common, we call it “firing off”.’ She was right. All my subsequent attempts to wet the inside of the cardboard bottle came to nothing. My worst fears were confirmed: the bullets had knocked out the sacral nerves that control the bladder. I was not incontinent, I was overcontinent, condemned to a lifetime of peeing through catheters.

  As part of their comprehensive care, the consultants at the Royal London decided that it would be a good idea to have the inside of my head looked at while they were about it. A clinical psychologist was duly dispatched to my room, clutching notes.

  ‘Now tell me,’ she began, without looking at me, ‘why are you here exactly?’

  I wondered if this was perhaps some sort of philosophical question about God, the universe and the meaning of life, but decided to play it straight.

  ‘Um . . . it’s all in the notes,’ I told her.

  ‘Well, I haven’t read those. Was it a car accident?’

  Oh lordy, I was too tired for this. I began telling her the basic details then stopped halfway, suddenly feeling it was all a waste of time. If this woman couldn’t be bothered to find anything out in advance about her next patient then I certainly didn’t feel like baring my soul to her.

  The BBC sent me a superb Royal Navy psychologist who had counselled other journalists after traumatic incidents. Neil put me at ease immediately, and not just because he had read my medical notes. As a military doctor he understood about gunshot wounds, firefights and the effect they can have on people. We talked for what seemed like hours. All right, I admit it, I talked for hours while he mainly listened. Maybe I was just having withdrawal symptoms from being on air and Neil was my captive audience. But it felt wonderful to tell the whole grisly story to someone who was a dispassionate listener, someone whose emotions had not been hurt by it all.

  We fairly quickly established that in terms of mental health I had been lucky. Despite the vivid horror of my experience I had so far been spared the nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety attacks and other symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I could deal with what was in the recent past. All my exertions, I told him, were going into getting better, all my anxieties were about what sort of physical state I would end up in. Was I going to be paralysed for life? Would I ever run, walk or even stand again? If I was to be crippled for life then what kind of a husband and father would that make me? These were the questions that kept me awake at night.

  At about this time I had a visit from General Sir Peter de la Billiere, who commanded British forces in the Gulf War of 1991, and his wife Lady Bridget. Sir Peter and I had worked together in the Gulf soon afterwards for Flemings bank and they had come to our wedding. Now Sir Peter had written Supreme Courage, a large and impressive book on the history of the Victoria Cross and some of those from all over the Commonwealth who had won it in battle. To my considerable pride he wrote in the inside cover: ‘To Frank, a man of great courage. See you fighting fit before long.’

  Over the summer a number of my BBC colleagues came to see me, many of whom had been to far more dangerous places than I had. Brian Hanrahan, who had covered the Falklands War; Orla Guerin, the Middle East correspondent, who put on a flak jacket for her job like other people put on socks; Ben Brown, the ten o’clock news special correspondent, who had been to just about everywhere on the planet where people were shooting at each other, yet always managed to return with a perfect tan and no injuries; John Simpson, who had had a narrow escape the previous year when the US Air Force shot up the convoy he was travelling with; Stuart Hughes, a producer who had lost half his leg to a landmine in the Iraq war; Caroline Hawley, the Baghdad correspondent, who shared the Cairo bureau with me for a couple of years and who now worked in an atmosphere of constant fear of car bombs, kidnappers and snipers; and Tony Fallshaw and Duncan Stone, two of the bravest and best cameramen in foreign news. All of these people and others, I believe, showed amazing courage in pursuing their stories in dangerous conditions and yet now I found myself being drawn involuntarily into their Club of the Brave.

  There was also a deluge of cards, letters and emails, mostly from friends, but a few hundred from members of the public who had got used to seeing and hearing me on BBC News and felt they almost knew me personally. I read every one of these and treasured them but I could not begin to respond to them. Several were from Muslims, both in the UK and in the Middle East, hugely and unnecessarily apologetic for what their co-religionists had done to me in the name of their version of Islam. One even commiserated with me on ‘the martyrdom of your cameraman’. Many of the British Muslims who wrote to me were furious that Islamic extremists had attacked us, saying the gunmen were not proper Muslims and that they had brought shame on their religion. One Asian girl in Luton with beautiful handwriting wrote that although she thought the West deserved to be punished for its policies in the Middle East she cried when she learned that I had been shot; I was not sure how I felt about that. From Jeddah a Saudi couple I have known for years wrote to tell me they went straight to Mecca to pray for my survival on the night I was shot. (Having now seen my medical records, I think I needed every prayer on offer.) Aly, a Pakistani friend in Dubai, told me how he had been on a flight when I was attacked and had sat there, tears rolling down his face, staring at the on-board news which read: ‘Frank Gardner shot in Riyadh, condition critical.’ It must indeed be very strange to see the name of someone you know so well alongside such dire public news. A Christian hermit on an Atlantic island sent me a collection of her poems, some of which struck quite a chord with me. A Welsh couple sent me a gorgeous sheepskin rug from their farm in the hills. The Home Secretary David Blunkett, the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the EU’s foreign policy chief Javier Solana all sent me personal letters of commiseration; Paul McCartney sent me an autographed note after he had heard my story from one of our producers at an anti-landmine conference. There was even a letter from a fan on the inside: a convict in Wormwood Scrubs who wanted to meet up when he got out. James Maughan, who had been my best man at our wedding, sent me a collage of photos from some of the many Latin American and Asian countries we have travelled round together, as well as a box of cocoa-dusted truffles from Zurich; these cheered me up enormously. Jo Cayford, a BBC producer friend just back from Moscow, brought me one of those wooden matryoshka dolls, except that instead of being the usual stout, red-cheeked babushka it was of Osama Bin Laden; I unscrewed it and there inside was a smaller wooden doll of the Taliban’s Mullah Omar; inside him was Saddam Hussein; then Ayatollah Khomeini; and finally the smallest doll of all was Yasser Arafat. There was also an email from Disco Ron in Hong Kong, the friend who had taken us skiing in Lebanon in 1992 and for whom life was obviously still one long fiesta. ‘Yo dude,’ it read, ‘I’m in town. Let’s go party!’ I looked at the date this email was sent. It was three weeks after I had been shot and must have been about the time I was spiralling downwards with that dangerous chest infection. Of all my friends, only Disco Ron had not heard what had happened to me and, strangely, this made me smile.

  As if to test my tolerance for pain once more, the white coats decided I needed a skin graft from my inside thigh to patch up the raw but granulating wound over my stomach. Back I went under the knife while the plastic surgeons did their work. When I emerged from
surgery there was a thick bandage over the ‘donor site’ on my thigh which itched like mad. I was told it would stay in place for two weeks and I was not to scratch it. When the bandage came off it revealed a neat, rectangular patch of vivid, suppurating sores. ‘Excellent,’ said the plastic surgeons. On my abdomen the graft had taken, which was a relief since if it had not they would have had to rip another patch of skin off my leg and start all over again. Back on went the vacuum dressing, draining the site of excess fluid. When the surgeons came into the room a few days later to inspect their work they were delighted. To me, my abdomen looked like a horror show. Only a very thin, bright-pink membrane covered my intestines, which coiled and uncoiled themselves beneath it like a snake slowly digesting its lunch. Was this what I was going to be stuck with for life? It was all too reminiscent of that scene in Alien where the monster bursts out of John Hurt’s abdomen. ‘Just don’t put it in the sun,’ warned the plastic surgeons. As if.

  By now I had been in hospital for over two months and it was starting to dawn on me just how serious my injuries were. I had absolutely no movement below my hips, although my legs and feet were in pain all day every day, and I still had this huge raw wound in my belly. I asked the lead neurosurgeon what my chances of walking again were. ‘If I were a betting man,’ he said, ‘I’d say you probably won’t walk again. But with nerve damage you can never be sure.’