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GUEST COLUMN

Volume 5 Number 4

How I Cheated the Fat Lady

01 May 1992

My doctors say they cannot count how often they had hauled me back from `halfway through the pearly gates'.

By GEOFFREY LEAN
It all began ten days before the Gulf War, with a sharp pain in my stomach. My doctor diagnosed a twisted bowel and sent me to my local hospital for an emergency operation. I remember a needle being stuck into my arm, committing myself and my family rather nervously to the Almighty, and no more.

I woke in intensive care nearly a month later, trapped in a spaghetti junction of transparent tubes, totally paralyzed, unable to speak and breathing, with the help of a ventilator, through a hole in my neck. My doctors say they cannot count how often they had hauled me back from `halfway through the pearly gates'.

Accounts differ as to what went wrong in the first place, but it seems clear that the operation was delayed for too long. After that there was a series of complications, in my lungs, pancreas, kidneys and finally my muscles, which, as a result of an extremely rare condition, literally dissolved.

My wife, Judy, scarcely left my bedside for weeks on end, while close family and friends looked after our two young children. One night she was told I was almost certain to die. `We had managed to keep a crack of a window of hope open, even at the worst moments,' she says, `but now the window closed. It was unspeakable.'

Just then our vicar came `flapping reassuringly down the corridor' and Judy, anguished by my suffering, asked if she should let me go. Searching frantically for inspiration, he replied that as I still seemed to be fighting, she should go on fighting too.

`So,' she says, `we went back to the prayers and to telling you: "Don't you dare die on us!"' Judy and my sister encouraged each other with the US election saying `It's not over until the fat lady sings'.

Breakthrough
All the time messages of support flooded in. The unlikeliest people revealed that they were praying for my recovery. Groups of friends met at noon each day to pray for 20 minutes, others in the United Sates rose at 7am so as to pray at the same time. It was bewildering, when I woke, to discover how much people had cared.

The crucial break arose from this concern. An Observer colleague `suddenly thought out of the blue' of ringing her father, a consultant physician. He suggested getting a second opinion, and the Observer appealed to Professor Ronald Bradley of the intensive care unit of St Thomas's, one of London's teaching hospitals. A couple of days later, when my kidneys failed and the local hospital no longer had the facilities to cope, Bradley arranged for me to be moved to his unit, in the only ambulance in Britain with the technology to keep me alive. Once there he started to `unpick' my problems.

In my coma, I was not oblivious. I could not see, but I could hear and feel. I could hear the nurses telling me that they were about to take my blood pressure or give me an injection, and I could feel the tourniquet or needle. I could feel Judy's fingers entwined with mine and hear her talking to me. Without the nurses' warnings, and her presence, I would, I think, have been very scared.

The rest of the coma was an extraordinarily vivid dream. Much of the real world filtered through. I knew, for instance, when the Gulf War began.

Twice I knew I was near death. It was a remarkably matter-of-fact feeling, not frightening at all. I felt ready to accept it, but determined that it would have to work very hard to get me. Each time, it was Judy's presence that rescued me: the second time, I had to take a conscious decision to recover.

Much of the dream was about being paralyzed and voiceless. I slid from the coma into reality and cannot, to this day, mark the transition. I could only move my lips, eyes and the tips of my fingers.

It was a carnival day when they first let me sip some water. Three weeks later they put a silver tube in my neck that gave me back my voice. Gradually the muscles began to return. Another three weeks and I could lift my hand to my chest, hold a book and read.

First steps
By then, I had been moved to the Lane Fox Unit. The brainchild of Dr Geoffrey Spencer, it rehabilitates people whose lives have been saved, but still need technology to survive. I was there for the next four months, gradually relearning things I had once taken for granted. It took weeks to learn to stand and then to walk again.

Last July, six months to the day after I first entered hospital, I spent my first night at home. I can now walk a couple of miles and am working again. Everyone says I will recover completely. I have been very lucky.

I hope I shall never forget being quadriplegic and then wheelchair-bound. I have learned about the courage of people in appalling circumstances. After that comotose decision, I never doubted I would get better. There were so many around me, far braver, who faced being handicapped for life.

Judy and I have always been fortunate in our marriage, but this experience has given us even greater love and respect for each other. They say at St Thomas's that a loving family is one of the things that makes the difference between life and death in the desperately ill - and I certainly had that.

My faith has grown, both in God and other people. I have gained in assurance and I think I am less worried by little things than in the past. And I know, from the visits that I can recall, that the shallows of the ocean of death are a peaceful and strangely welcoming place to be.

Geoffrey Lean is the Environment Correspondent of the `Observer', London, from which this article is abridged.