March 19, 2006. Pale shafts of sunshine are falling through the gap where the bedroom curtains don’t quite meet. I lie in bed, feeling the languorous contentment of a cat.
Unusually, my four children — all in their 20s — will be at home tonight, so I’m planning a celebration supper.
Miles, my eldest, will be back from his holiday in Austria this afternoon. At least he won’t be snowboarding today; he won’t have time because he’ll be travelling to the airport. I can feel the background fear of the past week dissolving, the fear that always lurks when he’s doing those jumps.
Time to get up: there are people coming for lunch. I’m making peppered beef; I crush peppercorns in a heavy ceramic bowl, while my husband, Ron, lays the table and sorts out the drinks.
Lu Spinney pictured with her son Miles, before a snowboarding accident left him with severe brain damage
A
couple of hours later, the main course is coming to an end, the
caramelised oranges are ready and waiting and there is nothing left to
do except enjoy myself with our guests.
When
the phone rings, I answer it in the kitchen and the background noise of
people and laughter makes it difficult to hear the young man asking me
if I am Miles’s mother.
‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘Why, what’s happened?’
I know already; I know from the tone of the man’s voice even before I hear that Miles is gravely injured.
‘I’m Ben, a friend of Miles’s,’ he says. ‘He’s had a serious accident on his snowboard.’
‘What injury?’ I ask, but again somehow I know. A head injury.
Lu has written a book detailing her grief after her son's untimely death
After
he hangs up, I remain standing, frozen, still holding the phone to my
ear, not daring to sever the thread that connects me across sea and
forests and mountains to Miles, to the person who was with him at that
fateful moment when I was not.
From
one instant to another the world has changed. We are no longer safe;
with frightening clarity, I see each one of the people I love as though
standing on the edge of a precipice — their outlines sharply etched
above the abyss that now threatens us all.
My
body absorbs the shock in a visceral plunge of nausea. I’m floating as
in a dream, an out-of-body experience, watching myself as I put my hand
up to stop the lunch-party conversation. ‘I’m so sorry, you’ll have to
leave. Miles has had an accident snowboarding. A head injury.’
I
can hear my voice, flat, expressionless, see Ron’s face registering
confusion and shock as he stands up. Within hours, I will be flying over
mountains, enduring the banter of the easyJet air hostess and of jovial
passengers setting off on carefree holidays.
Miles
has just turned 29, and after a week’s hard snowboarding he is fitter
than ever. It’s early morning on the last day of his holiday and the sun
is just beginning to glint and sparkle on the night-hardened snow.
The
jump today is very high and Miles is going to take it as fast as he
can, so he goes to the ski shop to buy a helmet. Out in the sunshine
again, he puts on his sunglasses and looks around.
There’s
a photograph of him taken at this moment: he doesn’t know it, but he is
as handsome as he might ever wish to be, and the girl also caught on
camera, coming out of the shop in her new turquoise ski suit, is giving
him an inviting smile.
And
now Miles is standing at the top of a slope that leads in one steep
drop to the dip and rise of the jump. This is when he is at his happiest
— under pressure, pushing himself to succeed.
Taking
a deep breath, he pushes off. At first swooping from side to side, his
path gradually straightens into an arrow of gathering speed.
Miles on a snowboarding trip in 2005. An accident in the Alps would leave Miles with life-changing injuries
Too
fast now. He knows he’s not in control as he is taken by force up the
ramp, skewing sideways when his board clips the edge. And then he is
hurtling, spinning up, up into the free blue sky.
The thwack of board and helmet on hard ice, the cries of onlookers, the blue of sky and white of snow. Silence.
Then, very slowly, he sits up, raises himself, stands shakily. Friends gather round, supporting him, their faces grave.
He speaks: ‘Jesus, that was something.’ Someone asks: ‘Do you know where you are? Do you know what day it is?’
‘St
Anton, Sunday,’ he says, thickly. He takes off his helmet and sits
down. Suddenly, his eyes roll upwards and his body convulses, back
arched, limbs juddering.
Soon
paramedics are removing his jacket and T-shirt, cutting through his
vest in the race to keep him alive. The air is reverberating with the
thump, thump of a helicopter’s blades.
I
arrive at Innsbruck University Hospital with my daughters, Claudia and
Marina, my second son, Will, and the children’s father, my ex-husband
David. My second husband, Ron, will fly in some days later.
Miles pictured with his sister Claudia, one of three siblings he had, in South Africa in 2005
As we walk into the vast glass and concrete foyer, I feel the air being sucked away from me.
The floor rises in waves, the walls bulge in, I can’t breathe.
We
arrive at the ward. It feels as though we have entered an under-water
world: tinted green glass divides cubicles and nurses’ stations, and
everywhere is silent save for the rhythmic tidal swish of respirators
and the soft keening of machines, like whale calls in the deep.
Nurses and doctors glide through the rooms, serious, intent on the silent bodies beached on their high beds.
Miles
lies on his back, perfectly still. His strong face — the one we’re so
familiar with, that we know to be so expressive, humorous, animated — is
closed from us in a way it would not be if he were asleep.
A
multitude of wires and tubes connects his brain and body to the bank of
machines and electronic charts behind him, recording every tremor of
his existence. ‘You will be all right, you’re going to be all right, you
are going to come back to us. I love you so very, very much, my
extraordinary, precious, beloved son.’
The
first time I cry is in the bend of the corridor on the way back to the
waiting room. Crying with great racked gasps, a knife-edged pain
wrenching my chest.
From left, Miles, Marina, Claudia and Will enjoy a skiing trip in Les Gets, France in 1991
Day
two. I’ve been handed a letter from the chief executive of BBC
Worldwide — Miles has been doing a project for them as a management
consultant. The letter is full of praise and wishes him the speediest of
recoveries.
Again,
I can’t control my tears. The letter gives Miles substance, a
background. In hospital, he is simply another TBI — another Traumatic
Brain Injury.
The
medical staff cannot know that he has a first-class degree from Oxford,
that he is thoughtful, funny, brave, kind, impatient and irascible.
The
only story they have in the notes that accompany him is that he once
snowboarded — not that he likes boxing and playing poker, writing poetry
and playing the fool.
Pulling
up a chair next to Miles’s bed, I read the letter aloud to him. He’s in
a coma, breathing through a ventilator, but a little part of me is
certain he is listening.
Day eight. When we arrive this evening, the doctor is smiling. ‘Your son is breathing on his own!’
We
can picture his recovery; we’re euphoric. We call the family and our
close friends to tell them the news. Later, many mojitos later, we dance
down the street to the hotel, chanting as we go: ‘He’s breathing on his
own!’
But nothing else changes, and so our euphoria is short-lived.
The
days sink back into their routine; each morning I wake in the hotel
room with a stab of fear, taut with foreboding at what the day might
hold.
Breakfast
has become an ordeal. I used to love hotel breakfasts like a childish
treat, but now I am repulsed at what seems a lavishly obscene spread of
food.
I
am trapped in a nightmare, a ludicrous object of grief crouched in the
corner, pinched and thin and angry, hollow-eyed and foul.
It
is a new thing, this anger, and it is taking unattractive and
unexpected forms. I could machine-gun the moon and stars, but I also
want to pepper with bullets anybody or anything that comes in the way of
my private grief, or anyone who may be a threat to Miles — like the
nurse who seemed careless yesterday when taking his observation notes.
Miles during a skiing trip in Austria in 2005. He would suffer a head injury after taking on a high jump
Miles’s
predicament has opened a door onto the relentless, unstoppable
suffering of other people, every day, everywhere; this terrible thing
that has happened to him is only one drop in a vast cauldron of human
suffering.
I
have been talking to the athletic young neurosurgeon on the ward, who
is a keen snowboarder. He tells me the helmet may take the impact, but
the sudden acceleration and deceleration can cause the brain to rotate
within the skull. I don’t want to hear this.
The
medical term for this, he continues, is diffuse axonal injury — DAI for
short. If that happens, we do not yet know any way of reversing it.
Very
few of the 10 per cent who regain consciousness will return to
near-normal — and any improvement will have to take place within the
first 12 months.
Miles, do you remember my last words to you as you were leaving the house? ‘Please don’t do any dangerous jumps, my darling!’
It
was my foolish, ritual request, a kind of game we played. I loved your
daring and you enjoyed my mock protectiveness (although it wasn’t really
mock — I meant it, but I had to say it lightly).
I
remember you hugged me with that crushing bear hug I love so much and
you said: ‘Don’t worry, Ma, I’m older now. I promise I’ll be
responsible.’
Miles bought his crash helmet that morning just before the jump. He would have died instantly without it.
But
perhaps without it he wouldn’t have gone as fast. Perhaps he would have
been more cautious, perhaps it disoriented him. Is it my fault he
bought the helmet?
Will is photographed with his sisters Claudia, left, and Marina, right, at Will's wedding in 2010
Week four. I ask Professor Benir, the senior consultant, to tell me the truth: ‘What form is this brain damage going to take?’
Professor Benir looks back up from Miles to me. The damage is not to his intellect, he says.
That
is not the area of the brain that is damaged. But he has suffered a
very serious trauma to his brain. What is crucial now is that he begins
intensive rehabilitation.
‘We
have done our work here, the surgery is complete; the important thing
now is for you to arrange the next stage for him.’ It takes a week of
intense negotiation. Finally, Miles is offered a bed in the intensive
care unit at University College Hospital in London.
There,
he’ll be reviewed and assessed before being moved to an acute brain
injury unit in Queen Square. Back in London, we are marked out as a
family that has been visited by disaster.
I
have become different, outside and inside: outside, because I am now an
object of pity and horror, no longer safe; inside, because my terrible
new sensitivity has destroyed tolerance — there is no room left for it.
Friendship
is put to the most severe of tests. I cannot bear to think how often I
may have failed my friends in the way some fail me now, so often
unwittingly.
A
procession of doctors give me a range of reasons why Miles cannot go to
the acute brain injury unit: there are no beds available, he lives in
the wrong postal district; there are limited resources.
Miles, Marina and Claudia enjoy some cake on Marina's second birthday in 1988
I discern the unmentionable truth: he is too damaged to warrant time and money being spent on him.
My confusion begins to turn to disillusionment.
Miles is still in a coma; to give up now would be unimaginable. If we allow despair to tip the balance, we are all lost.
In the past few days, he seems to have come closer to the surface of consciousness.
When
we greet him, there is now a slight flicker of movement across his
face; for the first time, we are seeing a glimpse of some dimly felt
expression.
Then, one morning, my son Will, who is visiting Miles, is told that a Dr Mosley would like to see him. Will calls me afterwards.
His anger rings down the line like an unearthed electric current.
Dr Mosley is the eighth doctor to see Miles. ‘His prospects are extremely bleak,’ he begins.
Intensive
rehab ‘would only mean the difference between his future being grim or
not quite so grim — treatment would not serve any useful purpose’.
Any useful purpose!
And
there’s more: ‘Many families decide, on reflection, that their loved
ones would want not to be kept alive like this,’ he says.
Who is this man? How can he talk like this?
Miles is breathing on his own. There is no machine to turn off.
Miles, right, plays with his brother Will on their bicycles in London
The issue is not whether he lives or dies; it is about whether he is left to languish on a general ward.
A tall Australian male nurse is on duty when I visit Miles late that afternoon.
There is a prickle of menace about him; his manner supercilious and his handling of Miles curt and dismissive.
He
looks up as I come in and then with a sweep of his arm towards Miles,
he makes a mock bow. ‘There he sits,’ he says, ‘King and Lord of all he
surveys.’
Miles
has been placed into a large high-backed armchair, his body slumped
forward awkwardly against the canvas straps that are holding him
upright.
His body is slack and quiet; an image of horror. King and Lord of all he surveys!
I
want to throttle the nurse, gouge out his eyes, beat him until he
whimpers for mercy. I want to see him cowering and jibbering with fear
while I beat him until I can beat him no more.
That
evening I hear that a bed has become available at Queen Square. It’s as
if Miles has won a place, against the stiffest competition, at the most
prestigious institution in the world.
Two days after his transfer to the brain injury unit at Queen Square, Miles is still in a coma.
His friend, Jasper, is visiting him and I have gone to sit in the vestibule outside the ward.
Friends
feel awkward in the face of his intimidating blankness and embarrassed
in front of me. It is difficult to know how to speak to him; we all find
it impossible to sustain a flow of one-sided conversation that sounds
in any way normal.
Suddenly a nurse comes running out from the ward.
‘Miles’s mum, come quick, come quick!’ she says.
‘Miles has just opened his eyes!’
I
fly through the ward and yes, there he is, sitting in his wheelchair
with his deep green eyes open for the first time in eight weeks.
He has emerged from his coma!
Every moment of the past eight weeks has been geared to this one longed-for moment, the fragile dream come true.
I’m
overwhelmed. ‘Miles, Miles, oh my God, Miles, you’re back, you’re
awake, I must call the family, you’re back, my darling Miles...'
Post a Comment