Out of the Blue

F lay in the cardiac ICU for a week before being moved back, weak but awake, to the post ablation ward. We were so happy, took him magazines and grapes and cool drink. Ready for his recovery. Of course he would have to stay put until he was on his feet, but that was OK.

That first afternoon he ate some grapes and drank some orange juice, then complained about a stomach ache. Just the grapes, I said; probably should not have had them, perhaps they were a bit acid. I even joked about this to the New Zealander we had met previously, and to the doctor, who was called. Not this stomach ache, said the doctor; this is a strange one. M and I left to have dinner, reasonably unconcerned.

On our return to the hotel after dinner we were called to the desk. The hospital had phoned, looking for us. We should go there immediately. F had collapsed and had been rushed back to ICU; they wanted to scan his stomach, but were worried that he would not even last the ambulance trip to the place where this could be done. What's more, they had found an aneurism near his heart which could burst at any moment and his life was in the balance.

We were stunned. Hovered in the ICU waiting room, having digested the information; unable at last to bear any more waiting, we pushed through the doors and there he was, on a gurney, conscious, about to be wheeled to the ambulance. Giving directions - I forget what he was saying, but he was instructing someone about something, which was typical of the man. Waved as he was wheeled away.

He did make that journey, and we were eventually told that he would have to have surgery the following morning, to his stomach. He had a colostomy. Out of the blue. Of all things.

The absolute details of his medical condition escapes me now. My mind reeled at the time and it reels now. Some pre-ablation time a condition in his intestine reacted badly to the enforced week of mobility after the ablation, and his intestine could not be fixed. So they had had to operate, and he was gravely ill, now incarcerated in a separate building devoted to stomach problems. And this ICU ward was horrible.

His bed lay in a glare of lights in what seemed to be a traffic centre of activity. To get there we had to go through several swinging doors, completely swathed in the detestable pale blue sterile robes. My husband F was unconscious and again on a ventilator, while around him nurses and equipment bustled, noisily came and went; that hardly a word of English was spoken or understood did not help matters. We were largely ignored, marooned with a gravely ill man attached to tubes and machines under glaring, inhuman lights. The machines beeped and counted the small signs of life within him while we stood helpless and anguished beside his bed. Each time, we could only stay a few minutes.

That week was dreadful. F regained consciousness of a kind but begged us to remove him from where he was. He pleaded for us to take him home - not even aware at that stage that he was in France. He wanted us to bring him a gun, he would pull the trigger, he said. Please put him into the water and let him go, he said.

Son B came and went, backwards and forwards from London, Daughter K left her five-month-old baby and small daughter and joined us in France, bringing with her a breast pump to maintain her milk flow. Together we hovered painfully next to that bed; we came and went from ICU after obtaining admission through a monitor in my tentative French; we slept in the same hotel in separate rooms but in the same trance of dread -(we had moved from our first bleak, modern hotel to one more family-oriented, where I had even made enquiries about a ground floor room where F could eventually recuperate). But it was not to be. Nothing was to be.

My daughter was with me when he was finally transferred back to cardiac ICU. F was very weak, very thin, but alive, and cardiac ICU with its calm atmosphere, was more subdued, with kinder lighting. There K virtually talked her father back to a positive state - inasmuch as a man so ill could be positive. He slept most of the time but was occasionally aware of his family and surroundings, in small glimpses of the man himself.

K could not stay away from her baby for longer than five or six days. She left tearfully after saying goodbye to her father and flew back to South Africa.