Fighting Against the Odds

Coincidentally it is that same time of the year now. The last fortnight of F's life. As we head now towards that dreadful date I still find myself freezing up, and within this fortnight I must write about his death, which is difficult.

This time two years ago he was in cardiac ICU in a French hospital and I was spending seven or eight hours a day at his bedside. I would drive there each day in a hire car along kilometres of highway, on the right hand side of the road, reading road signs, taking care with traffic, parking in the huge grey tarmacked parking area of the hospital set in completely flat countryside surrounded by electric pylons. The journey from hotel to hospital took about twenty minutes. It was always cold although frequently sunny.

The family-run hotel we had discovered was adequate, clean and comfortable although certainly not five star. Each day I was asked sympathetically by the owner or her mother how my husband was getting along, and each day I was exhorted to have courage - in French, courage is the same word. I used to eat breakfast in the small dining room - a boiled egg, or a croissant, yoghurt, fruit, black tea. A dear little bird (I think a robin, with a red breast) used to hop around the window near my table, busy with its own small life, and I would watch for his appearance.

At the hospital I reached F's ward by way of a flight of stairs and a meagre, glass lined corridor. He lay in one of six cubicles. At the centre of the room were a couple of desks for nursing staff and of course, one could hear the pinging rhythm of various cardiac machines which were continual in that universal sound of "hospital" - squeaking shoes or trolley wheels on the gleaming flooring of wide interior passages, voices, the melodious two notes preceding muffled announcements from the depths of administration or the tick, tick tick of vital machinery attached to patients which ticked or pinged or squeaked rhythmically and quietly - not to mention the prominent coloured electronic displays which moved above the head of each bedside recording blood pressure, heart rhythm, oxygen levels and other things, obtuse graphs and figures which were both reassuring and terrifying.

His bed was on the inside of the room, windowless. During this last fortnight he was moved to the bed obliquely opposite, where there was a window through which sun could stream in the afternoon. It was thought that this would cheer him up. By now he was very depressed and was put on to anti-depressant medication which would have an effect, I was told, only in about six weeks - this medicine just one more thing among the many daily and continual dosages of drips or drugs because he had gone down to an infection which was the one thing, they said, they dreaded. There was little talk at this time about his heart or its rhythm. That could be dealt with later. Now they were fighting for his survival, and, after the colostomy, an infection in his weakened state was very bad.

But we seemed slowly to be winning; or at least, he seemed to be holding his own. He was fully conscious now but bedridden. There was no sitting up in bed, much less getting out of it. One day I had come in to find him sitting in a chair (weeks past) absolutely at the end of his tether. Please, he said, I can't take this. The staff had left him there for an hour - it would make him stronger, they said. I rushed to insist that he be put back to bed - a man, the physio, would have to be called for this, they said, to move him. Agony to wait - but he arrived within minutes, and lifted up my husband, and I can still see that horrifying moment when he dangled like a rag doll in the arms of this man. Completely, utterly helpless.

I did not mince words to the staff - in this case a thickset Frenchwoman I had not seen before who did not speak a word of English but seemed bent on disciplining the illness and my husband's weak state as if she could beat it out of him.

This time two years ago, however, we were resigned to the fact of his being severely ill but looking forward - and even beginning to discuss - the possibility of going home. Not that F talked much, he slept most of the time. The nurses had tried to cheer him up with a television at the foot of his bed, but not even soccer, or tennis, or cricket interested him now. He was oblivious to the sunlight, oblivious to family most of the time although he did say, once, that I should go home to South Africa, get back to bowls, leave him there and visit occasionally - a preposterous idea!