Our neighbours in ICU
It becomes more and more difficult to write this in a linear fashion. Certain events stand out but the overwhelming memory of what happened is a hazy sense of days of exhausted numbness; days of feeling shock and disbelief that this was happening. So many people said to us that they didn't know how we were coping. Our answer has always been that we had no choice. What else were we to do? The feeling of numbness helped. Sometimes it felt is was happening to someone else.
As you first enter the double doors into ICU in Jimmy's there is a waiting area and a small room. If we were not at Joe's bedside we were sitting in this room. It was in this room that we met and sympathised with so many of the other families who had relatives in ICU. In the main, people moved on after 2 or 3 days but there was one family who were there almost as long as we were and 2 families who lost their relatives whilst we were there. As one very distressed son cried out loud at the loss of his mum, I remember Anna and I looking at each other and, though it was unsaid, we knew that both of us were thinking 'that's not going to happen to us... that's not going to be our story'.
The open plan layout of ICU meant that each time we walked down to sit with Joe we had to walk past others who were also very sick. Each day we saw the sadness and sheer desperation of relatives who, on witnessing the smallest upward change in their relative's condition, hung on to this glimmer of hope; only to see hope crushed again as their condition took another dip. This was the pattern of our experience in ICU. The nurses did warn us at the beginning that progress in ICU was always slow and always up and down, but I don't think any of us really took this in on an emotional level. We would leave at 9pm and Joe's results could be looking quite good with his oxygen therapy at 50%; then we would ring before we went to sleep and he had often taken a dip and his therapy would have to be increased to over 70%. It became so hard to cope with this that at one point Anna didn't want to call them after we had left. She wanted to try to sleep with hope still present. As the days went on this became increasingly difficult.
As you first enter the double doors into ICU in Jimmy's there is a waiting area and a small room. If we were not at Joe's bedside we were sitting in this room. It was in this room that we met and sympathised with so many of the other families who had relatives in ICU. In the main, people moved on after 2 or 3 days but there was one family who were there almost as long as we were and 2 families who lost their relatives whilst we were there. As one very distressed son cried out loud at the loss of his mum, I remember Anna and I looking at each other and, though it was unsaid, we knew that both of us were thinking 'that's not going to happen to us... that's not going to be our story'.
The open plan layout of ICU meant that each time we walked down to sit with Joe we had to walk past others who were also very sick. Each day we saw the sadness and sheer desperation of relatives who, on witnessing the smallest upward change in their relative's condition, hung on to this glimmer of hope; only to see hope crushed again as their condition took another dip. This was the pattern of our experience in ICU. The nurses did warn us at the beginning that progress in ICU was always slow and always up and down, but I don't think any of us really took this in on an emotional level. We would leave at 9pm and Joe's results could be looking quite good with his oxygen therapy at 50%; then we would ring before we went to sleep and he had often taken a dip and his therapy would have to be increased to over 70%. It became so hard to cope with this that at one point Anna didn't want to call them after we had left. She wanted to try to sleep with hope still present. As the days went on this became increasingly difficult.
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