Holding on

Anyone who has suffered any kind of loss or trauma will know the all-consuming anguish one feels at the beginning. You feel like you will never stop crying and the emotions are so acute that you have physical pain. Pains in your chest, knotted feelings in your stomach and headaches so severe it's as if  you will pop. This doesn't persist though; after a while you stop crying and this high expressed emotion is replaced by a curious numbness. This is a natural response that functions to protect us, I guess. It would be impossible to sustain the level of emotion that hits when you are first given bad news. The shock and horror is paralysing. I remember coming out of the relatives room on that Saturday to get a glass of water. A nurse stopped me and asked if I needed anything and I  had to think for a minute and then just said 'water'. I realised that I had been just standing in the middle of the corridor,  looking at her and not seeing her; there were tears just running down my face and I was completely unable to articulate what I wanted. To be able to go through the daily activities of eating, washing and dressing etc. those extremes cannot continue. So that first reaction  of acute distress was quite quickly turned to numbness. Every time I think of what happened in those final 2 weeks I am reminded of the lines in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness - 'the horror. the horror'. ( I always seem to think in terms of the stuff I read) That sounds extreme and the events we were experiencing were extreme,  but conversely what we felt in the main was an overwhelming flatness.

Joe had stabilised but at a level much worse than he had been. His oxygen therapy was above 70% much of the time and the pressures were high. In addition to this he had been turned on to his front as this was the only way the nurses had managed to get his oxygen sats up. Apparently lying on your front opens up the airways more effectively. Everyone was very concerned as Joe's condition was so fragile and attempts were being made every day to find out what was happening to him. He was still being dialysed and tests had started to show that his new kidney wasn't functioning as it should. The doctors were not overly concerned at this point as this was common in patients who were ventilated but obviously it was a concern with a newly transplanted kidney. Our worry was that he would need another transplant if his kidney failed.

For anyone reading this now it must seem an odd thing for us to worry about, given how ill Joe was. What you need to understand though is that even after all this, even though we knew that Joe was so ill, however much the doctors warned us, we still didn't really believe he was going to die.  Certainly he seemed to hold his own. His oxygen therapy came down again and his condition didn't gave us any further cause for concern for the next 2-3 days.