Читать книгу Heart and Soul - The Emotional Autobiography of Melissa Bell, Alexandra Burke's Mother - Melissa Bell - Страница 10

COLD, DARK MORNINGS IN ST PANCRAS

The clinic I go to is beside the railway lines, just behind St Pancras Station, one of the great historical sites of London and the location for films as varied as the Harry Potter films and the Spice Girls’ first music video, for their hit ‘Wannabe’. Each day, hundreds of workmen arrive there to continue the task of restoring the station to its former Victorian glories now that it has become the home of London’s high-speed rail service to Europe. Their labours fill the air with dust and line the roadsides with screens and hoardings, masking the scale of the project as the rest of the city’s life goes on all around them.

If the morning is cold and dark when I arrive at the clinic, I will invite the other patients to wait with me in my car until the staff open the doors and let us into the welcome warmth of the ward. As we sit there chatting, some of them tell me they’re surprised to find that I drive myself to the clinic. Hardly any of the other patients drive any more, but, even if it is a struggle, I prefer to live a normal life whenever the exhaustion isn’t too overwhelming. Besides, if I didn’t have the car, I would find it very hard to get to all the places I want to get to in the few hours I have left each day. To me it seems that some people give up on life very easily.

A lot of us regulars in the ward are from Caribbean or Asian backgrounds. I don’t know why that is – maybe it has something to do with our diets, or maybe it’s a secret buried in our DNA, a ticking time bomb of chemicals waiting to go off and derail our lives from the moment we are born. But, of course, whatever their ethnic background, for wives, daughters, mothers and grandmothers, there is never a good time to be struck down like this.

It may be a bit of a generalisation, but I have found that people from the West Indies have a lot of funny habits and beliefs, some of which we carry with us wherever we go in the world. For a start, we don’t like going to see the doctor to get things checked out, even when we are feeling terrible and could obviously do with some help. Maybe it’s because we’re stoical or somehow fatalistic about life. Or perhaps it’s because we just don’t want to hear bad news, preferring to stick our heads in the sand and keep on enjoying the moment for as long as we can before we eventually have to face up to the fact that we are mortal and sooner or later the party is going to have to end and the music is going to be switched off.

We don’t like to be cut either, so we tend not to rush to donate our organs, believing we should go back to God at the end of our lives in the same state that he made us, with no cuts or incisions. I lost that battle when I was three weeks old and the surgeons sliced open my tiny little back to remove the suspicious-looking growth. If there was any chance of finding a new kidney, I would be more than happy to surrender to the scalpel again.

There are usually more men than women patients on the ward. In fact, at one stage, I was the only woman in here. Maybe that’s why hardly anyone speaks to one another once we are in through the doors. In my experience, most men don’t tend to like to communicate quite like we do, seeming to prefer to internalise everything. Having said that, I’ll admit that the man who lucked out and had the kidney transplant used to like a bit of conversation to pass the time, but most don’t. He was very educated and eloquent and I enjoyed talking to him, but once you’ve got a new kidney you never have to go on a dialysis machine again (unless that one packs up on you too), so I haven’t seen him since.

Even though every bed in the ward is occupied, it can feel quite isolated sometimes, just lying there with the nurses bustling about their business around the beds and behind the screens, listening to the sound of the machines, waiting for it all to be over so I can get back in the car and go home to my own unmade bed. For those few hours, it feels like you have no control over your own life, no freedom of choice in what you do. Some people find it comforting to have other people making all their decisions for them. They become institutionalised and seem to lose the will to do anything else. I am determined not to let that happen to me.

Getting up early on these mornings is almost always painful. When the alarm goes off at a quarter to six the last thing I want to do is drag myself out from under the covers and on to the streets of King’s Cross. Even at that hour of the morning the traffic is already heavy because of all the building and development work that has been going on around the area, and because people are already starting to arrive for work in the new office blocks that have been opening up in previously neglected streets.

Before leaving the house, I have a quick wash, pull on whatever clothes I need that day, whether it is just pyjamas or a dressing gown, or something more formal if I might be going on somewhere after I’ve finished the treatment. I don’t want to wear anything heavy because the first thing the staff do when they let us in is weigh us to find out how much fluid we have put on since we were last there and I don’t want to make things seem any worse than they are.

I never pee any more. My kidneys have failed totally and all the poisons and bad stuff which they should be taking out of my blood and turning into urine just stay there until the machine extracts them, running round and round in my veins, waiting for a chance to kill me, hoping I’ll get careless and allow them an opportunity to strike. It’s shocking how much you miss something as simple as having to go to the toilet every few hours, something that you once took for granted or at most saw as a bit of a nuisance.

The ward is empty and waiting for us when the doors of the clinic are finally opened, the machines all cleaned out and disinfected, standing ready beside each bed for us to be hooked up. The nurses move quietly and briskly around them, making sure all our notes are in the right places and that we will have everything we need as we arrive. We look for our folders to see which bed we have been allocated, like guests at some formal dinner looking for our place names, or children searching for their names on school notice boards.

‘Who’s first?’ someone carrying a clipboard asks.

‘That’s probably me,’ I usually say, slightly embarrassed by my own keenness, but still determined not to lose my place in the queue and end up wasting more of the day than I need to. The others probably think I’m a bit pushy, always trying to be the first to be hooked up.

The tubes go into previously opened holes in my chest, one to carry the contaminated blood out, the other to bring the filtered and cleaned blood back in. It would be better if they could go into my arm, but the nurses haven’t yet been able to find a vein there that’s big enough to do the job. They keep searching and working at it. Once I’m connected up, the machine starts humming and a nurse brings me a little polystyrene cup of tea and a piece of toast to give me a bit of strength. I just sip at the tea because I don’t want to use up my daily fluid allowance too quickly in case I want to drink something else a bit more delicious later in the day. Each day I’m only allowed three-quarters of a litre of fluid. That’s the big problem about not peeing any more: you can’t risk taking the fluid in if you have no way of letting it out. Imagine how frustrating it is not to be allowed to have a long drink of cold water when it’s a hot day and you’re really thirsty. At moments like that all I can do is suck on an ice cube.

I settle back to concentrate on my thoughts and my memories. My life has turned out to be very different from anything I ever expected.