Читать книгу Endal: How one extraordinary dog brought a family back from the brink - Sandra Parton - Страница 11

It was a huge shock the first time Sandra took me home for the weekend after the accident. I’d overheard them saying that she was a nurse but I was still anxious she wouldn’t know how to look after me properly. Shouldn’t there be a doctor there as well? What if I needed help with things like undressing myself? Would this woman do it? Was she really my wife?

Then, in the car, she mentioned that we had children, and that was most peculiar. I didn’t feel like a person who had children. I had no memory of them, no idea of their names or what ages they were.

When we got back to the house, I didn’t remember any of it, but there were photos of Sandra, the children and me all over the walls so I knew I was in the right place. When would my memory come back?

Then the door opened and two children burst in shouting and squealing. I couldn’t bear the noise they made. I didn’t feel as though I was their father. There was no bond there, no memories of when they were babies; they were strangers, and the two of them seemed to make the noise of twenty children. It drilled into my ears and echoed round my head.

‘Go away!’ I waved my hand, and Sandra came rushing out, concerned. ‘Go away!’ I gesticulated at her as well. My speech was thick and slurred but I could tell they understood me.

I had a horrible itchy rash that was spreading up my body and itching constantly and I fretted about that most of the weekend. Could it be a strange tropical disease? Had I contracted something in one of the hospitals they’d put me in? Was it an allergic reaction to the medication I was on? Or was it a symptom of some serious new development in my condition?

I hated being helped to get dressed, all my food being served for me, and the fact that there was very little I could do. I’d flown all over the world fixing battleships at the drop of a hat, and now I couldn’t make a cup of coffee for myself because my hands kept twitching and it would have spilled everywhere.

I found that I couldn’t remember words. I could bark out an order – such as ‘Coffee!’ – but when I noticed a cake on the countertop and wanted a piece, I couldn’t remember the word for it to ask for some. Sometimes I’d try and I’d confuse Sandra by coming out with the wrong word – ‘kite’ or ‘door’ perhaps. Or I’d just point and growl. I certainly couldn’t speak in sentences, or remember any of the niceties such as ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.

Sandra was incredibly patient that weekend. She tried to jog my memory by showing me photos from a holiday we’d had in Singapore and Malaysia. I recognized myself in the pictures and I could tell that we looked happy in them, but they brought back no emotions. I didn’t remember being in that place. I only felt frustration at the barriers in my brain, huge impenetrable walls that I couldn’t bypass.

A doctor had explained to me that after it’s been damaged the brain favours some types of memories over others. The ‘favoured areas’ are different for everyone. Some might keep their love of music, or sporting prowess, or the ability to do complex mathematical calculations. As for me, I think I retained a lot of my technical knowledge, because I could remember precise details about the weapons systems I’d worked on in my various postings for the Navy, but I’d lost all my memories of the people in my life.

The problem is that memories are the basis for emotions, and love is based on shared history, and because I couldn’t remember any of our history I no longer felt any ‘love’ for Sandra and the kids. I’d woken up and found myself living in the middle of a life that didn’t feel like mine. It didn’t feel right. It was as though I was visiting strangers and I didn’t feel well enough to be polite or friendly to them.

I couldn’t actually remember what ‘love’ felt like. How did you know when you loved someone? I knew nothing about the woman and the two children who were trying to get through to me. They were strangers. It’s maybe a bit like watching a man in his eighties who has dementia and is being cruel to his partner because he can’t remember who she is. I had a sort of reverse dementia and I just felt emotionally blank, like an empty shell.

Sandra’s nursing experience may have meant that the staff at Haslar let her take me home, but after observing me close up for a couple of days she realized that I wasn’t fit to be there. I needed specialist help that she couldn’t give me. She took me back to Haslar on the Monday morning and had a chat with the staff and before long I was being transferred to Headley Court rehabilitation centre near Epsom in Surrey for assessment. And that’s where I stayed on and off for the next year, just coming back to visit Sandra and the children at weekends.

Originally an Elizabethan farmhouse, Headley Court was converted into a huge mansion by Lord Cunliffe, governor of the Bank of England, in the early twentieth century. During the Second World War, Canadian forces were based there, and the grounds were used for army training exercises, then after the war money was raised to convert it into a rehab centre. They have doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, a cognitive therapist, and several hydrotherapy pools and gymnasiums, as well as workshops where they make artificial limbs.

‘Right!’ I thought when they showed me around. ‘Let’s get started.’

An orderly handed me a newspaper. ‘Here you go, Allen,’ he said brightly. ‘Just have a read through and pick out a story that interests you. Any little nugget will do. When I ask you later, you have to try and remember what it was you picked out. OK?’

I grunted and opened the newspaper: the Sun. Every morning in Headley Court they brought you a paper and asked you to memorize a single item. The Sun had little square boxes of two-line stories: simple things, like amazing animal feats, or vicars who streak through their churchyards. I picked one of these and repeated and repeated it in my head, over and over again.

The other patients were sitting round the day room scanning their own papers but I tried not to look at them, focusing hard on remembering my news item. I ignored the other voices and the general chatter about the day’s news, and I tried not to look at anyone else.

Then the orderly turned to me and asked, ‘What was your story today, Allen?’

I opened my mouth – and it was gone. Just a blank space where the words had been minutes before. I shrugged, furious with myself, and turned to glare out of the window.

‘Not to worry. Maybe tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Now, who can go round the room and tell me everyone’s names? Do you want to have a go, Dave?’

Dave would love to. He always got it right. He pointed at each person and said their name, and when it came to me he said, ‘Dolly Parton,’ which was my nickname in the Navy.

And I hated Dave at that moment. I was full of rage that he could do something I couldn’t. We both had severe head injuries and were struggling with a range of disabilities, but his short-term memory for facts seemed better than mine and his speech was certainly a lot better, and I didn’t think that was fair.

Dave was an RAF instructor and had been injured in France. He’d been cycling all the way from Catterick, North Yorkshire, to Gibraltar, when he was knocked over in a hit and run. At Headley Court, Dave could always remember his news item in the morning and he could remember everyone’s names and the latest football scores, but on Sunday evenings he’d ask: ‘Has my mum been to visit me this weekend?’ even though it was only an hour or so since she’d left. He couldn’t remember that. They got him a little notebook that he kept by his bed, and he was supposed to write down everything that happened in it so he could keep track.

‘Look at your book,’ someone would say whenever he asked about his mum.

Dave was in a bad way so I should have been more charitable but I really hated him when he did better than me at those memory games. It wound me up that we had to do them every morning and I always failed.

I often thought that if you had to have a brain injury, it would be better to have a more catastrophic one so that you no longer retained any awareness of your state. The worst thing was that I knew I wasn’t stupid. I could remember that I’d had a very high-powered job designing weapons systems for the Navy. I had flashes of complete memories, but they were like tiny islands in a vast dark sea. I couldn’t put them in order or get them to join up, but I knew that I used to have a lot of people working under me, and that thousands of colleagues relied on my expertise every time they went to sea. I’d worked my way up through the ranks, serving in Northern Ireland, in the Falklands, and then in the Gulf War. I’d passed my boards to become an officer so I’d had a glittering career ahead of me with good pay and prospects. But now I couldn’t remember one paltry item in a newspaper for half an hour. It drove me nuts.

After the newspapers and the ‘naming game’, the orderlies handed out boxes of Lego along with pictures of things we were to try and build. I’d loved Lego when I was a boy. I think it had just been brought out then, and I got one of the first-ever sets. I also liked Airfix models and model railways – anything technical, basically. In Headley Court, they gave us a two-dimensional picture of the three-dimensional object we were supposed to make with the Lego, along with some instructions, and it was supposed to stimulate your cognitive powers. I could never follow the instructions, though. I had to do it my own way, figuring it out for myself, often working backwards, and usually I’d get there in the end, even if my model wasn’t 100 per cent perfect.

As I struggled with Lego blocks, memories would come back to me of sophisticated weapons systems I’d used and helped to develop. For example, in the Falklands War in 1982 we’d been testing an anti-submarine torpedo system. A huge missile was fired from a ship and when it reached the point where it detected a submarine, the torpedo was dropped with a parachute attached, and it searched the area until it found its target. We fired a practice one at an American submarine from a range of 150 miles, and it was so accurate it dropped directly into the conning tower and they couldn’t get their hatch open. It had special telemetry so that we could see what had happened during the flight, whether any equipment had been damaged during take-off and so forth – it was quite an impressive piece of machinery.

I peered at the picture of a Lego ship I’d been given, trying to work out how to make a mast, and the irony made me feel very bitter. From someone who was in charge of high-tech weaponry, I was now back in my second childhood, dependent on carers and struggling with the most basic tasks.

‘Bollocks!’ I muttered as part of the prow broke off and fell to the floor beyond my reach. I swore a lot, and that was the word that seemed to come out most often.

Most days we had some kind of workshop. If it wasn’t Lego it might be twisting a bit of wire to make a metal coat hanger. They handed out the wire, the instructions and the finished product, but I found I could never follow the written instructions. I got the lefts and rights and back and front muddled and it just hung loosely apart, no use to anyone. However, when I examined the finished product and worked backwards I could see exactly how to do it. I took my wire and copied the existing one and eventually got through the task.

Another day we had to put together a bird table. I can’t imagine they let us use saws and power drills, not with all the neurological disorders in that room. They probably gave us the pre-cut pieces and we had to assemble them in the correct order.

I saw a speech therapist most days because my words were coming out like a bark or a harsh cough, and I had the most terrible stutter that was painful to listen to. We had to go back to basics and retrain my voice box, tongue and lips with a laborious series of exercises so that I could get words out clearly – if I could remember them, that was. I still forgot lots of words, and I still resorted to snapping ‘Bollocks!’ in my frustration, but the speech therapy started to help, and that was a positive step.

The physiotherapists worked out a programme for me to try and deal with the spasms that caused me to twitch and flinch so frequently. I’d lost a lot of weight during the weeks of bed rest and my muscle tone was poor but I threw myself into a compulsive exercise routine. I found that I could swim using my upper body strength, and I could lift weights and raise myself up on the climbing wall. I began to exercise during every free moment of the day until the doctors had to come and speak to me about it.

‘Allen, you’re losing too much weight with all this exercising. You need to calm down. If you get any thinner, we’ll have to send you to hospital and get you on an intravenous drip.’

I rejected what they said, though. I thought, Fit body, fit mind, and still sneaked off to the pool or the gym whenever I could. I saw some of the other guys getting fat with enforced rest in a wheelchair or bed, and I was determined that was never going to happen to me. I’d never been overweight in my life and wasn’t about to start now.

There had been some books in the bag of possessions Sandra brought along for me and I tried to read one of them, but it was no good. By the time I got to the end of a page, I’d have forgotten the beginning and would have to go back and remind myself who the characters were and what it was all about, so I gave up before long. I practised and practised reading newspapers, determined that one morning I would pass the memory test, but to no avail. No matter how many ways I tried to fix a story in my head, it just wouldn’t stay there.

I tried writing, but it came out all wrong, with the characters back to front, for example, and that was very alarming. You need to be fastidious when you work on naval weapons systems and you couldn’t afford to put a ‘3’ the wrong way round or switch a ‘6’ for a ‘9’. But I just couldn’t see the characters in my mind’s eye any more, because you need memory for that. It got to the point where I wanted to punch the therapists – it was the speech therapists who worked with me on my handwriting – even though I knew they were only trying to help.

It seemed that I was hitting brick walls with everything I tried. When was I going to start getting better? Why couldn’t they give me some drugs, or even do an operation to get me back to normal again? This was all taking far too long.

Occasionally we’d be taken for days out. We were bussed off to Birdworld once, a huge park where they had lots of aviaries, and you could watch penguins being fed and see herons doing tricks. I wanted to walk round on my own but the orderlies insisted that we all stayed together and didn’t wander off, as if we were a bunch of schoolchildren. That was really irritating.

The other thing that annoyed me was in the coffee shop when a stupid waitress turned to one of the orderlies and asked, ‘Will he have tea or coffee?’ She was referring to me. Why not ask me directly? I thought that was terribly rude. Did she think I was mentally subnormal and incapable of answering for myself just because my walking was a bit funny and I twitched a lot?

‘C-coffee,’ I told her, annoyed with myself for stammering.

She wouldn’t meet my eye; she just scribbled it down on her pad and hurried away. She definitely wasn’t getting a tip, I decided angrily.

After that I became very self-conscious when we were out in public, noticing the way people would glance at me then look away again quickly, worried that they might be caught staring. Did I really look so bad? To me, I looked the same in the mirror as I always had, but the twitches were intensely annoying.

Sometimes we were taken to the theatre, but I had no patience with anything that didn’t contribute directly to me being cured. Sod the Shakespeare, I thought. Just make me well and get me back to work. And hurry up about it!