Death Just A Whisker Away

“We worked in gangs for all we were worth

The young boys pulling the wagons

We were digging the tunnels, shifting the earth

It was then that it happened

No-one knew how the cracks appeared

But as it fell they all disappeared

Stone fell like rain”

-Genesis – Driving The Last Spike

I think that song and especially those verses are quite apt for what happened in October 2008.

The phone call from Amanda, my step-mother, was one I never thought I'd have to hear. Every boy's father is immortal and in his mid-fifties, he should have had 3 or 4 more decades of what we class as a proper life. It happened so quickly, nobody could take it in, especially me.

Dad had never had any kind of serious illness, nothing life threatening and had never had a serious operation. That proved to be his downfall, life's way of being a complete bitch. He'd been out for a meal with Amanda and started to feel ill. Off he trundled to hospital. That in itself proves just how bad the pain must have been. There was a long delay, with Dad in serious pain before the doctors jumped into action and relieved the pain. They quickly found the problem lay in his appendix, it was on the verge of bursting and that meant it had to come out.

It was about this time Amanda sent that first text I think, letting me know Dad was ill and in hospital. He was put under sedation, ready for the operation to remove the appendix. A fairly ordinary procedure, done every day around the world. He should have been out of hospital and back at work within a week. He'd never go back to work again. He'd never go home again.

The allergic reaction to the anaesthetic wasn't immediate. It didn't actually rear it's ugly head until the operation was well under way and boy did it hit at the worst possible moment. Dad's heart stopped, he was clinically dead and the doctors had a very big decision to make. Sew him up, bring him round and have the poisons from the bursting appendix kill him, or carry on operating with his heart stopped. For the doctors, there was only one choice....

They kept operating. I have never blamed them for the decision they made, it was the right one by them. As doctors, they made the correct choice.

Had Dad had the option though, it would have gone the other way. He'd have said that if it went past 4 minutes with his heart stopped, he'd want to die. I am exactly the same, I'd make the same choice as he would have done. Sadly, he wasn't capable of making that choice, he was clinically dead.

By time they'd finished the emergency part of the operation and resuscitated him, his heart had been stopped for 15 minutes. Don't believe the movies and don't believe people who tell you they were clinically dead for that long and are still telling you themselves. Starved of oxygen for more than 4 minutes, the brain starts to die. So after 15 minutes, you can probably guess just how grave the situation was.

I was still unaware of just how serious the problem was, but the phone call arrived on the Monday evening.

Amanda filled me in on the whole situation. Dad was suffering multiple organ failure, his brain was pretty much gone and he wasn't expected to last long. For someone who suffered from massive anxiety problems, this was one hell of a kick in the balls. Actually, scratch that, this was a shotgun, right to the heart.

I had to get down there. I had to say goodbye to my father. The soonest Amanda could get me there was the Wednesday, with a 5 hour coach trip. I couldn't wait that long. The mother dug deep and gave me £50, to get the train the following day, which took less than 2 hours. My last blog mentioned that I have never been lost in my life. Although technically true, I was all at sea when I arrived at Rugby station to change for my train to Northampton.

Rugby junction and the station itself was going through a major upgrade and new, temporary platforms had been built. I hadn't been to the station for a couple of years, although growing up, I was there twice a fortnight going to visit Dad. When I got off the train, I remember being on the phone to someone, I forget who it was though. I got off the train onto one of the temporary platforms and couple that with the lack of awareness because I was on the phone and the massive anxiety I was feeling at the time, I couldn't comprehend where I was.

Thankfully I managed to find my bearings, just in time to catch the connecting train. When I got to Northampton, my brother and his then girlfriend picked me up at the station airport. He couldn't resist stirring up some trouble, even in that situation.

The night before, as I was stressing my heart out, sat on my own at my computer, I'd managed to get hold of my cousin on Facebook. On the chat, where nobody but he and I could see it, I informed him of the situation. Somewhere, lost in translation, my family thought I had posted all the information on my Facebook status, or on my cousins wall. They all started bitching about it and my brother “warned” me that people were pissed off. I soon set the record straight with them and no more was said about it.

Also in the car, I asked my brother if he was planning on going to the hospital to visit Dad later that day. His answer, and I quote was; “I don't know, I'm scared of hospitals remember”. Had I not been in a moving car, I'd have decked him on the spot. I'm afraid of 300 foot falls but I would certainly get the hell over that fear sharpish to say goodbye to my father.

When I arrived at the waiting room of the intensive care unit at Northampton hospital, I sat down without even looking at the rest of the family. There was tension in the room as soon as I walked in, all to do with this Facebook conversation I had had the night before. They had caused this tension, not me, by turning something that was so insignificant at that point, it may as well have happened on the moon, with another family.

Eventually Amanda's mum got sick of the tension, grabbed me and led me to my Dad's bedside. Not one of my relatives even thought that I might want to see my Dad, they were too busy judging me silently and continuing their opinions that I was a bad son. After what had happened and the way they had treated me at Dad's 50^th, that was the penultimate nail in the coffin of their existence to me.

Dad was hooked up to all sorts of machines. He had improved slightly. Organs had started to work again, but he was still in the danger zone. I still thought at that point I was there to say goodbye to him. My brother was there aswell. I told him in no uncertain terms that he was a dickhead for even suggesting he wouldn't be there at every available opportunity and for once, he paid attention. The condition Dad was in hadn't really sunk in by then. I didn't know what everything meant, or even what had happened. I just didn't know what to do.

Kirsty may already have slipped your mind by this point. That's not that surprising considering I'd barely heard a peep from her since all this had happened. She knew what was going on, she knew where I was and why I was there. I made sure the texts, voicemail messages and private Facebook messages gave the the full story. Yet she barely said a word back.

Now to put you into the picture about my state of mind that first evening in Northampton, I had rushed down there to say goodbye to my Dad, who was by no means out of the woods yet, my family had chosen an insignificant topic to kick off at me about, which wasn't actually true and I was under a great deal of strain before any of this had happened. What Kirsty pulled next was incomprehensible.

I'd taken my old laptop with me, so I had at least connection to the outside world if I needed it, and boy did I need it. 3 days after I had rushed to be by Kirsty's side after she twisted her ankle in a motorbike crash, I thought I could rely on her to be there for me in my time of need.

Could I bollocks, as it turned out

It was on Facebook again, the only place I could get hold of her. It was on the chat and she actually replied. It wasn't to last. I have no idea how the conversation got to the place it did, but somehow she was telling me that she was worried about our relationship and where it was heading. She wouldn't go into more details though. I told her to suck it up and tell me. I regretted saying that.

“We're stuck inside all the time, I want to be down at the pub with my friends”

The reaction you just had? Yeah, me too!

I kicked off and kicked off big. I ranted and raved through my fingertips, telling her how selfish and insensitive she was being. I don't think she replied to any of my questions though and next thing I knew, she had disappeared, gone offline. I snapped. I don't regret how I ended it with her, I did it right there and then, in a private message on Facebook. She deserved nothing more from me and her behaviour over the next few days would just prove that beyond doubt.

Amanda told me I could have anything from the drinks cabinet, apart from the vodka and Southern Comfort. I took that literally and in the next two weeks, drank EVERYTHING in there apart from those. I was drinking a bottle of Jameson's every night. Straight from the bottle, or mixed with coke, Irn Bru, lemonade or anything else in the fridge. When the Jameson's had gone, I moved onto the Bushmills, then the Bells, then onto the gin. A bottle a night was the minimum I'd consume. I don't think I slept in my old bedroom at all that first week, I fell asleep on the sofa every night about 3am. Then Amanda would wake me up at 8 when it was time to go back to the hospital.

Dad was improving slightly, his organs at least. Eventually he started to regain consciousness. Well, his eyes opened anyway. It soon became evident at just how catastrophic the situation had been. Although he wasn't completely brain dead, he wasn't a vegetable as such. But he was pretty close. That side of him hasn't improved any even to this day, 3 years later. It was obvious that he was no longer the Dad we knew, the person we knew. As far as I'm concerned, he doesn't know what a human being is, never mind who I am. He reacts to movement, noise and light, but that's about it.

My feelings and controversial feelings at that, is that Dad died in October 2008. It's just his body that lived on. Our minds were always so similar, that was our connection. His was gone, which meant the connection we shared, was also gone.

My anxiety was at it's height. I could barely process all of the emotions going through me. Things got worse when I went back on my laptop and looked at the outside world. Kirsty was slagging me off in public. On Facebook, to my friends, to her friends, to complete strangers, nobody was immune to her feelings about me. Within two days, she was going out with someone else, but still seemed to be obsessed with bringing it all back to me. Five days later she was declaring her love for her new boyfriend and still laying into me from all directions.

Thoughts of suicide appeared very quickly and became more regular by the hour. The alcohol was doing a number on me aswell. I was suffering from what I now call the “whisky hangover”. No headache, no dull pain at all, just a feeling that the world is spinning faster than you can blink. Then came the cigarette issue. It wasn't that I was smoking so much, it was that the nicotine didn't react well with the whisky hangover. I was on the verge of collapsing at the hospital most days and of course I hadn't made the connection with the drinking at that point.

My heart was beating at a fast pace almost constantly. It didn't stop, day or night. Medically speaking, I should have probably had a heart attack in that first week. In the second week, while on the phone to a friend and having a smoke in the back garden of the home my Dad had lived in throughout my childhood, I asked her if she could get me some cannabis when I came back. I needed something to stop the anxiety, something to stop the fear of having a heart attack because I couldn't control my heartbeat and breathing anymore.

Things started to have an air of finality when Amanda started dividing up Dad's stuff between us all. Dad's fondness for games consoles meant he had all the modern ones and a cracking PC aswell.

My brother had first option and he chose the PS3, thinking that was the best of the lot. I don't think he realised that that left me with the powerful PC and the Xbox 360. The Wii was to go to my friends kids for Xmas. Amanda said she wanted £100 of whatever we got and I got the rest. £140 was a hell of a bargain for the Wii back then, when it was sold out 2 months before Xmas. They got a bargain and the kids got a cracking Xmas present. Organising all of this gave me opportunity to do some planning and take my mind off things. I had to come back home though. There was nothing I could do for Dad down there and I needed to come to terms with everything and I could only do that in Warrington.

The crap from Kirsty had calmed a bit, she was no longer insulting me at every turn, although it didn't stop entirely for a while. Getting my stuff picked up from her house was a different matter. I had my bike, some games and a few other bits and pieces. In return, I had her touch screen phone, which she had in fact given me as a gift a few weeks beforehand. After I had given my phone to my mother, it meant I was without one of my own. She was a complete dick about it all. I'd arrange for my friends to pick my stuff up while I was in Northampton and when they knocked on her door, it was always nobody home. Eventually, I got all the stuff back, then I returned the phone, but it all contributed to the stress and anxiety that almost crippled me, nay, killed me over those first 3 or 4 weeks without Dad.

I did smoke a bit of cannabis after returning. Not a massive amount, probably 9 or 10 spliffs over the next 3 months or so. I slept like a dream that first night home after smoking just half a spliff.

A few weeks later, Kirsty started to show some remorse for what she had done. I had filled in one of those Facebook questionnaire things and posted it, 30 things you may not know about me, or something like that. She didn't come out of that looking too good and commented at the end of it. I was surprised by what she wrote. She apologised for what she had done. Amanda, who had seen the damage it had done to me first hand, replied in kind by saying something along the lines of; “about fucking time that bitch said sorry for trying to destroy you”. She was spot on with that.

One thing I was struggling with was tears. There just wasn't any. I was upset, devastated, heartbroken. But I couldn't cry. That just stopped me from releasing the pressure and it built up to levels I hadn't seen before.

I went back down to Northampton at Xmas and Dad had been moved onto a ward. He'd live, but he'd need 24 hour support for the rest of his life. Life? It's no life what he has. Machines to breath, machines to eat, it's no way to live. He wouldn't want it like it is now. He'd rather be dead, I know he would. I know I would. I made a promise to him when I said goodbye to him the day I came back home. I know he didn't know what I was promising, or even who I was, what I was. I promised him I wouldn't be back until I had made him proud. I still haven't seen him since then. But I'm getting closer to fulfilling that promise to him.

I didn't tell anybody down there about my promise and that would cause ramifications in the following months.