The Beginning of the End

Part 3 – The Beginning of the End

10 September 2019

3.30 am A man in pyjamas is lying on a bed stripped to the waist. Leaning over him is a woman he has never seen before.

She’s attaching pads to his chest. He’s being rigged up to an electrocardiogram to check his heart's rhythm and electrical activity. “It’s a little high, but nothing to worry about love,” the nurse says reassuringly.

But he is worried. Minutes before he was blue lighted by ambulance from another hospital, Airedale General Hospital (AGH) barely 12 miles away, where he was told he had been hit by a stroke. A brain had been attacked.

The bleeps of heart monitors and saline drips on the ward are incessant. He could barely hear himself think, let alone sleep. And sleep is what he needed most. The man had been awake for 20 hrs.

A nurse puts a canula in his arm. He hardly feels the prick as the needle enters a vein in his arm. She links it up to a saline drip. “Don’t worry love, it’s just to keep your fluids up.”

What’s HASU?

Above on his left writ large on the wall are the letters H. A. S. U. “What’s that?” “You’re in the hyper-acute stroke unit at Bradford Royal Infirmary love.”

While it sounds impressive, it also sounds pretty serious. “You’ve been on the edge of life, but you are back with us now,“ the nurse says.

Questions. Too many questions.

Within 30 minutes a youngish doctor strolls up beside his bed in HASU. He smiles and starts running through a list of questions.

When did you feel this coming on? Where were you when this happened? What were you doing? How did you fall? Did you hit your head when you fell? Do you have any chest pains? Do you smoke? How much have you had to drink in the past 24 hrs? Have you had any symptoms like this before. Has your family any history of heart problems? Have you any weakness or numbness in your limbs - in your face, arms, hands, legs or feet?

The man tells the doctor: “I have a splitting headache and I can’t feel anything down my left side. I can’t move my left arm and barely move my left leg. My left hand and foot don’t appear to belong to me.”

“The left side of my mouth is numb and I have a strong metallic taste in my mouth. It feels like I’ve just been to the dentist.”

The doctor seems completely unfazed by the rush of answers from the man, which is both reassuring and annoying to him.

“As they may have told you Mr Minton-Taylor, you have had a bleed on the brain. But don’t worry, you are going to be alright.”

 But I don’t feel alright and it’s 3.45 in the morning and I just want to go to sleep.

 Twelve Hours Before

 09 September 2019.

3.30 pm Almost twelve hours before I had been sitting at my desk staring at a blank PC screen trying to put together a brief for a project for postgraduate PR students to work on with IKEA Yorkshire.

I just couldn’t seem to find the find the right words. A mental block. It was just two weeks before the start of a new academic year and I had promised my academic course leader I was going to have this brief sown up for him. At this rate it wasn’t going to be delivered. This was becoming a bad day at the ‘office’, and unbeknown to me, it was going to get a whole lot worse.

I pecked at the keyboard one more time trying to see if I could wrap up the brief. But it just wasn’t happening. I felt deflated. It was at that moment I felt a slight tingly feeling in my left fingers and thumb. I needed a break and an expresso uplift.

I got up from the office chair but, my left hand loses its grip on the armrests of the chair and my left leg gave way under me. I could feel myself crumple in slow motion to the floor. In trying to steady my fall I grabbed the desk with my right hand, but all I achieved was to pull the keyboard and computer monitor down on top of me.

I tried to reach up to the phone, but all I managed to do was yank the cord of the handset from its base. My mobile phone was recharging at the back of the desk out of reach.

I couldn’t even get up on my knees and crawl to the office door - barely a few feet away. But failed. My left thigh was tingling, but this was a feeling I had experienced before, so I thought I was having nothing more than a bout of severe cramp.

My Wife Finds Me

4.45 pm my wife Caroline found me an hour later crumpled on the floor of our home office. I pleaded, rather unconvincingly, with her that if she helped me up to bed that I’d be fine by the morning. All I needed was a good’s night rest. “If I’m no better, then let’s call the GP.” She gave me one of her knowing looks.

8.30 pm Caroline comes up the stairs and checks on me and noticed for the first time that the left side of my mouth was distinctly lopsided.

"We’re Going To The Hospital"

 “I’m sorry, but we are going to Airedale (General Hospital) right now. We are not waiting for an ambulance”. I protest, but Caroline was most insistent and as a former intensive care unit nurse. I reluctantly accept her decision.

[I’ve been to A&E departments before and I know there will be a long wait in store, and I didn’t feel dressed. Turning up in pyjamas and a dressing gown didn’t really fit in with my suit and tie image. [’m of the age when in the 1960s you saw your GP in a suit and tie in respect of the medical profession].

8.50 pm Our car draws-up outside the hospital’s A&E department three miles away. Caroline grabbed a vacant wheelchair from inside the reception area and lifted me into it from the car.

I’m wheeled into reception and within 20 mins I’m in front of a young male Polish triage nurse. He took my pulse checks my temperature and heart, and shined a light into my eyes.

Reality Dawns

9.10 pm “I think you’ve had a stroke Mr Minton-Taylor”. I am dumbfounded. This can’t be right I thought. I can still talk and think, although admittedly I knew I wasn’t thinking straight. “We need to get you examined further.”

The next five and a half hours are spent lying on a hospital bed in a cubicle in a new A&E department which all looks very up-to-the minute and sparkling clean.

I’m checked over by a duty woman doctor and go to radiography for a CT scan on my brain. I wait for the results of the scan. It seems to take ages.

A nurse passes by and thoughtfully puts a blanket over me as the super-efficient aircon is making this ward seem very cold.

The woman doctor who has been attending to me says: “You’ve had a subdural hematoma, a bleed on the brain. I’m going to check with the on-call consultant at Bradford Royal Infirmary (BRI) to see if we need to get you transferred to the BRI. It’s our specialist stroke unit for the region," she says.

Talk To Me

10 September 2019

At 2.40 am two cheerful paramedics turn up and lift me onto a trolley and wheel me into the back of an ambulance.

The woman paramedic takes the wheel and drives like a bat out of hell to the BRI. 

In the back of the ambulance the male paramedic takes my hand. “Talk to me,” he said. I didn’t much feel like talking, and said so. “Just talk to me,” he insists. “You need to keep awake." 

The drive barely takes 20 minutes. There’s an eerie stillness outside the BRI even though we are just off the city centre. But then I realise it’s three in the morning.

[I had driven an ambulance as a motoring journalist. There’s little feel in the steering, they wallow at an alarming rate round corners and you feel shockwaves rippling through the body of the vehicle on anything but a perfectly surfaced road. In other words they are a pig to drive, but in this paramedic’s hands she made the drive look all so easy. Skill and experience count].

I’m whisked out of the ambulance on a trolley. There is discussion about which floor we need to go to.

The Man in the Dressing Gown

We wait for what seems like an eternity for the lift the doors to open. A man shuffles out of the lift in a dressing gown. He’s got an unlit cigarette in his hand.

The paramedics look at the long list of wards on the inside of the lift, when the man asks how he can help. “HASU”, asks the female paramedic. “Oh its next door to the Ward 6, the stroke ward,” he says. “I’ve just come from there I’ll take you up.”

We all squeeze in the lift together and the lift ascends slowly to the ward. We all get out and he gets back in. He turns round to the woman paramedic without getting out of the lift and gives her a big smile. “Don’t tell them, will you. I’m not supposed to be off the ward.” She draws a finger across her sealed lips. I envisage the opening scene from “The Full Monty”.

As I am pushed through a set of double doors into what looks like something out of the American TV series ER, the stillness of the corridor is sharply broken by the cacophony of a busy ward. 

The paramedics hand over my papers to a nurse and I am carefully lifted from the ambulance trolley onto a hospital bed.

The paramedics bid their farewells and a new chapter begins.

It’s 3.30 am and it’s been nearly 12 hours since my stroke.

Afterpiece

11 September 2019

A day later after being transferred from the HASU unit to Ward 6 at the BRI I quiz a youngish-looking consultant about my condition. I marvel at the way he is balancing a laptop carefully on one hand while scrolling through to my notes using his other hand. He looks tired, but he gives me a reassuring smile. I like his approach.

“How are you feeling Mr Minton-Taylor,” he asks. “As well as can be expected, I suppose,” I reply.

“So what’s the prognosis doctor. I mean what can I now expect?” I ask. “Well, we are going to keep you in for a day or two, keep you under observation and do a few more checks. If they don’t reveal anything more, we’ll get you transferred to Airedale for rehabilitation.

This is the same consultant I now work with as a stroke ambassador for AGH’s and BRI to improve patient liaison and experience between the hospitals and patients, especially in the post-hospital phase.

A report in the ‘Age and Aging’ Journal in March 2020, reported on the economic costs of stroke with around 100,000 new stroke cases and over one million people living with the consequences of stroke annually in the UK. The aggregate societal cost of stroke is £26 billion per year including £8.6 billion for NHS and Social care and significant unpaid carer demand. The report concludes that ‘interventions aimed at rehabilitation and reducing new and recurrent stroke are likely to yield substantial benefits’.