Muamba’s slow recovery brings back dad’s hospital care
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
THE almost hourly media updates on the condition of Bolton Wanderers player Fabrice Muamba will, in all probability, be the closest many following the story ever come to an intensive care unit.
The much-loved 23-year-old’s on-pitch cardiac arrest earlier this month sparked a remarkable world-wide outpouring of sympathy.
‘Pray for Muamba’ became the Twitter watchword within minutes of the dramatic event. Those prayers appear to have been answered given his steady recovery in the London Chest Hospital ICU, where he has been looked after since his collapse in an FA Cup tie against Tottenham.
Like most folk, I had a fairly vague notion of what happens in an ICU, informed as much by TV medidramas like Casualty and George Clooney in ER as any real life experience.
That was until my dad wound up there following major surgery last month. The unfolding Fabrice Muamba story, magnified by a voracious media from inside the somewhat surreal bubble that is Premiership football, has brought it all back.
So there I was, sitting by a high-tech hospital bed reading Tam o’ Shanter out loud to someone almost certainly oblivious to my presence.
Truth be told, that was probably just as well because I was making a right hash of Burns’ classic poem, recently voted Scotland’s favourite. Ploughing on doggedly over the disinterested, robotic bleeping and whirring of a ventilator, heart and pulse monitors and an intravenous food drip, I’d find myself tangled up in the bard’s broad Scots dialect every second line or so.
Yes, it’s funny the things you find yourself doing in an ICU.
Self-consciousness tends to go out the window in the timeless, touch-and-go reality of a place where life hangs in the most delicate of balances.
If you’ve ever been on either side of a hospital visit — visitor or visited — you’ll appreciate that fresh news tends to be a precious commodity. The long, awkward silences kick in sooner than you might expect, unless of course there’s a natural gas bag either in or sitting next to the bed. Before long you’re talking hospital food and eating the grapes you’ve just brought them.
And that was one of the reasons I picked up the volume of The Nation’s Favourite Poems and started to flick through it. Can someone who is unconscious actually hear what you’re saying? I choose to believe they can, though that’s perhaps down to one too many hospital dramas.
The nursing staff, bless them, didn’t bat an eyelid as they came and went every few minutes to check on my dad, and on the wealth of raw data being spewed out by those machines helping him maintain a hold on life.
Burns’ words echoed down the years:
O Tam! had’st thou but been sae wise,
As ta’en thy ain wife Kate’s advice!
She tauld thee weel thou was a skellum,
A blethering, blustering, drunken blellum
I was sounding like a blustering, drunken blellum myself. Perhaps the trick is to have a dram or two before launching into it? Tam — and doubtless Burns too — would have concurred. I half expected my dad to rouse from his semi-comatose state, if only to beg me to shut up.
In the still of the night in such an intense yet peaceful atmosphere, the senses are heightened. I found myself appreciating the genius of Burns’ lines perhaps for the first time, laughing out loud at some of his inspired turns of phrase. I put on a CD of my dad’s by Gaelic singer Rachel Walker, an artist I’d not heard before. I didn’t need his native Gaelic tongue to understand what she was singing about.
Yes, it’s funny what you find yourself doing in an intensive care unit.
People often glibly talk of nurses as "angels" when describing a professionalism and above-and-beyond the call of duty devotion that can be the difference between life and death. Strangely I was more impressed with how down-to-earth those I was soon on first-name terms with were. In the somewhat surreal surroundings of an ICU, that can be just what you need.
I was delighted to meet for the first time in decades one old primary school classmate now working there. She showed all the calm assurance I recalled from a five-year-old girl 40-odd years ago.
Talk soon turned to childhood memories, laughter proving to be the best possible tonic.
I like to think that as well as being touched by the response to his predicament, Fabrice Muamba will be allowing himself a chuckle or two at the funny ways of the world as he recuperates in that ICU.
