Endal: How one extraordinary dog brought a family back from the brink. Sandra Parton
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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!
Headley Court was a military establishment, where they all wore uniform and you needed a pass to get through the gates. The furniture in the day rooms was standard issue, exactly the same as they put in the married persons’ accommodation. The staff all seemed very nice, though, and I thought the facilities were excellent.
It was our eighth wedding anniversary, 5 November 1991, when Allen was admitted there. The first thing they did was run a series of psychometric tests to establish his brain capacity at the time. I remember one of the tests was to see whether he could put some cards into a particular sequence. The doctors told me that he would start to do it, then forget what he was doing and have to ask them to remind him. That was a bad sign, they said. It would have been better if he had laid the cards out and maybe got the sequence slightly wrong, because that would have shown that at least he understood and remembered the instruction.
They showed him a card with a shape on it and asked him what it would look like if you turned it through 90 degrees. He had no idea. They also asked him questions such as, ‘If you were in a shop paying for something that cost fifty pence and you handed over a pound, how much change would you get?’ And he didn’t have a clue. Not a clue. I was horrified when they told me. What on earth had happened to him? Liam could have answered some of the questions he was getting wrong. They got him into intensive physio to try and deal with the twitches and loss of leg control, and speech therapy to deal with his stuttering and difficulty in forming words, but what were they going to do about his loss of cognitive powers, I wondered? How could they ever fix that? Sometimes the brain can heal, but I was aware that brain injuries can also get worse over time as more brain tissue dies off.
The extent of his brain damage sank in gradually over weeks and months, rather than straight away. When he came home for weekends, I watched him like a hawk, straining to find any glimpses of the old Allen and the relationship we used to have, hoping and praying that any day now he would snap out of it and get back to normal.
‘Do you want to watch TV?’ I’d ask. ‘That programme you like is on.’
‘OK.’ He’d shrug, and we’d sit down to watch it together, but when I glanced at his face it would be blank and I could tell he wasn’t following it at all. He didn’t laugh at funny moments, or react in any way to what was happening on the screen.
When I referred to things we’d done together in the past, or places we’d been, there was a similar blankness. One day I pointed out our wedding photograph on the wall.
‘You remember our wedding day, don’t you?’ There was no recognition on Allen’s face. ‘In Wilton?’ I continued, tears coming to my eyes. ‘It was Guy Fawkes Night. Your friend Kevin was best man. Look, there he is.’ I pointed to the photo again.
Allen shook his head. ‘Don’t remember.’
‘Do you remember how we met?’ I persisted. He paused and then shook his head.
There had been plenty of clues before but it was then I finally realized that he didn’t remember me at all from before the accident. I burst out crying, covered my face and ran upstairs. I threw myself on the bed, sobbing my heart out. I suppose I must have known already, but I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself. I wished I hadn’t pushed him. It had been easier not knowing because now I had to think about all the implications of it. If he didn’t remember me, did I really still have a husband?
That first day when I picked him up from Haslar he hadn’t had a clue who I was. The staff had told him I was his wife, so he knew that much