A few weeks ago, the TV and radio presenter Richard Bacon was in the news for having spent seven days in an induced coma in Lewisham Hospital in south London after becoming ill with a lung infection on a flight from Los Angeles. Doctors told him afterwards that he had nearly died. My first reaction to this was: how dreadful for him and his family. My second reaction, more or less on top of the first, was: seven days? That’s nothing.
In 2012, I spent three weeks in an induced coma at King’s College Hospital, a few miles down the road from Lewisham, and 51 days in intensive care overall. Often, when I tell people I had pneumonia they are shocked and ask how I caught it. In fact, pneumonia is relatively common and, although still dangerous for the elderly or anyone with a compromised immune system, is usually easily treated with antibiotics. In my case, it was not so straightforward. Like Bacon, for a time I was close to death. At one point one of the consultants told my family I was “the sickest man in London”.
It began in what was perhaps the best and most exciting week of my professional life. I had been shortlisted for a major literary award, the Sunday Times Short Story prize, and the day before I became ill I had watched the actor Julian Sands perform my story at an event in central London. Three days later I was due to go to the prize ceremony at Christ Church College, Oxford, but by then I was in bed with what seemed like a bad case of flu. I had stopped eating, I had a pain in my right side and was taking paracetamol and aspirin every four hours to keep my temperature down. That evening, I lay in bed refreshing Twitter but by the time the news came through that I had not won the £30,000 prize, I felt too ill to care.
Four days after that, hallucinating and unable to stand, I was taken to King’s in an ambulance; four days after that I was put into a coma and intubated – a tube put down my throat to drive oxygen into my lungs and my bloodstream. The next three weeks, unknown to me at the time, were dramatic. I had not responded to the antibiotics and was diagnosed with severe sepsis and then acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) where the lungs inflame, harden, and then stop processing oxygen, a condition which has a 50% mortality rate. My brother returned from working abroad and the rest of the family visited on rotation. My five-year-old daughter, in her first year of school, was brought in to see me. The matron told my wife that children who lose a parent cope better in the long run if they have had a chance to see them before they die. My son, only six months old, was kept away.
Nevertheless, I survived. Three weeks later, the infection had receded, I was woken from the coma and, following a period of intensive-care psychosis during which I believed the nurses and doctors were trying to kill me, I recovered quickly.
My natural predisposition is not towards happy endings. I have written many short stories and none of them end well. I am averse to the idea of character building, growth through suffering, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I do not want to seem glib or trite. But taking the long view – as I can now, six years later, with the memory of the long, often desperate days in hospital disappearing – it is hard to see it any other way: nearly dying was life-affirming.
It was life-affirming not only because I survived but because I survived without the legacy of illness that the doctors at one point predicted: a year or two of convalescence, oxygen tanks at home, perhaps permanent invalidity. It had been very bad luck to become as ill as I had – ARDS is relatively rare and poorly understood, and afterwards the doctors could give me no reason as to why I had developed it – but within three months of leaving hospital I was back at work, more or less 100% fit. The only physical sign of my ordeal, then and now, is a small pinkish scar at the base of my throat from a tracheostomy. I have been back to the hospital several times over the last few years to meet with groups of other former intensive-care patients, and it is immediately obvious many of them have not been so lucky.
It was life-affirming because countless strangers had worked carefully, skilfully and relentlessly to preserve my life, because through extraordinary efforts and human co-operation a system had been created that was there to save me and anyone else who found themselves in the same position, regardless of who we were. I had thought about this a lot in intensive care and then again when I was better and moved to an ordinary ward. In the bed opposite me was a Somali boy, perhaps 17 or 18, unable to speak English, without visitors or family, his illness unknown to me, but plainly traumatised, the NHS seemingly all he had. It was life-affirming because people did all the things that they are supposed to do; abandoned their own work and lives to sit by my bedside when I was in a coma and hold my hand or read to me, sent food for my family and looked after my wife and children, wrote letters and emails, lit candles, sang or chanted, endless kindnesses, and later, when I was better, insisted on buying me lunch or dinner. It was life-affirming because I had a job which carried on paying me and then let me come back to work part-time, and we were not left ruined by my illness.
In the immediate aftermath, and for perhaps a year after, I was on a high. I had cheated death. Everyone knew how ill I had been. When I went back in to see the doctors they told me they had not expected me to make it, that my recovery was miraculous. I felt like a miracle. I wrote and spoke about the experience, to medical students and nurses, made fundraising videos for the hospital. I enjoyed the celebrity and had a strong sense of my own specialness – I had been to the edge and come back.
But even when this wore off, and in the long term, there have been unlikely – counter-intuitive – benefits. For several years before the illness, I had suffered from periods of acute anxiety, much of it to do with my health. Intensive care, particularly long stays like mine, are known to leave psychological scars; post-traumatic stress disorder is common. When I was getting better but still in hospital, my wife and brother joked that once I was discharged they would wheel me straight over the road to the Maudsley, the largest psychiatric hospital in the UK. It didn’t work out like that. If anything, the opposite seems to have been true – that the severity of what happened has in some way immunised me, physically and psychologically, from further illness. My anxiety has abated and I have barely had a day off sick in the past six years. Perhaps this is a common phenomenon, but I doubt it. One friend claimed I am a 10% better person that I was before I was ill, meaning it, I think, in the most general sense, and I wouldn’t argue with that.
Other good things happened. While I was off work recovering, with time on my hands, I began, after years of trying, to write a novel. In the book, The Alarming Palsy of James Orr, a man of about my age, with a family, a job and a mortgage, wakes one morning with one half of his face paralysed. Confined to his house and immediate neighbourhood, his life begins to unravel. Amazingly, it took other people to point out the parallels with my own experience. I also wrote and published a long account of being in hospital. Laura Barber, an editor at Granta, read the piece, contacted me to see what else I was working on, and the novel was published at the end of last year.
All this sounds like hubris, I realise, and even now there may well be scars, physical as well as mental, that cannot be seen but may yet reveal themselves. In many ways, it was not me who suffered the worst of it. By the time things became critical I was deep in unconsciousness, and it was the people around me who were forced to contemplate the real possibility of my death. I am not haunted by what happened, though I do often think of the other version of life, the version in which things did not work out, where my children grow up without me, fatherless, my daughter with fading memories, my son – easier for him, perhaps – with none at all. But this, although it can make me cry, is not really a bad feeling, only a clarifying and grateful one.
So, against my better instincts, a happy ending, at least for now. Of course, none of us know what calamities might be round the corner; that much has been made clear to me.
The Alarming Palsy of James Orr, by Tom Lee is out now, priced £8.99. Order it for £7.64 at guardianbookshop.com
