1 week ago
29
On the evening of Monday 1 February 2021, during the third Covid lockdown, my wife Alexa and I sat down on the sofa to have sausages and chips in front of the TV. The children were tetchy, and we were worn out from trying to home-school them while working from home, me as a lawyer in the music industry and Alexa as a charity fundraiser. But at least, Alexa said to me, we had made it through January.
Then I started making strange noises. “Are you joking?” she asked. Then, “are you choking?”
She knew it was my heart. Days before, my cardiologist had told me I would need surgery within the next six months to repair a leaking valve that had been getting progressively worse for years.
“What if you don’t have the surgery?” Alexa had asked. I replied: “I’ll just drop down dead.” I was joking – my heart problem wasn’t thought to be that serious – but as it turned out, I was right. By the time my dinner tray started slipping from my lap to the floor, I was already clinically dead. My heart had stopped beating and I wasn’t breathing. I was having a cardiac arrest.
I am alive now only because of my wife and son who got help, my friend and neighbour Peter who gave me cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and the paramedics who eventually got my heart started again – 40 minutes after I had stopped breathing.
I was taken to hospital in a state of deep unconsciousness, leaving Alexa standing in our living room, where the furniture had been pushed aside and there was mud on the floor and debris from the paramedics’ equipment strewn everywhere.
It would be two months before I’d return home, visually impaired and with a brain injury, my perspective on life altered completely.
The days after my cardiac arrest were a time of total contrast: Alexa was living a nightmare, not knowing whether I would live or die, while I was in a coma, oblivious to what was happening.
Then, on Friday, I woke up. The hospital set up a video call for me to talk to Alexa, but I was making no sense. The following day, it became clear that I was blind. That’s when the doctors started talking to Alexa about a brain injury caused by the lack of oxygen, and her relief at me having survived turned into a sense of dread about what this might mean.
A few days later, Alexa was allowed to visit me in the hospital as an exception to the lockdown rules; the doctors thought it could help me as I was so confused and disoriented. I was also hallucinating. When she arrived, I had just had a brain scan, and when she asked me about it, I told her I had been to a premiere of a film about bees.
Over the coming days, when Alexa wasn’t visiting, we would video call a lot. She says I was laughing and joking as if I was hosting a dinner party, completely unaware of what had happened. She, the doctors and the nurses would tell me time and again that I’d had a cardiac arrest and that I had a brain injury, but I would immediately forget anything that I’d been told.
Weeks later in neurological rehab, I underwent extensive testing which found my memory and other cognitive functions were in the bottom 2% of the population. One day in hospital I asked why my mother hadn’t been to visit, and Alexa had to tell me that she had died three years before.
During the second week, my sight began to return, but only partially and I had trouble processing what I was seeing. I remember sitting by the hospital window one day, feeling cold air seeping through the window frames, craving a breath of it. It had snowed overnight, and I was looking out at Hampstead Heath, unable to understand why it was white.
Throughout this time, the hallucinations – caused by the brain trying to compensate for my loss of vision – continued. One had a significant impact on me, and really my novel, This, My Second Life, came from it.
In it, I was in a cottage hospital in Dublin, some time in the past. I was alone in bed in a small dark room. The door was ajar and outside a group of young nurses with lilting Irish accents were sitting round a table in the soft glow of an oil lamp, talking very quietly. Murmuring, really. I felt so looked after, like nothing could possibly hurt me, and it had a profound effect on me.
I believe I had that hallucination because I was being looked after like that in real life. I still remember and am grateful for the extreme kindness of the doctors and nurses and other people working at the hospitals I stayed in, and those who have cared for me since.
Around that time, I felt as a baby with a belly full of milk must feel: content and untouched by the world. Before, I’d been trying to balance a stressful job with lockdown and home schooling. Now I just sat or lay for hours without thinking about anything, floating through time. The busy part of my brain had been turned off, and all I experienced were sensations, not thoughts. It was like the silence after a monumental crash.
When I returned home from hospital, I wanted to hold on to this feeling, to record it, and I began to write. I can see now that with my writing I was creating a world that reflected the tranquillity that I was experiencing. I was building a sanctuary that I could go to for that sensation of total peace.
I remember a hot day, lying outdoors and writing in my notebook. I carried on like this, writing small amounts by hand, once every few days, often forgetting what I had written before, and hampered also by dyslexia and extreme fatigue from the brain injury.
As I wrote slowly over the next three years, I came to realise how fundamentally my experience had changed me. I see the world differently now, and although I am very limited in what I can do compared with before, my life feels freer and more open.
It was important to me to have a connection to the work of my late mother, the writer Helen Dunmore. My main character is called Jago, the name of the young boy in a picture book my mother and I worked on together years ago. I also reincarnated the character of Granny Carne from my mother’s Cornish Ingo books, a wise woman as old as the hills who helps Jago adjust to his life after suffering the same health crisis as me. So, although I can’t tell my mother about my book, I am happy that there is a thread through time connecting her work to mine.
When I finished writing the novel, I put it away and didn’t do anything with it. Trying to publish it would have been a step too far back into the world.
But I also knew that I needed more from life than just drifting through, that I had a second chance, so I sent my novel out. When I was offered a publishing deal for it, I felt as if I was being given a new start, and I understood that writing is what I will do.
In a way, This, My Second Life is not only about Jago’s second life, but about mine too. I have a lot of problems, but I am alive, I can see, I have my family and friends, and I can write. My greatest hope for my novel is that it leaves readers feeling uplifted and with the sense of peace, contentment and possibility that it has given to me.
