Man Flu

A postcard from hell

Ben’s still got man flu, I say to the head of my daughter’s nursery. She lets out a compassionate chuckle. We know how men are.

It’s August in Mallorca and heat is already zig zagging off the pavement at 9am. This is why we moved back, I think, blinking into the sunshine as my daughter bum shuffles in to see her friends.

We’ve been back in Mallorca for almost a year, after 18 difficult months trying to make it work in the UK. We tried so hard to make England feel like home but my heart was in the Balearics. We wanted our children to play late into the evening in cobbled squares. We wanted mountains, sea, fresh produce and affordable childcare. The village we needed to raise our children was in Spain.

Ben packed our life into a horse trailer when I was 5 months pregnant and I waved him, the dog and the baby onto a ferry. He hadn’t the correct papers for neither dog nor trailer, yet through optimism and sheer force of will he somehow made it.

‘She’s a daddy’s girl,’ one woman at the nursery keeps saying to me. This makes me seethe, but I concede not many dads have road-tripped solo with their baby. They haven’t seen Ben for a couple of weeks and have missed him at drop off. They’re gutted he won’t be making an appearance at the Summer Paella party. One of the teachers is a die hard fan of his old band.

I wonder how he finds the time to look so presentable before leaving the house. I have known him to change his trainers three times before the nursery run. I, on the other hand am wearing my slippers and have breastmilk leaking from a nipple that’s escaped my bra. My youngest daughter is 4 months old and the nursery run has become my own personal takeshi’s castle. Do I leave the toddler to scream the house down / eat a tube of Sudocrem while I go to the car, or do I leave the baby in the house so the toddler’s tantrum is confined to the car seat? Sometimes I put them both in the double buggy and push them to the car but that can mean two rounds of buckle wrestling with my eldest and my arms are already dead from the weight of the maxi-cosi pebble. I am anxiously squinting over my shoulder to check that my other daughter is still asleep in the car. She’s in the throes of a sleep regression and I’m so tired my eyes feel hot.

Truthfully, I am furious that I have to do the nursery run again. I’m convinced that Ben hit it too hard at a festival he was performing at in Holland. He’s been sleeping in the afternoon - a crime in my eyes when I am still doing all the nights with the baby and at night he joins my eldest daughter in a chorus of coughs.

On the first night in forever that we decide to share a bed, he wakes up and is violently sick. We put it down to a bug from nursery. The next night he sweats through his sheets. He calls in sick at work, where he is growing micro-greens. I suggest that he gets a note from the doctor so they know that its serious.

The doctor runs some blood tests and gives him some antibiotics. He thinks he might have a stomach bug like e-coli. Later that evening he sends Ben an e-mail, telling him to go to the emergency room. I read the results and consult Dr google. His infection markers are concurrent with someone with sepsis.

‘Go now,’ I say.

Ben wants Supper first.

‘Please go now,’ I plead.

Ben starts frying a steak.

‘For god’s sake go now!’ I shout as he shovels food into his mouth.

He shows the Dr in A and E the results. He looks outwardly fine but he definitely has an infection. They put him on intravenous antibiotics and run more tests. Our insurance won’t pay for him to stay overnight so he comes home. The next day he goes to the public hospital, where they find a mass in his lung.

‘The fever means it probably isn’t cancer,’ he says. ‘Phew, I think.’ Then he says,

‘Best case scenario it’s TB.’ He’s put into isolation for the weekend and is sporadically visited by doctors in PPE. By Monday they’ve identified a bacterial infection in his lung called a Pseudonoma Aerigunosa. I look it up and find its commonly picked up by patients in ICUs. Its rare for a healthy person to catch it, even rarer for them to become very ill.

I feel terrible about the man flu.

He’s admitted onto the ward for a week, two weeks. He’s poorly but it still doesn’t feel too serious. ‘Treat it like a holiday,’ I say. ‘Enjoy the time off from childcare and use it as a chance to practice your Spanish.’

I start to operate as a single parent, relying on the generosity of my aunt who looks after the girls while I go into hospital. The bacteria is antibiotic resistant so they keep changing his treatment to try and beat the fever Eventually they decide they are winning the war and settle for one that can be administered at home. I can’t wait to have him back in the house, even if he isn’t up to much. He’ll be bed bound for a few more weeks but at least there will be another adult to laugh with. His mum is coming to help as well so my children are officially outnumbered.

On the day of her arrival I call him and he sounds tired but still on track to come home. I then don’t hear from him for the rest of the day. I wonder if he’s sleeping, then I wonder if he’s angry with me for not visiting the night before. At 8pm I crack and call the ward, mortified at the thought that I’m overreacting.

‘There is nobody by that name in the hospital,’ the operator says. I keep repeating his room number, convinced the language barrier is the problem. eventually she talks to her colleague,

‘I’m afraid he’s in a different hospital. He’s in intensive care.’

I start shaking. Why wouldn’t they call me? I go to charge my old English phone and see a missed call at 4pm. He’s put down my old number as his emergency contact.

I leave him a sobbing voice note that I hope we’ll laugh about when I see him tomorrow. Then I tell his mum as soon as she lands. The hospital won’t let us visit and can’t give us any information over the phone. We’ll have to go in at 8am the next day, they say. Neither of us sleep a wink.

We arrive with the baby in the pushchair and are greeted by a friendly doctor with curly hair and good English.

He was coughing up blood, the ICU doctor says, after leading us into a private room, but the only person able to cauterise his lung was in this hospital. The plan was to operate and take him back, but something went wrong with the operation. He lost a lot of blood and it wasn’t safe to move him so they had put him into a medically induced coma.

‘He was very very difficult to sedate.’

She tells us the plan is to wake him up in 48 hours, but 48 hours comes and goes. The mass in his lung is an enormous abscess full of bacteria. He has developed extremely severe pneumonia. He cannot breathe without assistance.

We meet a family who inform us that they’re ‘the people from the newspapers.’ Their daughter fell off a balcony and broke her back on their first ever family holiday.

‘We’ve already been in the Mirror and the Sun, the BBC want us now but we’re not doing any more interviews.’ They show us where to queue outside the double doors to the ICU.

They’re raising money to have her repatriated to England. Every day spent in the ICU is costing them money. I thank the universe for Ben’s part time job growing micro-greens which gave him access to healthcare. We’ve been asked about repatriation by almost everyone we speak to.

‘Wouldn’t you rather do this at home. Do you really think an island can offer good enough care?’

I kindly point out that we are in Spain, not outer Mongolia and we didn’t arrive on this Island by seaplane. The hospital we’re in is a University hospital on an Island with the third largest airport in Spain. The King of Spain has a house here. The healthcare is genuinely excellent. I’ve spent time in many hospitals throughout my life, and this is one of the best ones I’ve seen.

They read out the patients’ names from a list outside the double doors that lead to ICU. Lorenzo, Silvia, Francesco, Maria. They don’t have middle names in Spain so Ben is announced as ‘John David Mount.’

We’re directed to box 20, one in a number of glass cubicles full of sleeping people attached to bleeping machines. Behind the desks are doctors in royal blue scrubs, monitoring everybody’s vitals on a bank of computers. They chat amongst themselves and I feel a surge of rage that for them this is just another day in the office, when for me its a day in hell. Nurses flit in and out of the boxes, emptying catheters, taking notes and changing medications.

Ben’s medication is changed a lot. Every day the doctors take a sample from his lung and grow a culture, trying to second guess what this gram negative bacteria will do next. The antibiotics are struggling to keep up with its rapid mutations. Everything is new. His rotating bed is new to Spain, his latest antibiotic is new to science. This situation is new to all of us. New and terrifying and exhausting.

He usually sleeps on his back with his arms crossed so I’m hopeful he will look peaceful in the coma, but they’ve put him on his front to help him breathe. A huge tube had been forced down his throat and his swollen tongue is sticking out of his mouth. He has blood on his chin, in his fingernails and in his ears.

Families are allowed to visit at 8am, 8pm and 1.30pm when there’s an update from the doctor. As he’s asleep we restrict ourselves to the one visit, queueing up at lunchtime with the other devastated families. One of us waits outside with the baby while the other chats nonsense to his unresponsive body. I share notes as we swap over, ‘On his back today, less blood in the tube of lung fluid but his temps at 40.’

I have to change into a gown, mask and gloves outside his see through box. Sometimes I hold his lifeless hand with my rubber blue one, but sometimes I sit in a chair and stare at my phone. Dissociating until I can see a doctor who says,' ‘its mutated again,’ or ‘no change.’

On some days the doctors invite us into a room for further discussion. These tend to be meetings where we get bad news, or discover new secondary diagnoses.

I breastfeed the baby while they tell us that he might need dialysis, that he has arrhythmia, that the bacteria has eaten over three quarters of his right lung. They tell us that when he is well enough, they will leave him positioned on his back. Every day I see him on his front I lose hope.

‘He won’t come back whole,’ one doctor says, the language barrier leaving this sentence open to my worst interpretations.

I decide that my efforts are best spent on things I can control, so I distract myself with worries about the children and our finances. Ben doesn’t qualify for sick pay in Spain so I’m on my own. We’ve burned through our savings funding my maternity leave and our four bedroom house with its pool and its veg patch now seems ludicrously extravagant. I make a spreadsheet and work out how short I am of covering my expenses, then I terminate my lease and plan my return to work.

In the meantime my mother in law and I look for things we could sell for quick cash. We narrow it down to Ben’s platinum discs or the two large marijuana plants that are growing over by the washing line. Ben tasked me with keeping them alive while he was in hospital and now that he is almost down one lung, there is no hope in hell he’s going to smoke it. We watch youtube videos on how to keep it happy, dragging buckets of nitrous rich water from an old water tank that’s become home to some overgrown koi carp. I hate the plants but I need a new car so we dutifully move them in and out of the sun, and ask some lads from Magaluf to come and take a look at them.

We watch saving Grace together and laugh at how ridiculous our situation is. ‘As long as we can keep laughing we will be ok,’ she says.

Three weeks into the coma, there is no talk of waking him up. The doctors expressions are becoming more grave. The word ‘when’ he recovers has been replaced by ‘if.’ We give the doctors nicknames. Blue eyeshadow, bob and Dr Pamplona tend to give us optimistic news. Wet curls is more cautious but you know its really serious when you’re asked to wait for the translator.

One day, the translator is called to speak for the head of the ICU. We’ve only spoken to her once before and the wait is sickening. It’s been a particularly tough visit. They’ve brought in a rotating bed so they can suspend him perpendicular to the floor to drain his lung. He’s wasted away to skin and bone and a violent rash has spread all over his body. I wonder aloud why the tips of his hands and feet have turned purple. ‘Circulation,’ his mum suggests hopefully.

The translator corrects us, ‘sepsis. And multiple organ failure.’

‘The situation is very, very grave,’ they say. Its the worst case they. have ever seen. The bacteria is mutating too quickly to stop. Its been resistant to every antibiotic they’ve tried. They look at the floor. The translator explains, ‘if this doesn’t work we have nowhere to go.’ His mum reaches over and holds my hand, tears running down our faces.

‘This can’t kill him,’ I say to her on the drive home. ‘Ben’s part cave man. He once told me that if we ever got burgled he would strip naked and scream really loudly so the intruder would know he was mad.’

She isn’t listening. She’s lost in her phone, texting his brothers to update them on the awful news.

I crank up Hit FM to maximum volume. I need to drown out my feelings so I don’t crash the car. A ghastly techno remix of Simon and Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence rattles round the Ford Fiesta.

This is the first time I’ve seen my mother in law properly cry since she got here. She’s hard as nails and has been hitherto completely pragmatic. She was only supposed to stay for a week and now its been three. She’s bought new clothes in the market and is keeping moving in spite of breaking her toe on the beach almost as soon as she arrived.

But as hope has startled to dwindle, the cracks are starting to show. The worse the meetings with the doctors, the tidier my house becomes.

‘Does this have a place?’ She’ll say, holding up a pen lid, one child’s sock or a half used pack of printer paper that now lives by the TV. ‘No,’ is the only answer I can offer, my brain feeling like I need to take it out and put it in a glass of water.

Towels disappear from the bathrooms and appear washed and dried on my bed. Ben’s socks are darned and his beanies are washed in the bath. This morning she colour coordinated the cans in the fridge.

‘I’m going to go back to the hospital at 8,’ I tell her. ‘I’m going to tell him not to fucking die.’ Ben’s been sad recently. It’s felt like someone in Drum n Bass has died every time he opens his phone. Him and his friends have shared black and white headshots with outpourings of memories and love. I wonder if I will have to open my instagram and see pictures of Ben staring back. It will probably be an old photo, of a Ben I never knew. Anecdotes I never had a chance to hear.

We travel back silently crying and I fall into the arms of my childminder when we get home.

‘I’ll cancel all my plans this weekend and stay on call,’ she says. ‘If you need me to look after the girls I’ll be there day and night.’ The girls are blissfully unaware of the chaos that swirls around our family. Daddy’s girl has quietened her questioning about Dada. As the prognosis has become more serious, we have quietly stopped talking about him.

I haven’t told a lot of people back home what’s going on, for fear of making it all seem real. I don’t want to burst the bubble of their brat summers, so I sit silently as my Whatsapp groups ping with people talking about salmon sperm facials and the best place to stay in Sicily in Spring.

I’ve already become quasi-invisible since having two under two. People said that it would be hard and they were right. But right now hard is what I need. I need to be busy, distracted and tired so I can wear myself out before falling straight to sleep. I’ve been trying so hard not to give in to the sadness but that night I go into the walk in wardrobe in the house we can no longer afford and sit in a pile of his clothes. I sniff his cashmere jumpers and steal a t shirt before heading back into the hospital once the children are in bed.

‘I’m wearing all your clothes, I say, watching the ventilator hiss oxygen in and out of his chest. He’s naked and covered in sores. I touch the tips of his purple fingers and cry.

‘You’d better wake up because you need to de-bobble your jumpers. And because the babies need their daddy.’

I wonder if the girls will only know him from pictures. If our favourite beach will be where we go to remember him. I swam in the sea there when I was pregnant with both of them. I filmed a stupid video to announce my first pregnancy and Ben swam around underwater with a go pro to get the perfect shot. We’d laughed so much on that beach. We always took a packed lunch and a bottle of red wine, then we swam out into the bay to get the perfect view of the mountains. The dog once got so bored of us snogging he chewed through his lead.

Of course we’ve spent the last two years learning to be parents and romance has been all but dead. He can’t die now when all we’ve done for the last 6 months is fight about money and who’s more sleep deprived. I’ve been clinging onto the hope that it has to get easier. That I’ll get the baby off the boob and we can have a night away. That we’ll get them settled into nursery and take a luxurious Wednesday off to eat pizza and drink beer on the beach. We’ve only been on two dates since the baby was born. I haven’t got my body back. We were supposed to have so much fun.

‘You need to wake up so we can go to Cala Tuent,’ I whisper. ‘We might have to take the kids but it will still be fun.’

Kids are the ultimate practice run for your life being turned upside down. My first born pulled the rug out from underneath my old life, my second wrapped me up in it and this has thrown the old me off a bridge into the water.

Everyone keeps telling me how strong I am, as if I have a choice. What they should say is that I’m unlucky, unlucky to be in this terrible situation where I’ve had to be so strong. Ben’s best friend says I’ve entered ‘warrior mode,’ and its true, but I’ve been here for a while. I didn’t used to think I was strong. I thought that my mental health struggles and capitulated stand up career made me weak, but having children forced me to accept that I’m strong. The old me started to fade the first time they cut me open, awake and plonked a screaming baby on my chest. The new me grew in strength as I watched her get operated on twice before she was 1. The old me left for good when they cut me open for a second time. Motherhood is resilience and my strength lies in the doing. I feel like an old fridge magnet of my mum’s, that read;

I am woman. I am invincible. I am tired.

The romantic in me wants to drive to every beach we’ve ever laughed and beg the sea to bring him back, but I have to trick my toddler into eating vegetables and put saltless slop into ice cubes for the baby. I have to dole out Calpol after jabs and read Mog the forgetful cat and breastfeed a baby who keeps giving me thrush on my nipples.

Even though I feel like I’m drowning the kids still need a bath. Even though I’m too sad to eat they still need dinner. I’m propelled forward by their never ending need and I know that in saving me they will help to save Ben.

When I get back from the hospital Ben’s mum looks wild. An old schoolfriend has offered us his health concierge to see if she can help. The first thing she asks is if we’ve thought about repatriating him to England, the second thing she asks is if we’ve considered a bacteriophage.

‘Look here!’ she says, ‘it’s called a phage and it can be used to kill the Pseudonoma.’ I skim over an article about a medicine popularised by the Soviet Union called a ‘bacteriophage.’ Phages were used before the discovery of antibiotics and are still used in Poland, Georgia and Russia.

‘I don’t really do alternative medicine,’ I say to Ben’s mum, shutting down the conversation. I go back up to the walk in wardrobe and pine. Then I am up all night researching Phages. By the morning I have planned to go to Georgia.

‘I’ll just strap the baby to my front and go,’ I say. I’ve phoned a woman from the centre and promised to take a sample of Ben’s sputum to Georgia so they can make a custom Phage. They explain that the Phage is a virus that will target the bacteria and explode its cells. She assures me they have a track record of curing his condition.

I’ve found an EU law that states that if the doctors concede that they have no more treatments available, alternative medicine can be given on compassionate grounds to save a patients life. I send an e mail to the head of ICU explaining our plan then work out the logistics of travelling to Georgia with a 5 month old baby.

‘They said they’d send a cab to the airport,’ I say, as if this is the biggest hurdle in my plan. We still don’t know how to transport the sputum or how we’re going to get it. We then decide, without her knowledge that my sister in law will be the best person to go as she speaks Russian. In the midst of the madness my best friend arrives on the island. We need one person here who’s life doesn’t depend on Ben getting better. Someone who’s outer shell doesn’t splinter when the baby starts to cry, someone who ended up walking said baby up and down the same stretch of road for hours.

‘I walked past the same dead cat 6 times,’ she says when she gets back. ‘I think its probably good luck.’

She is here for the comedy relief I didn’t know i needed. She pays for my food shop and pours me wine. She spends hours playing ‘girls in the bed’ with my toddler while I lie in the bath and think about giving my moribund partner a virus to try and save his life.

When you find yourself in a situation as dreadful as ours, you’ll find that a lot of people don’t know what to do. They speak in small voices, send love and hugs and offer hypothetical help you’re too tired to accept. I don’t have the strength to delegate or the courage to outright ask, so I stay trapped in my nightmare unless someone drags me out of it.

Liv takes us all to the beach for lunch. She plonks the kids in front of a screen with a breadbasket and we sink a bottle of Miraval before I trudge into the sea with the baby on my front and say a prayer. I keep sending Ben Whatsapps. I send him pictures of the children and the sea. I tell him how much I miss him and how much we’re all looking forward to seeing him again.

My silly messages to nowhere stare back at me with one stubborn tick. I look out at the sea and thank god we chose to live here. I laugh at my daughter, who has stopped people in their tracks, shuffling in and out of the sea. She shrieks with laughter as Liv throws her around in the shallows. I am so lucky. I am so unlucky. I am so happy. I am so sad.

Ben’s best friend, Jho comes to the hospital to give me a hug before we go in. I am so terrified I can hardly choke out any words. Liv texts me,

‘Baby asleep. Cat still dead.’

Dr Pamplona is on duty today and he takes us into the room for a long conversation. He tells me that the head of department received my e-mail, and that they’ve heard from a health concierge in the UK. He needs us to know that the microbiologist overseeing Ben’s case is a leading world expert in Pseudonomas. He really could not be in a better place.

He has also read my e mail and is not averse to using a bacteriophage. Ben’s case is the worst they have ever seen and the treatments they are giving him are new to science. However, he tells me that for the first time in weeks, Ben’s condition has improved slightly on the day before.

‘The bacteria has not mutated. We think the antibiotic could be working.’