Three Weeks

I’m running after work. It's a well-trodden loop of singletrack and fire road on a sunny evening in June. An intense dry spell has been broken by some welcome rain. There’s a deep intensity of green everywhere I look, a celebration of water and light. 

I should be enjoying it. But all I can think about are my struggles.

The writing I’m trying to work on. The alternating stress / mundanity of work. Jobs round the house forever undone. And my niggles. 

There’s a pain in my hip. 

My back feels stiff. 

I am not celebrating water, or light, or running. I’m berating myself with an endless stream of thoughts about everything I’m not.

My fitness is poor. I haven’t been running enough. I need to lose weight. I need to write. I should be doing more... 

But then, I round a bend and up ahead are two people with their backs to me. They’re walking, but not quite. One is hunched against the other. His head hangs at an angle and lurches almost straight as he takes each halting step. 

The woman he’s grasping onto, his carer, supports most of his weight, though it can’t be much. 

He tugs at her arm with desperation, too frightened to let go; too terrified to hang on. 

They might be a mile and a half from the car park. I’m surprised they’ve made it this far. I can’t imagine how long that must’ve taken, how much pain and patience.

Suddenly, I’m quite ashamed. 

I wonder if they need help, wonder if it would be welcomed. I’m still unsure as I widen my path to jog past them. I give a cheery hello, and the woman returns a smile that says they’re ok. 

I leave them on the road, but the imprint of their struggle doesn’t go away. 

FUCK THIS, I say out loud in self-castigation. 

What have I got to feel bad about? 

Immediately, my steps start to feel lighter, my body stronger. My pace picks up. 

I am not struggling. I am running. 

I am free, and my problems are slight and stupid. 

How quickly that can change. 

*

The next week I am not running. I am drifting glassily down a hospital corridor, trying to think of all the questions I want answers to and all of those I don’t want to ask. 

My son is five years old and lies in a bed in the high-dependency unit.

Sometimes we sit by his bedside in silence, removed of agency and choice, realising that none of it, none of it matters anymore. 

At other times he is screaming, bone jarring screams that make every animal sense in my body turn to fight or flight. 

He is screaming because he doesn’t understand why he is here, why he feels so weak, why strange men and women crowd round him and squeeze and poke and prod at him with carefully guarded expressions, asking endless questions he doesn’t understand. 

Mostly he screams for his mum. Because he thinks that she is the only person who can save him, that she can surely put an end to this. Because why? Why would she let people hurt him like this? 

He wails in terror when six adults hold him down to insert needles in his veins, and still they can’t stop him thrashing. A vein ruptures. The screaming intensifies, even though you wonder how someone so small, so weak, can utter cries of such piercing anger. He bucks and twists and wails, and grown men and women cannot hold him. 

Another vein ruptures. Blood spatters on rubber gloves and clothes of people holding him. Blood runs down his little arm and pools on the bed sheets. 

His mum clings on, sitting on the edge of his bed and turning her face so he can’t see her cry. 

I pace back and forward, running my hands over my face and head, trying to stop myself from tearing everyone away from him. 

And then he sleeps, or the drugs work, and once again we’re left in the inertia of hope.

A children’s ward is a place of stark contradiction, a swirling synesthesia of dread. Cheery wall art mingles with howls. The jingles of cartoons fuse with the stench of bleach. 

Always, the thrum of the air conditioning. A deafening drone that becomes apparent when you walk out of the hospital and into the vacuumed silence of your thoughts.

People come and go. They are hurried, or slinking, or striding, or just drifting in the fog of helplessness. 

All that is human unfurls around you, spools out and tangles. And you are left to sit. Waiting. Watching. Hoping. 

The days pass in waves. Sometimes I’m silent and sometimes I ask questions. Useless questions, dumb questions. Questions that don’t have answers. I know that, and still I ask, searching for a glimmer of something. 

Is his chest moving too quickly or not enough? Has his face changed colour? Will he be alright? Won’t someone just fucking tell me he’ll be alright? Is he breathing? God, please let him be breathing.

Please, just tell me what to do. 

He’s given morphine, and only then does he come back. His personality appears briefly, like a snowflake on concrete. Random memories pour out. Sometimes he’s funny, but it’s a drugged clarity too frightening to enjoy. I’ve seen it before. In someone dying of cancer.

Days and nights merge into each other, the beginnings and ends uncertain. Only one of us can stay by his bedside, so I retreat into the silent dampness of the car park each night, sleeping for a couple of hours in my van. 

And then I’m back again. The nurses are still working, the machines are still beeping, and still we don’t know enough.

I’ve had a lot of time to think. 

Something. Something is at the tips of my fingers and needs to come out. Some truth I now know but can’t quite translate. Can’t quite hold it up to the light. I’ve seen it, felt it. I just don’t know how to say it yet. But I’m trying. 

It’s something about love, something about purpose. I understand more of both now.

I think about the nurses, and how they’ve restored my faith in the simple goodness of people. 

Ellie. Nicole. Rachel. Sian. Kenny. Niamh. Jocelyn.

They are with us twenty-four hours a day, on hand, on call. Their smiles are engineered to conceal and penetrate worry. Hopefully. Hopefully, they say. And doyouneedanything? CanIgetyousomething? 

One day Jocelyn carries my son down the long corridors for a scan. He’s too upset and sore for a wheelchair. She’s twenty-one, a student, a slim girl who doesn’t look capable. But she does it, and when they arrive back at the ward and she puts him down her arms are shaking and she is laughing about it. 

Someone’s baby is here, being passed between the nurses, usually those behind the desk, but sometimes the catering and cleaning staff, too. It’s not clear who it belongs to. Eventually we find out it’s the twin brother of a baby that was airlifted to Glasgow, along with the parents. With no-one left to look after him, the nurses become loving satellites. 

There’s such ordinary beauty in their kindness. I need to remember it. 

Eventually, my boy gets better, slowly at first then quickly when he comes home. His brother, his own toys, his own bed, all bring him back to himself. 

It’s not lost on me that the only reason I can write this is because he’s better.

It’s easy to forget all that happened when we’re back to normality. It’s easy to get wrapped up once again in our own trivial problems and desires. But I don’t want to forget. I want to live in reverence of simplicity and kindness. I’m still learning how to do that. 

*

A week later I’m running a hill race on Skye. I didn’t think I’d be here. I didn’t think of running or racing at all in the past two weeks. But the family are here, Nathan is getting better, remarkably so from where he was a week ago.

The climb is severe. We strive uphill on hands and knees over grass and heather and scree. It’s primal and brilliant, and as pure a hill race as you’re likely to find.

None of the usual thoughts go through my mind. I barely think about how hard it is, how much muscles ache, how fast or slow I am, who’s around me. All I think about is how lucky I am to be able to do this, how fortunate I am to have my family waiting at the end. 

Later, after it’s finished, I pick Nathan up onto my knee, still in my mud splattered vest and race number safety-pinned to shorts. 

“Did you have a good race, Daddy?” 

“I thought of you the whole time”, I tell him.