AT THE DROP OF A HAT

 ON 6th February 1992 I was doing the late stint as News Editor at a newspaper in Gloucester. There was no lead story for the morning and I was tearing my hair out and harassing the reporters who were also on lates, when two policemen walked into our offices and I broke out into a big grin, thinking they must have a good story for us.

But after greeting them they checked my name and then asked if Paul Williams was my husband. My smile faded a little as I answered in the affirmative. They then told me he’d been involved in an accident and could I come with them.

Fine, no problem. I wasn’t overly worried as they said it was ‘his legs’ and I just thought of broken legs, which is not good but also not the end of the world, and one of the risks of riding motorbikes daily as we both did.

When we arrived at A & E, only about a five minute drive away, I was immediately shown into this private waiting room, and it was then that I began to get a little concerned, thinking it might be worse than I thought, but nobody was telling me anything. A doctor had come in, introduced himself and told me he’d be with me as soon as possible, but that at present they were working on Paul.

The waiting room was only a couple of metres from where they were because I could hear Paul screaming and I was wondering why the hell they hadn’t knocked him out. I later discovered that it was his head and upper body injuries that had him screaming and they couldn’t do anything because they were afraid of putting him under, but at the time I just couldn’t understand why they weren’t giving him an anaesthetic.

A few people from the newspaper had joined me by then. Close friends who I also worked with. One of the reporters had telephoned them, and I found out later that the police had told the reporters how serious the accident was, though they hadn’t shared it with me.

I’d been there about four hours when a doctor finally came in to talk to me, and by then it was past midnight. I can’t remember exactly what he said now but the gist was that Paul had been involved in a very serious motorbike accident and in all likelihood he was paralysed but they weren’t one hundred per cent sure about that then.

I was just in shock when they told me that. I remember them letting me see him. He was unconscious by now, and for the next five weeks he would just be slipping in and out of consciousness, so I sat with him for an hour or so, and then a nurse told me they had a room for me to stay in overnight.

I did actually get an hour or two sleep, which amazes me now.

I was beside his bed again when the doctor came in around 8.30am and asked to speak to me. I will never forget this doctor because I thought him unnecessarily cruel. A really tall man, he towered over me and just said, “Paul is paralysed from the chest down and will never walk again”. We were standing in the doorway when he said it and I remember my knees going and grabbing the door frame. The doctor said “Get a grip. This is how it is and the sooner you accept it the better” and then he walked off!

If I hadn’t been so stunned I daresay I would’ve given him an earful. I’m rather known for speaking my mind. Thankfully I never saw that doctor again.

The next few months were crazy.

The accident happened a week before I was due to start a new job in Kettering. We had already been up there to find me a bedsit while Paul was going to stay and sell the house. It seemed impossible to move away from my friends and home with Paul now in Stoke Mandeville Hospital but when I telephoned the editor of MotorCycle News to tell him about the accident and that I didn’t think I could come he reminded me that I had been pestering him for a job for years and added that I could have as much time as I needed to get things together and that he and the rest of the staff would give me as much support as I needed.

It was my dream job, and I was the first woman journalist they employed, so I thought about it, telephoned him back and said I would be coming.

I had to leave our two dogs with my mother-in-law in the Forest of Dean and the house sale in the hands of a friend, but off I went.

The following eight months were a combination of me loving my new job and working hard, then driving from Kettering to Aylesbury every Friday night to spend the weekend with Paul, then returning to Kettering late Sunday evenings. I look back now and have no idea how I managed.

Paul had taken the news of his paralysis (he was now a C4 paraplegic) incredibly well; the doctors couldn’t believe his attitude and said he was bound to get depressed soon. He didn’t. In fact, when I told him (the doctors had said it would be better coming from me - I have no idea why)  the first thing he said was “But I can still ride, right?” and when I said no, he simply said “Well, I’ll have to build a trike”. However he was in SMH for 15 months, first just flat on his back, and then gradually having his upper body raised and eventually being hoisted (yes, with an actual hoist) out of bed and into a chair which he was taught to manage.

During this time I also had to find us a new rented home, one which would be suitable for a wheelchair user. I did find a lovely old cottage in Ashton, nr Oundle and the council helped out with ramps and refitting the bathroom. We also had a stairlift put in after he came home. Until then we had a bed for him in the living room.

I just have to say here that this would undoubtedly have been a little easier if we had not, almost two years prior to this, lost all of our money in a building society crash. Briefly, we had gone to live in Australia for two years, bought a house there and worked etc, but about a week after we had sold the house and put the money into our account the Pyramid Building Society (Victoria’s largest) crashed and we lost it.

It was that crash that brought about a change in the law so that people didn’t lose everything but at the time we did. As did so many other people. That’s a whole other story but explains why we had a new mortgage on the house in Gloucester and no money in the bank.

It had been a little difficult moving and making new friends but luckily with all that was happening I hadn’t really had much time to think about the situation we were both now in. I had occasional bouts of crying but not too many, and thought I was coping very well with everything.

Then, one early evening in October, as I left work to drive home I drove head on into another car. I wasn’t hurt, neither was the occupant of the other vehicle, but I started crying and shaking and could not stop. A passer-by apparently recognised me and telephoned the Deputy Editor of MotorCycle News who soon arrived on the scene and drove me home.

He asked a neighbour to look after me and told me to take as much time off work as I needed. I never went back.

I was a mess and the doctor put me on medication immediately. I still had to get down to SMH every weekend and UK Honda helped me with that by loaning me a Honda Revere for however long I needed it, but all that had happened was taking its toll on me and for the next couple of decades I was working for a year, sometimes two at a time and then breaking down and having to quit time and time again.

The breakdowns usually came after ‘little’ accidents Paul had. Once when I came home from work I saw him sitting way too close to the open fire and told him to move back. As he rolled the chair back I saw his jeans were scorched around the shin area and when I lifted them to look at his legs I saw he had bad burns for which he had to be hospitalised.

Another time when I came home he told me he’d had a fall but that a neighbour had helped him back into the chair and he was okay. I checked him anyway, and when I took his right foot off the footplate it just dangled, obviously broken. Hospital again. 

And the problem with local hospitals is that they usually have no idea how to treat paraplegics. One doctor was going to try to put plaster on his leg (which you cannot do when you have no blood circulation) and I had to physically stop him, screaming at him to take me seriously.

The nurses also, a couple of times. When he was in Peterborough hospital after one of these incidents I would visit him in my lunch hour and after work and would pull the curtain back to the smell of piss and shit. They were not evacuating his bowels and not changing his sheets when he had accidents. It seemed a constant battle.

Paul and I had been together 19 years before the accident and were together 26 years after. Most of those years were good but the last ten not so much. Paul was getting a lot of phantom pain and the doctors had him on way too much morphine.

He began hallucinating and accusing me of the most silly things. For example, he was convinced I had somehow inserted a fly into his toothpaste tube, despite their being no fly and how the hell would I do that anyway? He also accused me of putting something in his shampoo to make him go bald, despite him having a great head of hair until the day he passed.

And worse things. I would take the dogs (different ones by now) out early each morning after making Paul a cup of tea and leaving him in bed where I would walk up to a friend’s house in the country and share a pot of coffee with him and just chat for an hour or so. It was my only time away from Paul and I treasured those talks. Until Paul started phoning me and just screaming “you cunt” into the phone. I could handle that, but my friend and his daughters who were often visiting could hear him and I hated that, as they hadn’t known him before the accident.

Also in the last fifteen years he was probably back in SMH more often than he was out, often for a year at a time. He had a lot of problems what with metal rods in his leg and ankle, his head injury which caused short term memory loss, his punctured lung, various infections, and the need for a Baclofen pump to be inserted under the skin in his stomach area, to try to control the spasms which threw him out of the chair.

His last time in hospital was in February 2018 when he contracted pneumonia for the fourth time. This time however he would not let the doctors give him oxygen, saying he had had enough. And one morning he simply stopped breathing.

During all of this there were times I was working and other times we simply lived on his Disability and what I got as a carer, because for the first twenty years that was okay. But when he was released from an 18 month hospital stay much later, around 2012/13, and I had been forced out of our rented home because I received no benefits and neither did he if he was in hospital for longer than a month, the rules had changed and suddenly it was a hassle to get our benefits back.

I never did get a carer’s allowance after that but we were able to survive on Paul’s disability. I couldn’t work by this time because he needed round the clock care as his balance had gone and he could only get into the wheelchair for a few hours at a time and needed constant supervision. 

There are other things you do when the district nurses are not available: manually evacuate bowels, clean up wet and dirty sheets when there’s a blockage in the catheter and when the bowels are loose. Giving bed baths because he could no longer use the shower, and meanwhile being screamed at and abused by this person you don’t recognise as the warm, funny, loving man you have shared most of your life with.

This hasn’t been written for sympathy, not at all, merely to show how quickly and easily life can change. We were both in work, good jobs, were getting back on our feet again after losing our money, and then bam! A huge dry clod of earth left by a tractor in the middle of a road on a bend combined with a concrete post on the side of the road which his head smashed into ended that life and took us on another journey.

It’s life. It’s shit, but it’s life.

I’m now a 65 year old working for crap pay, living in rented accommodation and just trying to survive each month. It’s difficult.

Never take what you have for granted. Never.