"Dear Michael, HAPPY BIRTHDAY – it’s been so lovely to help look after you today on your birthday!
"You’ve been a popular chap today – FaceTime calls from your family and a birthday card!
"You were also treated to a rendition of Happy Birthday from about 15 ICU staff and a round of applause from staff and one of the other patients!”
I know nothing at all about this. Not one bit.
That’s because at the time nurse Monique and volunteer Sophy wrote this letter, I was in an induced coma for 40 days.
This letter is one of many the nurses and volunteers wrote to me, and put into a Patient Diary, a handwritten journal of each of the days I was in that coma.
This was at the height of the first wave of the pandemic in April and May 2020, when doctors and nurses hardly knew what Covid was and when something like 42% of the patients in my intensive care ward were dying.
It was kitted out for 11 patients but had to take in 24. This meant the nurses running between two, three or even four beds.
I’ve since met Monique and some of the other nurses and heard what they went through, and the strain they were under.
You can picture it: young men and women, stepping up to do the work to save lives at a time of a major emergency.
There they were, knowing one slip-up with their PPE gear could result in them getting infected with a new, terrifying illness.
Or going home and passing the infection on to vulnerable or elderly parents and grandparents.
And let’s not forget, at the outset, good or adequate PPE just wasn’t there.
The consultant surgeon on my intensive care ward told me that on one occasion they opened a box of PPE and it was clearly second-hand! And worse, one outfit had blood on it.
And yet, in the midst of this crisis, with nurses climbing in and out of PPE gear that looked like spacesuits, the nurses on my ward had the time, patience and kindness to write this diary.
Let me explain what it means to me...
If you are sedated, the doctors pump you full of what one called “mind-changing drugs”.
You are not only made unconscious but, if you are “intubated”, you are given paralysing drugs too.
Intubated means having a tube put down your throat to pump air into your lungs. Machines take over your body so that whatever energy your body has can be devoted entirely to dealing with the infection.
You can figure it out: I came off 40 days of heavy drugs. My body was useless. Even if I could move my arms and legs about, I couldn’t stand up.
When physios and nurses tried to get me out of bed, I collapsed. I’m a big bloke and it took four of them to prop me up.
My mind was even more of a wreck. I didn’t know why I was there, or what had happened to me. I drifted in and out of sleep having weird dreams about German Christmas parties and 1950s tractors!
If the nurses and volunteers hadn’t written these letters, I would know absolutely nothing of what went on for nearly six weeks. After all, my wife and children couldn’t come in because of lockdown restrictions.
Heaven knows, those 40 days are odd and bothersome enough but without that diary, I would be much more lost than I am.
Before I went “under”, the doctor asked me if I would sign a piece of paper that would allow them to put me to sleep.
I asked if I would wake up. He told me I had a 50:50 chance. “If I don’t sign?” I asked. “Zero chance.” He meant zero chance of living. And that conversation is the last I remember.
So I owe huge, incalculable debt to the nurses who looked after me.
Not only did they help keep me alive but amid a weird nightmare of disease and death, they wrote letters full of hope, fun and encouragement.
It often brings me to tears when I read, say, this letter: “May you continue to touch and inspire every human being you will encounter! God bless, Your nurse – Wincey.”
This is a person I had never met, who (I happen to know now) came from the other side of the world to work in the NHS. She did all the work needed, checking the machines and drips, making sure that I was clean and shaved (so that the hole for the tracheostomy stayed clear and clean).
She bathed me, cleaned me, went the extra mile when she saw my blood pressure plummeting and yet still had space in her mind to think of kind words and to spend time writing them down.
I can and do say thank you many times to Monique, Wincey and a huge cast of names in my diary and to the others in the ward I went to later, after the ICU, and to all the nurses and health workers at the rehab hospital where they taught me to walk again.
But now that nurses are fighting for enough money to live, to support their families, I can support them in this fight.
And I know full well, it’s not only their own pay packets they’re fighting for.
Also at stake is recruitment and retention. Poorly paid jobs don’t attract trainees and don’t keep nurses in their jobs.
It’s the NHS itself that they’re fighting for – and I’m passionate about supporting that fight too,
I’m two years older than the NHS, so I wasn’t born into it.
But in every year since, it has been with me and for me, through a bad car accident, a long-term illness, the final months of my parents’ lives, the births of my children and then Covid.
I’ll do whatever I can to keep it.
