Unremitting Reality...

The first days

Arriving home on Friday after two months of Dónall’s hospital treatment in Southampton was almost as traumatic as I’d feared, and as delightful as Dónall had expected. We’d booked two extra nights to stay in the room where I’d been based most of the time, about a mile from Southampton General Hospital, so that Dónall could attend the phleblotomy clinic as an outpatient to have a blood test to monitor his progress on a new blood-thinner.

Thursday was spent in the boarding house room, as we began to get used to dealing with the insulin pens and pain-relief that the nurses in E8 had been administering to Dónall. There was a terrifying moment when Dónall had a fall in the bathroom and it looked as if he wouldn’t be able to get back to bed because I couldn’t help him up (with ingenuity and super-human effort we managed it). There were panicky moments when I couldn’t remember how to prime one of the two insulin pens that he needs. Dónall was taken aback to realise how weak he was — ‘Reality is so unremitting’.

A follow-up phone call from a member of the hospital diabetic team before we left for the phlebotomy department gave us a walk-in appointment with a diabetic nurse who completed my sketchy induction into Dónall’s Diabetes Type 3 treatment regime, and then we were on the road to freedom and home, an hour and a half through the blossoming, soon-to-be-leafy roads in Hampshire and Surrey, to Guildford.

Dónall had taken some of the strong painkillers included in his leaving pack, though he prefers to stick to basic paracetamol. Every jolt and pothole on the surface of the A31 evoked a gasp and a groan from him, and a ‘Sorry’ from me, though there was nothing to be done about it.

The weather was calm, clear, warm and sunny, as it had been every day since February the 28th when we had disembarked from our holiday cruise, Dónall by emergency ambulance to the Acute Medical Unit of Southampton Hospital, and I by pre-booked taxi to our home in Guildford. It was more like June than early April.

As the outline of the town appeared on the horizon, I remembered the anguish of entering it on that day when I’d believed that I’d never see Dónall alive there again. But now, with two months of intense physical and emotional suffering and a major operation behind him, Dónall’s capacity for endurance was rewarded. ‘You can almost smell the Earl Grey’ he was joking, promising to make me a cup of tea as we arrived home at last.

We settled down in the garden, taking advantage of the last full day of climate-warmed early summer sun before the weather changed on Saturday. I knew that from now on we would be getting down to the serious business of eradicating any remaining traces of the cancer that so nearly took him from me.

The first full day at home, Saturday, was a day of resting up for Dónall, and a day of adjusting to his new needs for me. I found myself adopting a role — a combination of nurse and matron, alternately persuasive and peremptory, anxious and concerned. My roles of lover, friend and wife were subsumed by the practical need to respond to and manage the medical needs that the hospital had met until Friday.

Now, on Sunday, ‘unremitting reality’ has served up weather that’s nearer to our usual expectations of April in Britain — cloudy and changeable — and a move by both of us back to our old relationship. The practicalities are less daunting to me as Dónall is becoming accustomed to his temporary weaknesses and patiently developing new strengths. There will be good days and bad days. We’re in it together, dealing with all of it.

This diary is still serving a purpose for me, as a record of this extraordinary experience, in which we’ve learned just how much we love each other, and that we’re committed to make the best of whatever is left to us.

Is that all there is? Yes.