My sterile prison cell

When I was younger I got drunk one night end ended up in a police cell. As I lay on the solitary piss-stained bunk I looked up at the ceiling of the cell and felt a tremendous feeling of placidity wash over me. This isn’t so bad, I reasoned, if this is what prison is like I can handle it.

The reality was, however, that unless I killed one of the guards with a sharpened lolly pop stick I was most likely going home in the morning and the little bit of notoriety that this experience would afford me would be healthily repaid in beers and possibly women. I knew plenty of girls back then who liked a bad boy. Perhaps I would be a bad boy once I’d done my tiny dribble of porridge.

That happened 35-years-ago and truth be told I never quite made it to bad boy status. The last guy I actually fought with is now dead of cancer, and the reason that we fought was because he accused me of plagiarism. It was a distinctly middle-class difference of opinion and an equally flocculent variety of skirmish: he aimed a punch at me and I sort of wrestled him to the floor, where we rolled about in the Zerox dust like a couple of wrinkled teenagers. Isn’t that what Christmas parties are supposed to be all about?

I never quite earned bad boy status but I’m getting to know what it’s like to do my time. Because life for me at the moment is all about living in a prison cell. Lights out is around nine-thirtyish and my prison wardens are all young and beautiful. (And even if it wasn’t 2016 and I get a detailed daily breakdown of visitors to my web site I’d still be saying that, ladies.) From there on in it’s the sounds of silence that fill my head. The noises made by anguished, frightened children crying for their mothers (never their fathers) which, without fail and usually in exactly the same order, elicit from me feelings of abject sorrow followed by selfless pity followed by aching sadness followed by mild irritation followed by red hot anger followed by if you don’t shut that whining fucking brat up so I can get some sleep I’m going to chuck the fucking whinging parent out of the fucking window and really become a fucking bad boy. Sleep deprivation is a very successful torture method and has been known to start wars.
As I wrote that last sentence an electronic alarm sounded from a gadget by my daughter’s bedside that looks a little like the one used by Bones to check out unconscious Klingons. It keeps doing that. It’s letting the whole ward know that the drug being pumped into my daughter’s arm via a thin plastic cable is not reaching its target. It’s a bit like what happens when the hose pipe bends while you’re watering the garden (Oh, to stand in the sunshine watering the garden…). And amid the farts and burps and snores and slurps of the rest of the ward I am aware of a murmur of irritation. Some other sleep-starved parent wants to throw me out of the window and earn themselves a slice of bad boy status.

But none of us can do this. Because we’re in a hospital for sick kids and whatever feelings you have about your lot in the world you have no choice but to make like an erstwhile Page Three model: grin and bear it. And this is actually no bad analogy because when you’re the parent of a sick child in hospital you are naked. Every routine, every ritual, every secret practise that makes you who you are is cast aside and laid open to the universe.
7:34 a.m. and lights have just come on. I’ve already been up for two hours. At least we don’t have to slop out. In the beds around me anxious parents are already talking in not quite so hushed tones about their own concerns, their own damaged children. Soon a damp mop will be dragged around the ward and my daughter will be offered a breakfast menu which she’ll refuse to choose from. Interesting the speed in which new rituals worm their way into your life. In two hours’ time Sofia and I can go home for the day. Compared to many here we’re the lucky ones. But it’s not really home because it’s a home that is invaded twice a day by still more elegant prison wardens as they refill my daughter with drugs. There goes that alarm again.

Each time that alarm goes off you’re aware of an onrush of footsteps. This is followed by the bustling image of an impossibly pristine young woman in a sparkling pressed nurses uniform, a mere child of flawless skin and glossy hair. We’re all destined to get to know nurses in one way or another and I can tell you that they have very little in common with the old Benny Hill version of a nurse. While they can occasionally be seen to move at Benny Hill double-quick speed it is there that any similarity ends. Without going all political on you, you only have to spend a couple of minutes in the company of these young women to start wanting to see Jeremy Hunt’s flaccid dick stuffed into a sausage roll and force fed to David Cameron via any orifice that isn’t his mouth. How dare these Oxbridge Bullingdon buffoons play God with loaded blue dice? How dare they attempt to stand in the way and block the paths of these people who give so much and get so little back?

It is the nurses – my stoic, uncomplaining, smiling prison wardens – that I find most interesting of all. Each one is my daughter and each my mother. Because even though my own mother was actually a nurse I never really had any understanding of what she actually was. I don’t remember her having the driven look in her eyes of the girls who surround me here. And she never struck me as someone who was prepared to sacrifice herself for others. But she must have been.

This is the long haul for me. Life has temporarily ground to a halt. My days are spent waiting for the nights and my nights are spent longing for the days. And already I’m finding out more about myself than I’d really like to know. More than any person would really like to know.

When your child falls ill (Life is what happens…)

Who was it who said that life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans? Well for the moment, at least, he was right.

Just under three weeks ago I had everything kind of planned out for the bulk of this year. I was writing the sequel to my book ‘Rope Burns’ and in order to do so I was rekindling lost contacts from the world of boxing whom I hadn’t seen for 25 years. Weirdly, it was all about coping with the death of my father by going down an extremely unusual route. And wonder of wonders it was actually sort of working. Meeting up with these people was having a considerably more palliative effect than the idiot therapist whom I saw last year. When I’d finished writing what I’m calling ‘Dangerous’ I was going to get to work on the sequel to my kids book ‘Johnny Nothing’.

And then my daughter got ill.

The first symptoms were flu-like. She had fevers, chills and was exhausted most of the time. I kept her off school, believing that after a day or two’s rest she’d be right as rain. However, she didn’t get better. Day after day went by and all she could do was lie on the sofa and sleep. The fevers intensified and she refused to eat a thing. After five days of this I called the doctor who suggested I bring her into the clinic. ‘She’s too ill to travel even short distances,’ I said. He mumbled something about Calpol and giving her food and that was that. That was my first mistake, well second actually: I should have insisted that something was done straight away.

By day 8 my wife and I were getting really worried. Apart from a little bit of fruit she’d still not eaten at all and was shedding weight faster than a supermodel preparing for a Vogue shoot. I called the doctor again and this time insisted that she see her. When we got into the doctor’s surgery Sofia looked so ill that no-one could deny that she needed urgent attention. The doctor very efficiently filled in a few forms and sent us immediately to A&E. There, she was seen within minutes and given a variety of tests. Later, a doctor spoke to me privately and told me that she they didn’t know what was causing the illness but that she needed a drip and at least an overnight stay.

Here comes mistake number two, or three: That afternoon, having not eaten all day myself, I dragged myself to the nearest eaterie, which happened to be a MacDonald’s, leaving Sofia with my wife. While I was swilling down a coffee I got a call from Laura, who told me that Sofia had been discharged and would not, after all, be staying overnight with a drip. For the second time I should have insisted that something be done immediately.

This left us looking after Sofia for a second long and anxious weekend. On Monday I called the doctor again, who was able to log on to the hospital computer. He advised me to give it one more day and if there was no improvement to take her back to A&E. At 5:00 am the following morning I was awoken by Sofia coughing. The cough was alarmingly constant and aching painful. I tried to give her cough medicine and hot lemon, the usual things, but these were hopelessly inadequate, a bit like throwing rice at a machine gun. Later that morning I told my wife to get ready to take Sofia to hospital but as luck would have it the fever suddenly disappeared, as did the cough. I didn’t think it would do us much good to take Sofia to A&E saying: ‘She was really ill this morning but she’s improved since. Can you take a look at her?’. With this in mind I packed my wife off to work and waited to see if Sofia’s cough and temperature would return.

By mid-day it had returned with a vengeance, as had the fever, and so I dragged Sofia to A&E. This time they didn’t mess about. Within ten minutes she’d had her heart rate measured and declared dangerously high. Next came a speedy X-Ray and a very difficult conversation. Sofia, they explained, had a very rare condition. She had what appeared to be a 4 x 5 cm cyst or abscess on her lung. She was dehydrated and had lost a lot of weight (she’d eaten only a little bit of fruit in 10 days). Oh… and she also had pneumonia.

From there on the wheels were set swiftly into motion. Sofia was immediately put on a drip, feeding her nutrients and very powerful antibiotics five times a day. My wife and I took turns sleeping on a camp bed by her bedside.
For the first couple of days I stupidly attempted to try to write ‘Dangerous’ by her side while she slept. But I wasn’t able to concentrate – who would be able to concentrate? As a parent, of course, you end up blaming yourself. And the more I thought about it the more I realised that there had been definite warning signs in recent months. In December, for instance, I had taken her to the doctor’s after she had continually complained of shortness of breath. He had examined her heart, taken her blood pressure and asked whether she was stressed at school before declaring her fit and healthy. After she left that doctor’s room Sofia had burst into tears. I had then returned to speak to the doctor only to be very curtly told that that he could find nothing wrong with her and that he had other patients to see.

That was very definitely mistake number 0.5. I should have been more assertive. I should have insisted that Sofia have an X-Ray. However, the benefit of hindsight and all that… Whatever the case, on the afternoon of Sofia’s diagnosis I fired off an angry email to that doctor and promptly received three very nervous, guilty, apologetic phone calls from the health centre in question.

From then on it was a waiting game. Thankfully Sofia’s recovery, although not rapid, was definitely in the right direction. And as I sat by her bedside over an 10-day period I had a lot of spare time on my hands. Most of it was spent aimlessly tinkering with my iPad while simultaneously fretting about Sofia and the looming deadline for ‘Dangerous’ that I was sure to miss.

Inevitably I began to form relationships with other patients and their worried parents, as well as the doctors and nurses wHo were in attendance day and – sometimes annoyingly – night. There was the little girl who had been there for two months after an innocuous fall at school had left her with a badly infected foot. She is a picture of cuteness and grim intelligence; if I could take her home with me now I would.

Yesterday was the best and worst day: by the far the biggest cross that Sofia has had to bear has been the cannula (a word I didn’t know until last week) that has been put into her arm in order to administer her drugs. It seems she has inherited my sensitive skin which means that the needle has been regularly rejected. Eight times in seven days actually. Listening to her whimper at night as they tried to find a new vein in which to torture her some more has been impossible to take. As a parent it is sometimes your responsibility to provide reassurance just at the time when you are most in need of reassurance yourself.

As a solution to this awful situation Sofia was put to sleep yesterday and something more permanent called a PICC line was inserted into her arm. As I held her hand outside the operating theatre and watched the morphine send her instantly to sleep I finally let the tears go. The next hour-and-a-half was too painful. While I sat sipping coffee by her empty bed my mind began to play tricks on me. I wondered how I would break it to her mother if things went wrong. I wondered how our relationship could possibly survive the death of our only child. I selfishly toyed with the idea of killing myself if I had to do this. And then I thought about the effect it would have on Laura to lose both members of her family.

But now, less than 24 hours later, things have changed considerably. I’m sitting here at the dining room table typing away as Sofia and three friends sit playing together on the Wii. Screams and shouts of delight fill the room. Sitting beside Sofia is a community nurse, who is administering the second of two lots of antibiotics that Sofia must have at home every day for very possibly the next six weeks. In the evening Sofia and I must return to stay the night at the hospital because community nurses do not work at night and Sofia needs six doses of drugs per day. It’s going to be a tough month and a bit but already it’s not quite as tough as it was yesterday.

This morning, after being given the good news about Sofia being allowed to go home during the day, I was shown a recent X-Ray of the lung abscess. In little more than a week the drugs have exceeded all expectations.The object, whatever it is, has considerably reduced in size. The outlook suddenly looks a lot less bleak. Lots of Ts need to be crossed before Sofia gets a clean bill of health, and the holiday we planned is off due to the fact that Sofia is not allowed to fly for six months, but she’s alive, I’m alive, Laura’s alive. And I’m suddenly left with whole new appreciation of normality. Boring dumb normality. What bliss.

So ‘Dangerous’ resumes tomorrow. And boxing, as it always has done for me, is rallying around me. Tomorrow I’m due to meet heavyweight contender Anthony Joshua, and on Sunday super-middleweight world title challenger Frank Buglioni is coming to the house so that we can watch his last fight together. He’s asked me to write something on it for his new website and I’ve suggested he do a sort of ‘Director’s Commentary’ like they do for DVD extras.

So far writing ‘Dangerous’ has proven to be more than a little life changing. I’ve already laughed, cried, been hit by a bike after dining with Colin McMillan, almost lost my daughter and I am due to travel to Birmingham with Kellie Maloney early next month to have a little adventure. That sounds a lot worse than I mean it to.