The Boy Who Gave His Heart Away: A Death that Brought the Gift of Life

She thought of her brother, wrapped in silver foil to keep the heat in as warm air was fanned over his body, and Leasa felt as if the doctors had already made their decision and all this medical jargon was a way to justify letting him go. ‘It was like they were giving him his last rites.’

Linda lost control then and in her wild panic she fixed on a consultant cardiologist who had come to help explain, a small man she thought looked Italian. Grabbing his lapels, she yelled into his face. ‘You’ve got to do something. He’s only fifteen!’ The doctor was sorry, he said. He told them that he would do anything he could to save Marc, she had to believe that, but that they had run out of options.

‘There is nothing more we can do.’

What do you say when your friend is dying? How do you go up to a mate in a coma, all wrapped up in blankets, unconscious with a tube down his throat and all those wires connecting his body to machines, in front of his parents and his granny and his sister, and say, ‘Yeah, so … Right. Goodbye then, pal.’ The two lads who came to visit Marc were brave and resourceful but they couldn’t help the tears. Linda held them both, one on either side of her, pushing their heads hard against her shoulders as if trying to squeeze the pain away, for all three of them. It didn’t work.

Norrie was in the corner of the room, answering strange questions from the dishevelled but commanding doctor: ‘What height is Marc? What weight do you think he is?’

Linda overheard and turned on the medic, furiously. ‘What are you asking that for? You wanna be measuring him for the morgue, is that it?’

‘No, Linda, hang on,’ said Norrie, grabbing a hand to get her to listen. ‘There’s something going on, they’ve got an idea, I’m sure of it.’

She refused to believe it until the doctor offered just a chance, the slimmest chance, of help. ‘There is a machine in Newcastle, it could take over the work of Marc’s heart and keep him going until another heart becomes available.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘From a donor.’

A dead boy’s heart. Or a girl’s. A dead girl’s heart in Marc – that struck Linda as even stranger for a moment. But then again, why not? ‘Could it be anyone?’

‘As long as the size and blood type are right. You won’t remember this I’m sure, of course – there’s a lot going on for you – but this machine is called an ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine …’

Weirdly, those words stayed in Linda’s brain forever, as did the next thing she heard the doctor say. ‘… Make no mistake, Marc is dying right now. There is only a one per cent chance he can survive the journey. He might not even make it off the hospital bed and down that corridor, let alone all the way to Newcastle …’

‘What did you say, about Marc’s chances?’

‘One per cent. I’m sorry, Norrie, I can’t put it higher than that.’

Norrie seized the tiny chance anyway. ‘What are we waiting for? Let’s go now!’

But Linda hesitated – she looked down at her son – she understood what was likely to happen. ‘If my son dies in that ambulance he is going to die on his own, isn’t he? He needs us with him. Please let me and his dad go with him.’

The doctor was touched, Linda could see that, but she remembers being told it was not possible. They were going to use a specialist intensive care ambulance to take Marc to Edinburgh Airport, where he would be put on an adapted plane and flown down to Newcastle. There was already barely enough room in the ambulance for the medical staff and all the equipment they needed to fight for Marc’s life. A police escort would take spare oxygen bottles for the ventilator, but one person might be able to squeeze in there and then sit in the back of the plane if it was big enough. That was the best they could do. Another ambulance and patrol car would be waiting when they landed. Norrie said he would go with the cops, if they let him. Leasa, the level-headed daughter, took control of her mum. ‘You’re better off coming in the car with me. We’ll go down together.’

Linda was terrified. She was panicking and pleading in her head, praying, ‘God, can I make a deal, make a pact?’ Then she got an idea so crazy that she thought it just might work. She grabbed the doctor’s arm tight and yanked him, demanding his full attention. ‘Listen, I’m forty, I’ve had my life, can you not give Marc my heart, here and now?’

She meant it, too. They could have put Linda under with anaesthetic right there and then and taken a knife to her chest, pulled out her heart to give to Marc and left her dead and she would have let it happen, without hesitation.

‘I’m serious, I’m telling you, why not?

‘Please, doctor, please. Please give my heart to my son.’

They couldn’t. Of course not. No doctor would kill a healthy mother to save an ailing, almost-adult son, no matter how much she pleaded. The others all knew that.

‘Come on, Mum. Come on,’ said Leasa, pulling her close. So once again Linda had to let her boy go, despite every instinct telling her that this journey would be his last, feeling that prayers were all she had left.

‘Please, God. Don’t let him die on the way.’

Four

Martin

Hot and sweaty from playing football and thirsty for milk from the fridge, Martin Burton got back to his house in Grantham on that Tuesday evening to find there was nobody else home. His big brother was at his girlfriend’s house for tea and would spend the night there. He already knew his mother Sue was at the swimming pool with her friend. Martin had eaten his dinner before going off to the park but now he wanted a big bowl of Coco Pops. If he ate a bit too much sometimes, well then he burned it off. A restless lad, he was always on the go and up for a laugh. The telephone rang and it was his father calling from America, where he was on a desert exercise with the RAF. It was a happy, chatty call of the kind they always had when Dad was away.

‘Am I going to get a cuddly?’

‘Sorry son. You’ve got plenty. This isn’t a cuddly place – they don’t have a lot of cuddlies in Las Vegas.’

It was no big deal, he always asked that. They laughed about it then said goodnight.

‘Love you, son.’

‘Love you, Dad.’

However many miles were between them, they were still close. Nigel was a military man but his sons meant the world to him.

When the call was over, Martin probably turned up the television louder than Mum usually allowed, because he didn’t like to be on his own. Big Brother was his favourite, all those people going mad in a house like a prison, only it looked fun with the stuff they had to do, dressing up and playing silly games. A big lad in a kilt called Cameron had just won it a month before and he was nice. Martin bounded up to his mum for a hug when she came in from swimming, her hair still wet. They sat together for a while watching the box, his legs over hers. This was a bit uncomfortable because Martin was a growing boy of sixteen and she was petite – ‘but you’ve got to enjoy having them close while you can, haven’t you?’ That was what she always said. Her other son had grown up so fast and, proud as she was of the man he was becoming, she missed him as a boy. Nothing was wrong with Martin that night. Nothing at all. She left him watching the telly and went to bed. ‘Be quiet when you come up, will you? I’ve got work in the morning.’

Sue was a small, neat woman with a short dark hair, serious glasses and an efficient manner. She liked an orderly home, which was a challenge with teenagers. Still, they knew very well that they were loved by their mum. She had flashes of temper about things like leaving dirty washing all over the floor but Mum also knew how to have fun. They lived in a detached house with a garage and a drive on the edge of Grantham, a quiet market town in the flatlands of Lincolnshire, best known as the birthplace of the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, not that there was much to show for it. Grantham didn’t like to make a fuss, and the Burtons were a bit like that too.

They had moved to the town when Nigel was stationed at a local airbase. It seemed sensible to buy a house and make a family home somewhere, rather than travel all over the world after him. Nigel had been to war once in the Balkans and twice in the Gulf since then, but the boys were safe and settled in Grantham. Now their youngest was just on the verge of becoming a man, says Sue. ‘Martin was just getting to the age when boys gain maturity and he had started to be a bit more sensible. Girls had come on the scene. There was a big gang of boys and girls who used to hang around together. His body and his personality were changing. When he went to bed he was a normal, happy teenager.’

Sue woke at two in the morning because of the noise – there was a lot of banging and bumping coming from Martin’s room across the landing. This wasn’t fair, she had to get up early for work. ‘Martin? What on earth are you doing?’

She sat up in bed just as her son appeared in the doorway, a silhouette in the dark. He looked strange in the half light, but she couldn’t say why. Martin looked into the room at his mum but somehow looked right through her, as if he couldn’t see or recognise her face. ‘Martin?’ His answer was just a mumble. Was this one of his jokes? Had he fallen out of bed and banged his head?

‘What’s the matter, love? Stop pratting about!’

He mumbled again and took a couple of steps forward but his knees buckled and he collapsed, face down, on her bed. Frightened now, she shook him but he slid off and rolled onto the floor.

‘Get up! Come on!’

But Martin was slumped against the side of the bed in his pyjamas, the shirt riding up. His mother touched his face and it was warm but not fevered. She stroked his hair once, maybe twice, trying to be calm but feeling the fear rising as she wondered what on earth to do. The only phone was across the landing in the spare room so she ran in there to phone for an ambulance, calling back, ‘Hang on, love. Hang on.’

‘Is he breathing?’ the emergency operator wanted to know, so Sue rushed back to check, rolling Martin into the recovery position as best she could. He was a big lad. Breathing, yes. With a guttural noise like a deep snore that scared her. ‘That’s when I realised it was serious. He wasn’t getting up. But it still never entered my mind that this could be life-threatening.’

The operator was clear and precise. ‘Okay, can you open the bedroom curtains please and put the light on so the ambulance driver can see which house in the street is yours? Then I need you to go downstairs and unlock the front door, is that okay?’

The ambulance arrived within minutes.

‘I saw the flashing lights outside from the room upstairs. I called from the top of the stairs and they came up. They shone a light into his eyes, asked me what had happened and got him straight on to a stretcher.’

Sue pulled on a T-shirt and some jeans and found her purse and keys. ‘They wouldn’t let me in the ambulance until they were ready, but they did say, “Have you locked the door? Have you got your phone? You’re going to need to make some calls.” All the practical things they are trained to say, I guess. They wanted to make sure I was leaving the place secure. I just wanted to go.’

She rode in the ambulance with her son, holding on hard as it swayed around corners. ‘This was two in the morning now and the Grantham hospital was only two miles from our house, so it took minutes, literally. Martin looked fast asleep. They got him out of the ambulance and into the hospital, then they were like, “The waiting room is over there …” They whizzed him off through some doors, which promptly slammed behind him, shutting me out. I was stuck in the waiting room, the only person there. There was not even anybody behind the desk because it was the middle of the night and the main doors were locked.’

There were no other patients waiting to be seen, the little hospital was empty. The hard plastic seat pinched the back of her legs. She shivered. This was the quiet time between the last of the drunks and the first of the morning casualties. The calm before the dawn. The moments piled up, crowding her in. Sue was getting cold and scared but she was made of strong stuff. This will all work out, she told herself. No need to panic. ‘Somebody came and took notes: name and address, date of birth, allergies and that sort of thing. Then some young doctor came and asked me, was there a chance Martin had taken any drugs? I was pretty sure the answer was no.’

The doctor was insistent: ‘What about his brother, would he know? Could we perhaps ring him, just to make sure?’

‘No, we cannot,’ said Sue, rattled. Christopher had just turned twenty, he was sleeping over at his girlfriend Ashley’s house, his mother did not think it was appropriate to disturb him. ‘Unless you have got good reason to believe it’s drugs, I’m not waking Christopher to ask him.’

So then she was left alone again, on her own in the empty waiting room. Her mouth was dry, her eyes felt raw. A nurse came after a while and asked if she wanted to ring someone and ask them to come over to the hospital, but Sue said no. ‘I’m a Forces wife. I’m a big girl, I’ve spent a lot of my married life on my own, I’m used to handling things. I am not waking anyone at this hour just because my son has bumped his head.’

The nurse returned at four in the morning and insisted it would actually be best to call someone, to have them there for support. ‘Martin really is very poorly.’

That was when the penny dropped, remembers Sue. ‘She was drip-feeding me. This was the first time anyone had said that it was really serious.’ But the nurse was not going to tell her just how serious it was until there was someone to hold her hand. Or to catch her fall.

The phone rang and rang until the answerphone clicked on. ‘Please leave a message after the tone.’ Sue pressed redial and listened again to the purr of the call, steady and insistent, alerting the landline in the house of her parents, Len and Joan, in Lincoln, twenty-five miles to the north. If they didn’t pick up, what was she going to do? Who else could she call? Could she get the police to go round there and rouse them?

‘Hello?’

Her father sounded startled.

‘Dad, it’s me, Sue. Listen, I need you –’

‘Who is this?’

He was confused by sleep. She got frustrated and shouted.

‘It’s Susan. Your daughter. I’m in hospital –’

‘What’s wrong? Are you hurt? Where are you?’

‘It’s Martin. He’s had a fall. I need you to come, Dad. I’m on my own …’

The confusion fell away as Len recognised what she was saying and the fear in her voice woke him up, fully. ‘We’ll be there as soon as we can.’ He shook Joan, they dressed quickly and set off in the chill of the early morning. Both were seventy-three years old.

Len was concentrating on the road but Joan was worried, really worried. ‘What did she say exactly? Come on, she must have said more than that? What do you think is wrong? Did she really give you no idea?’ The sky began to glow beyond the street lights during the forty-minute drive. The roads were empty. The world seemed calm, too calm.

They were both scared stiff but Len was trying not to think too much about what was happening as they arrived at the hospital, a huddle of low prefab buildings that looked more like an old army base. They had to press a buzzer to be let into the hospital, which was otherwise deserted.

Sue was in a back room, distraught. ‘They think he’s got a bleed on his brain. They’re taking him to Nottingham to see a specialist, right away.’

The nurse beside her spoke softly. ‘Would you like to see him before he goes?’

Sue felt giddy, fluttery. ‘Yes, please.’

‘He’s on a machine …’

Somewhere in among the nurses and the monitors and drips and tubes in a room full of people and things was Martin. Her normal instinct would have been to push everyone aside, but Sue was rattled by what was happening and uncertain of herself in that moment: the doctors must know best. So she held back, thinking, ‘I have to let them do whatever they need to do.’

But then the nurses parted and she saw Martin, under a clear plastic mask. His eyes were closed. His hair was all messed up. He was unusually still, she sensed that in an instant. She hoped he couldn’t hear all this commotion: the beeping of the monitors, the tense conversations between staff, the rattling of her own heart. He would be afraid, poor love. She moved in close, trying to reassure him. ‘You’ve had a fall. That’s all, silly pudding. You’ve bumped your head. You’ll be fine.’

There was no way of knowing if he could hear her voice, but she had to say something, even if she was struggling to believe it. Half-blind from the tears, Sue bent to give her son a brief, soft kiss on the forehead before he was taken to the ambulance. ‘It’s all right, love. It’s all right. Mum’s here. Everything will be okay.’

Five

Marc

Marc was not going to make it down the corridor. He could not survive being moved out of the ward in a swarm of medics, trailing drips, monitors and machines. If he did then he would die in the lift on the way down to the specialist ambulance or somewhere out on the City of Edinburgh bypass in the night. There was no way he would get to the airport alive, his mum and dad were convinced of that, although neither of them dared say so. They were both hoping and praying to be wrong. Linda was weeping and keening as the bed was loaded into a big, boxy white ambulance. Marc lay at the centre of an octopus of tubes and wires. The ventilator was helping his lungs, the mechanical assist relieving his heart. All of this was tricky to get into the vehicle and it was going to be even harder to move out and into the aircraft without a slip that could mean a broken connection and a nasty death. They had to get there first, though. One of the medics, a stubbled Scot who might have had a son of his own about the same age, flashed Norrie McCay a sympathetic look. Norrie hoped he would talk to Marc on the way, even though the boy was unconscious. He didn’t want his son to feel alone.

‘Come on, son, let’s do this,’ Norrie said to himself as he got into the back of the police escort car, as if he was talking to Marc. But when they pulled up on the apron at Edinburgh Airport, he could see a problem. A really serious one.

‘Is that the plane for our Marc?’

‘Aye,’ said his driver. ‘Think so.’

Norrie had imagined a transporter plane that would open up at the back and allow the ambulance to drive right in – but this was just a small light aircraft, nowhere near big enough for the equipment, Marc and the medics. It was horrifying.

‘I’d no get in that door myself. What the hell’s going on? My Marc’s dying here!’

‘Calm down. We’ll get this sorted.’

The police officers looked uncertain as they went into a huddle with the ambulance crew on the tarmac. Norrie listened with the window of the police car wound down then called his oldest child, Leasa, on his mobile. ‘They’re saying the plane’s too small, hen.’

He was beginning to panic now. The one per cent chance of survival he had grabbed so thankfully and desperately was vanishing. ‘They’ve got tae take us by road. No, I don’t understand it either.’

Norrie remembers being told there was only enough battery power in the ambulance to keep the life-saving machines in the back going without a recharge for another two hours. The Freeman Hospital in Newcastle was at least two and a half hours away by the usual route, down the A1 through Berwick, Seahouses and Alnwick and into the city from the north. There was not enough time, even at night. This was hopeless, but the driver had a plan. They could go a more direct way, cross-country down the A68, shaving off miles. This might be a rollercoaster ride over the border hills, but if the police car went ahead to clear the way they hoped to drive smoothly enough to keep from hurting Marc. They might just make it before the power in the medical systems began to run out, or at least get near enough to transfer the patient if a Newcastle ambulance came up to meet them. Marc might not be able to survive the vibrations of a high-speed cross-country race for more than 100 miles, but then he might also have a heart attack here at the airport. There was no alternative. This was his only chance.

‘Okay, son, here we go,’ said Norrie aloud, looking back at the ambulance through the rear window of the police car as it led the way out of the airport. ‘Hold on tight!’

Six

Martin

‘You’re shivering, we’ve got to go home to get you sorted,’ said Sue’s mother as they left Grantham Hospital in the early hours of that Wednesday morning, having seen the ambulance carrying Martin set off for Nottingham at high speed. Shock was setting in. Sue only had on a T-shirt and jeans and the dawn was chilly. The ambulance driver had told her father that it was pointless to try and follow behind, so they went back briefly to her house first and Sue found some warmer clothes. Rocky, their grizzled old Border Collie, was baffled by all these people turning up in his kitchen so early, booting him out into the garden to do his business.

‘Come on, old boy, we don’t know when we’ll be home again,’ said Len, helping the dog out of the door with the side of his foot, but Rocky didn’t get it. He did what he had to do, then came straight back in and flopped back into bed.

‘Where can we put a key?’

Len was thinking ahead. They put it under a pot in the shed and left that door unlocked. ‘I’ll phone your friend later and get her to take the dog,’ said Joan. She would also phone Sue’s office and tell them what was happening, assuming control of that side of things to help out her daughter.

Sue was barely there. She was thinking of Martin and the bleed on his brain, whatever that meant. The hospital staff had not said much more. She was thinking about brain damage. She was thinking about therapy and what that meant and what it cost and whether she would have to give up work to care for him at least for a while and whether their house would have to be adapted in some way, until he was better. He was alive, at least. Whatever happened, he was still her boy. His ambulance would have arrived in Nottingham by now. Their journey took an hour, with her father driving painfully slowly and Sue got exasperated, believing the doctors could not operate on her son without her permission.

‘Go faster, Dad. Go faster! I haven’t signed anything, they can’t take him into theatre without my signature as a parent, you’ve got to speed up here.’ But Len wouldn’t go faster, for fear of crashing. They had to follow a map, they didn’t know where they were going and when they got to the vast Queen’s Medical Centre – the biggest hospital in the country at the time, with more than a thousand beds – and were eventually able to find the intensive care unit, the night sister had not heard of a Martin Burton. ‘Sorry, we don’t have anyone of that name. Where have you come from again? No, we’ve not had any patients from Grantham here and I don’t think we’re expecting any.’

Sue panicked then, but the sister looked at her again. ‘Hang on, what age is your son? Sixteen? You want PICU then, he might be there.’

A young male nurse who didn’t look much older than Martin himself explained in a kindly voice that the P was for paediatric, for kids. She knew that, of course, but her head wasn’t working properly. He walked them there, ten minutes away through the labyrinth of the hospital, up to the fifth floor in the lift and through corridors that confused and this time the answer was yes, they had Martin. ‘Or we will have, he’s just coming back from theatre.’ So they were already operating without asking, thought Sue. He must be in a really bad way. Her stomach twisted tighter. There was tea or coffee in the family room, but she didn’t want either. There were tissues, but she was past tears. There was nothing to do now but wait.

The hammering on the door startled Nigel Burton as he lay awake in a bed far from home, on the other side of the Atlantic and on the far side of America.