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

‘Yes? What?’

It was still Tuesday night there, eight hours behind Nottingham.

‘Chief Tech Burton?’

The big, bulky Sergeant Supplier with a grim look on his face clearly hadn’t come to drag Nigel out on the town. ‘I’ve had a call from the guard room at Cottesmore.’

They worked at the same base in England but were staying in apartments on Las Vegas Boulevard for ‘Red Flag’, an advanced aerial combat exercise in the skies above Nevada. Red versus Blue with live bombs, the RAF on the side of the good guys in raids and dogfights across hundreds of miles, training for serious combat. Nigel was the liaison between the pilots and the ground crews that kept the planes flying. The Sergeant Supplier at his door saw to the spare parts, but they knew each other only by sight. Whatever this was about, couldn’t it wait? Nigel had been up at half past four that morning and out to Nellis Air Force Base on the edge of town to get the first wave of Harrier Jump Jets away. He’d turned down a trip to the Strip with the lads for an early night, but clearly wasn’t going to get it.

‘One of your sons has collapsed and they’d like you to phone home.’

Nigel had served his country in wartime, and this carefully spoken man with a dark moustache and close-cropped, thinning hair was known and admired for being cool under pressure. He was trained to put other worries to the back of his mind and focus on the task in hand. This news was nothing he could not handle, although somebody at home had obviously thought it was serious enough to ring the helpline for forces families, which was how he had been traced and told. He didn’t expect it was Christopher who was poorly, Martin was the one who was always tripping over his own feet. He once fell off his skateboard and they took him to hospital then, but it all worked out okay. Fully expecting to be told that the crisis had passed, he rang home. There was no answer. Len and Joan did not reply to the phone at their house either. Nigel rang his own father, who knew nothing.

‘It’s very early here.’

Nigel told the sergeant he was not too worried.

‘These things happen. It will be fine, I’m sure.’

They sat in the apartment kitchen while Nigel kept trying to call home without success, but the next person he spoke to was a squadron leader calling from RAF Innsworth in Gloucestershire, the management centre for the RAF, who said he had been tasked with getting Nigel home. That was alarming. They didn’t pay for a commercial ticket back to the UK without a good, urgent reason, particularly if you were the only person in your unit who could do your job during an important exercise.

‘All I can tell you at the moment is that Martin has collapsed and it is serious. The earliest I can get you out of Vegas is 07.45 hours tomorrow morning. You will have to stop over in Pittsburgh for three hours, then catch the Gatwick flight from there. It’s the quickest way. We’ll have a car at the airport to take you to Nottingham. We’ll get you to your son as fast as we can.’

Fine, thought Nigel, as he started to pack his two kit bags, alone again in his room, but why the massive rush? There must be something he was not being told. Something terrible.

Seven

Marc

The police car rode the hills like a speedboat on the waves. Pushed back into his seat by the force of it all, Norrie felt sick to the stomach and gripped the hand rest with fright. He didn’t dare look at the speedometer. They were plunging into deep space, with the blackness wrapping back around them in the rearview mirror. The ambulance was just about in their slipstream, but suddenly they were slowing down.

‘What’s up? What are we doing?’

‘This is England. We have to stop.’

The ambulance passed by at speed as they pulled over and Norrie was alarmed. ‘You’re not gonna let them leave me behind?’

‘No way. See?’

Another police car sat in the lay-by ahead, this time with the markings of the Northumberland Police. ‘Come on, Norrie, let’s get you swapped,’ the officer said as he grabbed the spare oxygen bottles out from the back seat, letting in a rush of cold air. Norrie quickly tried to climb in the back of the next car but the door wouldn’t open.

‘No, Jock,’ said the driver, an Englishman on his own in the car. ‘You sit up front with me.’ Norrie would have got cross if anyone else had called him Jock, but he wasn’t going to argue with the only man who could get him to his son. The ambulance had disappeared over the hill but the driver saw him looking after it and grinned. ‘Don’t worry, Jock, we’ll catch them.’

What happened next was a shock, says Norrie. ‘I swear it was like being in a plane. We nearly took off. I thought, “My god, he’s bombing it!”’

They had been going fast before, north of the border, but this was something else and it made Norrie laugh. He was getting hysterical with the grief, the stress and the fear, but he was elated, too – they were doing something for Marc at last, going somewhere fast, getting the best help they could. At least they were trying, all these people – the doctors, the nurses, the paramedics, the cops – all on his son’s side. They were hurtling through the dark again now, but he knew they were heading down through the open country of the Northumberland National Park. ‘I could see the ambulance far off in front, but there were hills, so the tail lights would pop up red in the distance then they’d disappear.’

The lights started to get closer but Norrie suddenly began to feel really sick.

‘Are you all right?’ The driver must have heard him groan.

‘Not really. Can I have a cigarette, to settle my nerves?’

‘What? No, pal. You’re in a police car!’ The driver was concentrating on the road but he must have thought about his passenger and how there would be nobody else to clear up the sick, because he changed his mind. ‘Special circumstances? All right, you can.’

The window next to Norrie opened just a crack and the wind raged in his ear, but it was clear what he was expected to try and do. So he lit his fag, took a drag, craned his neck and tried to blow smoke out of the window. They were going at more than 100 miles an hour. The wind blew the smoke back in his eyes and the ash in his mouth, all over his face. The driver laughed. ‘Nice one, Jock.’

Norrie laughed too, high on adrenaline. It felt like seconds before they were in among houses and street lights again and the shop signs suggested they were on the edge of Newcastle, where two other patrol cars joined them. ‘My mates are going to play tag,’ said the driver, meaning that one car would race ahead and block off the road for the ambulance to pass through, then the other would accelerate away to the next junction to do the same. ‘I felt like I was in a movie,’ says Norrie, who had never seen such driving. Jock or not, he was grateful. ‘I couldn’t thank those guys enough for what they did that night.’

Still, when they got to the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle the distractions of the drive fell away and he was hit again by the full force of what was happening to his son. Norrie expected to walk into the hospital and be told that Marc was dead, but there was nobody there to meet them. The English policeman led the way up the stairs, but as they were going up he saw the doctor and nurses who had ridden with the ambulance coming towards him. There were four women and the older man, the medic he recognised from before, looking exhausted now. The man’s face was wet with tears, and Norrie felt a rush of despair, as he realised what that meant. It had all been in vain. Marc had not made it.

But as they passed on the stairs, the man reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. Norrie braced himself.

‘Your son’s a fighter. He’s still with us in there …’

Eight

Martin

When his phone rang at home at five-thirty on the Wednesday morning, the doctor who would take charge of Martin’s care at Nottingham was already awake. Harish Vyas was an early riser, no matter what time he had gone to bed. He answered quickly, so as not to disturb his wife and four sons asleep in their home in a village to the north of Nottingham. This was his sanctuary, the place to which he came home after the long days and nights that so often ran together on the ward, but he was always ready to return to the hospital at a moment’s notice. If there was one thing you could say about this comfortably built man in his mid-fifties with his swept-back hair and greying brush of a moustache, it was that he really cared. Other doctors knew how to detach themselves from work and walk away at the end of the day for their own survival, but not him. ‘I am an emotional being, that is who I am. I have chosen not to fight it. I cannot help becoming involved.’

Dr Vyas was in charge of the children’s intensive care unit at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, with a dozen patients at any one time, and he felt for every family. He knew the names of mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers, grandparents and carers and sometimes even pets, and once he was involved in an urgent case he found it hard to leave the hospital. ‘I could go on without much sleep for five or six days at a time, easily. This is really personal. You talk to the family, you stick with them and you don’t want the baton to be passed on to somebody new, for their sake.’

The unit required hard work and very long hours and needed a certain stamina and commitment. Working together in this environment produced phenomenal loyalty among the doctors and nurses. The ward sister knew he would come. She had only called because it was really important.

‘A young man of sixteen is coming to us from Grantham with significant neurological features. It could be a bleed on the brain. He is going straight for a scan and then to theatre.’

Sixteen years old. The same age as one of his own sons, sleeping safe. Harish Vyas thought of that as he drove up the hill away from his village and down to the hospital, through the dawn. It was only three hours since Martin’s collapse. ‘The brains of children are very different from adult brains,’ the doctor says now, looking back at that moment. ‘They have such amazing resilience. I saw a young girl who was brought in after a wardrobe fell on her and she was crushed. She had multiple fractures and a bleed in the brain. When she came to the emergency department, she was squirting blood from her nose. After surgery, I brought her over to our unit and ventilated her and, to cut a long story short, she is now back to normal. So children do surprise me. But Martin was, perhaps, a bit old.’

The brain is a fragile thing. Squishy to the touch, it looks like half a ball of fatty, uncooked sausagemeat bound up in clingfilm. It weighs three pounds, the same as a big bag of flour, but doesn’t feel that heavy in your head because it actually floats around, suspended in a salty fluid. This odd lump of white and grey matter is – by some miracle – the place where our thoughts and feelings occur, but it is also the beginning of the central nervous system that controls every part of the body. From here, the orders go out to make the heart beat, the lungs breathe, the tongue taste, the eyes see, the nose smell, the ears hear and the skin feel.

All this is done by 100 billion nerve cells which need oxygen to survive and thrive. Without it they begin to die, and that can cause headaches and seizures, take away the ability to speak, paralyse the body or ultimately kill. That vital oxygen comes from the lungs and is carried in the blood pumped up by the heart, through the neck to the head, where the arteries wrap themselves around the brain like an intricate cradle of incredibly thin fingers. At the tip of each finger is a patch where the blood gives up the oxygen and takes away carbon dioxide, turning purple in the process. Then the old purple blood is carried away by a spidery network of veins, back down the neck to be pumped again through the heart and lungs and refreshed.

Sometimes, disastrously, the arteries or the veins just burst. The blood floods between the brain and the skull. This bleeding is what the emergency neurosurgeons at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham could see had happened to Martin as they examined his brain scan in the early hours of Wednesday morning, although they could not yet be sure of the cause. It might have been the result of a head injury, like the one suffered by the little girl Dr Vyas was talking about – perhaps if he had fallen out of bed in the night. Or possibly a condition called Arteriovenous Malformation, a tiny tangling of the veins and arteries that could have been secretly lurking in his head for years, even since birth. They did know that he was bleeding heavily – catastrophically, in medical terms – and the blood had formed a clot that was pressing down on his soft brain like a butcher’s thumb.

There was no time to waste: it was three or four hours since Sue had seen Martin collapse and the surgeons suspected his condition was getting worse by the minute. They could not wait for his mother to arrive at the hospital, to explain to her what the scan had shown and to ask her permission to act, so they took Martin straight to theatre. There, the surgeons drilled a hole in the skull to let some blood flow out and to relieve the pressure and they sucked out the clot as best they could, hoping that the brain would stop swelling. If it did not then it would continue to get bigger, pressing upwards against the inside of his skull and downwards through the brain stem, the three-inch stalk that connects the brain with the spinal cord and controls vital functions like the heart rate, breathing and sleeping. Drugs were used to paralyse Martin and keep him from writhing about, because any movement was going to make things worse. A very high dose of morphine stopped him feeling any pain. He was being kept in a coma for his own good.

When Martin came back from surgery, he was put on his own in the room nearest the entrance to the intensive care unit. Reserved for the most serious cases, Cub 2, as the little sign with a cheeky monkey said, was away from the rest of the ward so that fretting mums and dads whose sons or daughters were close to death did not have to see the other children, who were mostly getting better, and the other children and their families did not have to see them. Sue and her parents were shown a kettle and supplies in the family room for hot drinks and a microwave to heat up food if they felt like eating, which they did not. They sat on two sofas staring at the television without seeing anything, minds hazy with the interference of anxiety and fear. Harish Vyas could see the distress on their faces as they stood up when he entered the room.

‘Would you like to sit down?’

He introduced himself and offered tea and biscuits, knowing that even in moments of high anxiety, people often have an urge to sip a drink and perhaps taste something sweet. There were no takers this time.

‘Can I ask what else you have been told?’

Something about a bleed on the brain said Sue, and the doctor agreed.

‘The most likely event is that the blood vessels in his brain have burst. The extra blood has caused pressure to build up inside his head.’

A registrar who had come up from the operating theatre two floors below explained what had been done in surgery, and that sickened Sue. Then Dr Vyas took over again, gently but firmly. They needed to see how he would settle down and do some more tests before they could be sure what had caused this and what might happen next.

‘If I can just prepare you a little, Martin is still very poorly. He has a tube in his mouth and there are various lines into him. These things are all part and parcel of his treatment here. You will notice that he isn’t moving, this is because of the drugs we give him to prevent any more problems. Would you like to see Martin now?’

If Martin had been awake he could have looked out of the window and seen the early morning sky. The pale blue curtains were drawn back, offering a grim view of air conditioning units and the flat top of the next hospital block, but the sky was out there too, distant and hopeful. But this handsome young lad could see nothing with his eyes closed and there was no prospect of them opening soon, not even when his mother entered the room. He lay flat on his back on a white iron bed with his head in a support block and a white, corrugated plastic pipe going into his mouth and down into his oesophagus for the ventilator, feeding air into his lungs to help them work. The monitors behind him showed a series of squiggly lines, changing all the time: blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels and the reading from a gauge on the end of a hairline wire going into his head. Half a dozen pumps sent drugs into his body through a single feed in the groin – ‘the hosepipe’, as the staff called it when there was nobody else around. Martin wasn’t moving, except for the rise and fall of his chest.

‘You can touch him,’ said the nurse gently, feeling Sue hold back. ‘It’s okay.’

She went closer then, feeling the warmth rising from his body, or maybe it was the warm air under the blanket, but it was suddenly hot in that room, stiflingly so, prickling her neck. Sue kissed the tips of her fingers and placed them on his forehead, pushing them through his hair.

‘Oh, Martin. What are we going to do with you?’

‘Call for you,’ said a nurse at the door and Sue went to the desk confused, but it was Nigel on a crackly line from Las Vegas, sounding far away. She was just about able to hold it together and describe the situation, as much as she had been told and could remember, until she had to tell him the condition Martin was in, right there and then. ‘He’s got a bleed in the brain. We don’t know what the outcome is going to be, we don’t know …’ Her voice cracked and Nigel also struggled not to lose control. ‘I’ll get there as soon as I can.’

Sue put the phone down and turned back to the reality of the ward, momentarily thrown, before being overcome by a rush of concern for her other son Christopher, aged twenty, who had arrived with his girlfriend, Ashley. ‘I was split between the two boys, divided between thinking about Martin on life support and worrying how Chris was coping with it. Christopher was very angry that he couldn’t do anything to protect Martin. He was very angry that Nigel wasn’t there. I think he felt he had to be the man. He kept having to go out to go off for a walk. I think he was letting himself vent that anger by storming around outside the hospital, rather than actually sitting with Martin and showing his emotions.’

‘Ashley stayed with him the whole time. If he moved, she moved. I was aware that he was a very angry young man right then and I wanted her to not have to deal with that, so I said to Ashley, “If he gets more angry and you need anybody, just fetch my dad.”’

Back at Martin’s bedside, for the sake of something to say to the young nurse in blue who was moving around her son, Sue began to ask questions. ‘What will happen now? If everything is for the best, how long do you think it might be before Martin could come home? We’ll do whatever is necessary for him, obviously …’

The way the nurse responded made Sue realise with a lurch that she might be getting this wrong. Everything she was fearing and dreading might actually be too much to hope for.

‘We’ll wake him up slowly,’ the nurse said cautiously. ‘Then we’ll wait and see.’

Nine

Marc

Somewhere south of the border, Linda was struggling too. She was in her own car with Leasa travelling to Newcastle when she felt her tongue swell up inside her mouth until she couldn’t talk. Her lips ballooned and her eyes became raw, weeping like they were full of grit.

‘Oh my God, what’s happened to you?’

The nurse who met them at the Freeman was shocked and treated Linda straight away. She had been given a couple of pills for a headache by a paramedic up in Scotland and was suffering an allergic reaction. The symptoms were dramatic but they would pass away with the right drugs. Linda was weak though and she needed to be put under observation. A porter pushed her to a ward in a wheelchair.

‘I was sedated and they kept me in overnight, with large doses of antihistamines. That was a really bad start, I just wanted to be with my boy.’

Norrie was already at the hospital and couldn’t believe it when Leasa found him and told him. ‘Seriously, that could only happen to Linda. Unbelievable.’

She was going to be okay though, it was just a bit of a drama. Leasa shook her head and made a joke about how her emotional mum was the centre of attention, even now.

‘There’s no show without Punch.’

Linda was brought up in a village to the west of Glasgow, a country girl who fell for the first handsome boy she met at her first proper disco in the local town, when she was just seventeen. His name was Norman but everybody called him Norrie.

‘We just clicked right away.’

He was short and sharp, gregarious and funny, but not one for candlelight or flowers. ‘There was no romance. Never.’

Within six months, to the horror of both their parents, Linda was pregnant. Norrie proposed. Sort of. ‘My granny and my father think we should get married because you’re pregnant. They’ll pay for the register office in Johnstone, which is £36.’

‘There were no violins,’ says Linda. ‘We were too young. I’d hardly been out with any boys. I hadn’t lived my life. I hadn’t even been to the dancing before and I had to stop anyway because of the baby.’

Linda was seven months pregnant on the day they got married in 1981. The only witnesses were a couple who were their friends. ‘We had a meal. Then I went home and made my bed, cos I was knackered.’

Leasa was the first child to arrive, a beautiful, very calm baby, who would grow up to become a strong young woman. Then came Darren and Ryan, both proper lads, destined to be a soldier and a professional footballer. Marc was next, the sparky little lad they all doted on and called over for cuddles. ‘Marc gave me the least bother. He was never ill and he never got in trouble at school. If there was a cat or a dog in the house it would go straight to Marc, he had a really good soul. Very laid-back and never complained about nothing. A wonderful brother to his sister Leasa, really dedicated to his brothers and his friends. A very caring son.’ He was very shy, though. ‘If anyone spoke to Marc he went scarlet.’

Linda was proud of her kids, but seeing them grow up and get on with their own lives was a struggle for her sometimes. They needed her less and less. Marc became her ally against the passing of time. He was the one she could still hold close and keep safe, until a fifth child came along. ‘I was pregnant for the whole of the Eighties,’ she says with a laugh. ‘I kept trying for another girl. I was like, “Norrie, one more time, please?” I never got her!’

The youngest, baby Daryl, was poorly with a hip disease for a while and had to be in a wheelchair at the age of four. ‘That probably stopped me having any more kids. “I don’t need a pram, I’ve got a wheelchair!”’

By then Marc was away running with a pack of cheeky lads from the same street, with a river to swim in, a waterfall to jump over and a wood for games. But when all her own boys were home indoors, the house was a riot. ‘Darren was the funny, cocky one who made us all laugh. Ryan was the daddy who’d say: “I’ve got football in the morning, youse better stop making a noise.” Marc was the peacekeeper, the negotiator. He’d say to his brothers, “What did you say that to Leasa for? You need to go and say sorry.” What a wain.’ Leasa was like a second mother. ‘She’s one of the best folk I know in the world. She’s lost more than a brother. Leasa taught Marc to walk when she was five or six and he was just a baby.’

Once the kids didn’t need her so much, Linda trained to follow her own mother Betty into the health service and started as a nursing assistant at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in 1991, working the twilight shift four times a week in the respiratory ward, doing everything a nurse would do except giving controlled drugs. That meant looking after people who were on diamorphine at the end of their life, as they succumbed to lung cancer. ‘I was very good at that, giving people respect in those times. Nothing prepares you for seeing your first dead body though, or having relatives screaming in your face. Or patients that have got cancer in their brain and they’re violent with you.’