Burn Injuries

Interviewer: Do you remember the trip to hospital at all?

Yeah, I do, very much so actually. Generally, my memory after a seizure is pretty rubbish. I have conversations where apparently, I’m talking normally, so I think I am aware when I’m having the conversations but afterwards, I have no memory of those sensible conversations. So, my memory is, you know, buggered for about half an hour afterwards. But that particular journey – I don’t know how long after the seizure it was – I do remember. I was taken – once again, can I say they were really lovely to me – and the first thing they did was… So, I went in the van ambulance to the very nearest hospital, which is probably only a five minute drive away. They checked me there and then they sent me off to a hospital, which has a specialist burns unit, so that same evening. So, I was probably, from the seizure to being in the burns unit of the specialist hospital probably took maybe… 45 minutes, an hour, something like that… Maybe not that long. I don’t know. Between 40 minutes and an hour, I would say.

So the next day on the Tuesday, I took her, popped her down to A&E, children’s A&E, at our local hospital and just asked the question really, because there was no pain and she said that-, the nurse there saw her, lovely lady, and said that they’re going to contact a slightly bigger hospital, children’s hospital – the burn’s centre – and speak with them. And she said "Oh, I don’t think it’ll be a problem at all" and I was like "Yeah, not a problem, I was just wanting to get it checked." And she come back and said "Actually, they want to see you. You need to go down tomorrow." And I was like ‘Whoa, ok.’ So, we made the trip, sort of half hour trip the next day, to go.

It’s the first time that, in the lives of all three of my children, that we’ve ended up at a children’s hospital and our local hospital, which is about a half hour away from here, that’s a big hospital. So, when you go in and get told by them that you’ve got to go to the children’s burn unit, you think ‘Oh Lord!’ and that, yeah, I mean I wasn’t like ‘Oh my God!’ or anything but it’s just like ‘Mm, I thought this wasn’t great.’ You know, 'I was right to take her, I was right to be nervous of this burn'.

I’m not somebody that uses trains so… and it was just her and I, and was very nervous about going there and being judged in the first place. I was nervous about getting there, I was nervous about being late and missing it. Was I going to get the right platform? Was I going to get off in the right place? All those things were on my mind. So, yeah, the second time, we knew what we were doing, we knew roughly where we were going and we knew the plan of the day, kind of thing, and then to chuck a couple of nice things in there as well was just a nicer experience.

It was quite a nasty ordeal. And having, you know, time off work, I just started a new job, maybe a month into a new job so the time of work for that, and it was quite a frustrating ordeal, and also not being able to do anything. As I say, I always like doing things. I’ve always got something to do, I've alwasy got something in my hands. I just couldn't sit still, and it was so frustrating not being able to do anything.

Because the specialist burns place was a bit about, maybe half hour out for us, so the whole having to drive there and work it around work obviously, I couldn't ride there at all. And I think that was probably one of the worst bit is although, I had the bike and stuff like that, I could no longer work, like, I could no longer ride, nothing in the whole recovery process.

I have some memories of being in hospital. They’re quite faint. I more remember, in terms of actually the incident, I think I recall a story that I’ve been told, and I don’t really have clear memories from that specific time but, you know, I know that it was a very stressful time, especially for my family. So the nearest hospital with a burns unit was about an hour away from us, so we all moved up there. We were given somewhere to stay by the hospital, which was very good of them but, obviously, that enabled us to all be together in terms of my family. My mum was also seven months pregnant, so my younger brother was born in hospital as well, where we were staying.

Immediately after arriving in the hospital, we were told that she couldn’t be treated there and were we told to try and get her out of the country as quick as possible. It took five days for her to be flown to the U.K. On day six we came to where we currently live and she’s been treated there ever since. She was in a medically induced coma from the initial injury, and she remained in a coma for about eight/nine weeks, I believe, and then spent about another three months in the high dependency burns centre in the hospital, and she’s been treated there ever since.

There’s nothing more frightening I think that your child being brought to a hospital and then being told that they can’t treat her. That was probably the initial panic and upset is, you know, you feel like you’ve got them in a safe place and then somebody tells you ‘Well, actually we can’t look after a child with an injury this severe.’ So, for those five/six days it was panic, it was just trying desperately hard to get her to a country – any country – that could treat her injury. Yeah, very, very frightening. Very, very frightening and then, when you get that call to say there is a bed available in the UK, it was, you know, the relief because she’d been actually given a chance to survive. Up to that point, it was just keeping her alive with no chance of survival, but when you get that call to say you can come, you know, at least we felt like we were giving her the best possible chance.

I think it’s always, you know, worry for other children. And my parents and sister, who they were living with at the time, because they gave up their life to care for our children. But I think it was the hardest-, because our other children were so young that it was the hardest part was, I suppose, for them asking questions, especially our oldest one at the time because he was only I think he was six and kind of saying ‘Well, why do you and daddy have to be with Elizabeth but we’ve got nobody?’. And that was really, really difficult because, trying to explain that to, like, a just-gone six-year-old, you know, that she’s really ill and she needs both of us, and he was like ‘But we need you too.’ So, it’s-, the other two were probably too small really to kind of understand. But that was, you know, that obviously breaks your heart as a parent because you’re torn between this and that and you feel like you can’t please anybody and you’re making everybody upset, including yourself. So, that was probably the hardest part, you know, the living in temporary accommodation or, you know, running back and forth to hospital. It’s, you know, as hard as it is, I think when you’ve got other children and you’re torn between everybody that was probably the most heart-breaking part of everything. And the guilt probably.

What was the guilt like?

Well guilt is awful and it’s the worst as a mother anyway. You know, I’d ring up every day to speak to them, to Facetime them, whatever, and they wouldn’t want to speak to me, especially the older one because, obviously, he understood a little-, a tiny little bit more than the other two but yeah, it’s just like that guilt coming away from the phone or video and, you know like your heart is aching because you’ve got, like, nobody and you want to please everyone but you’re pleasing nobody and it’s yeah, the guilt is horrible. And then questioning yourself as well, ‘Well, maybe one of us should be with them and one of us should be here.’ You just literally are torn between everything and everyone.