Intensive care: Experiences of family & friends

They took us down to this room and started to talk. And we couldn't quite understand what they were saying. And it was a lot of technical terms and not sort of much else. And then we'd got this decision to make. So my husband said to them, 'Well, what are you trying to tell us? Are you now trying to tell us that there is nothing more you can do for him?' And they said, 'Yes, that's what we're trying to tell you. And that you've got four decisions to make. One to put him, keep him where he is, take him back to the local hospital, let him go into a hospice, or try and manage him at home'. They said, 'You need to get people up that are very close, that need to be in on the decision. And then once everybody's here, we'll come back and explain to him what is happening'. 

By then there was a nurse in the room with us the whole time and then later on another one appeared. And we can remember her coming in. But the other nurse must have got her there somehow, because obviously they knew that it was getting near the time that [our son] was going to die. And to be honest you could see all the figures going down on the monitors anyway. And so you knew that, you know, it wasn't good. But I just couldn't believe that there wasn't a doctor to come and speak to us. The nurses took us, left us there, and then they came back a bit later and said, 'Look, we really think you ought to have a cup of tea. You've had, you know, you've had a shock'. And they said, 'It will give us a chance to sort him out and make him more presentable for you'. 

When you had the conversation with the doctors who were telling you about your four options, they were using a lot of technical terms and -?

Which we just didn't understand. I mean we knew what some of the terms meant obviously, because you do tend to pick up a lot more than you know as it were. But they would, instead of saying, 'Look, we're sorry, we've got some bad news to tell you' there was none of that at all. They went into all this technical terms, and saying what they could and couldn't do. And I would have preferred them to have come straight out, and not for us to have had to turn round and say, 'What are you trying to tell us? Are you trying to tell us that there is nothing more you can do for our son?' And which is when they said, 'Yes'. 

Was it at that point that they also said he'd have two to three weeks? 

We were told he'd got two to three weeks. 

And then it was only later through the nurse that you'?

We found out that he was going that night. 

Was he on a ventilator? 

No. He was on oxygen. And that's one of the reasons they talked about, the two doctors that had come to see him from Intensive Care said that his breathing wasn't very good and they'd got a special machine. They explained that it was a different machine to what he'd been on at the local hospital, but they would see how he went. But they said if it turned out that it was painful for him, then obviously they would stop it. But they said, 'We can assure you we will keep a good eye on him'. So there was me expecting him to be going off to Intensive Care, and then a quarter of an hour later I'm told that he's only got two to three weeks. It was just an unbelievable day in the way the whole pattern emerged, and the fact that nobody actually came back and told us that, 'He's in fact going tonight' from a doctor's point of view I mean, you know. I didn't think it had been fair for the nurse to have had to have come and told us. 
 

It was over three hundred tablets of everything. He went even into tablets that had been lying in the drawer for over a year, stuff of my husband's and myself that he took all that. He was then taken to Accident & Emergency where, that was horrendous because that was, nearly five hours of the doctors and nurses not really telling us anything. 

I thought maybe his stomach would be pumped out but it wasn't. They had to know exactly what he'd taken, and one of the drugs was so dangerous and the amount he'd taken does affect the brain so very badly and, I, we were left in a room and it was only me kept going out and out and calling any doctor, nurse, you know, 'How's he getting on?' 'We're dealing with it, he's alright, he's sedated'. And then we were brought back in the room, but that was like five days not five hours, horrendous. The only thing at that minute that got me through it a bit was my father was in the opposite wing of the hospital, just had his stones removed from an operation and he was fine and getting through it. And it was just going to be with him in the others part of the hospital which whiled those hours away. 

And then I came back again and, it was, still we weren't told, by ten o'clock that night and this happened at half past one that afternoon. So you can imagine the time was horrendous. We were told he was going to Intensive Care and I thought, I had a relief almost as though he was going to be really taken care of because I knew the doctors and nurses would be watching over him all the time. 

That first night I think was really a blur. We stayed and we didn't go home, we stayed the night. And the next morning we were obviously just by his bedside. Through the time he lasted ten days but it was very, very rocky, very up, very down, one doctor telling us that he was going to survive. We had a big black cloud but the other side of the black cloud was the silver lining, and I gave, I really had hopes that this was wonderful. I thought, after about four or five days my husband and I got to know every monitor in Intensive Care. I knew how it operated. I knew what it supposed to be, I knew that what was registering was wrong, that my son was not doing as well as we thought. 

His heart stopped a couple of times and they revived him, and he carried on another couple of days. The day before he died we were told that he would pull through, but they were, we weren't to know whether he was going to be either any brain damage or certainly liver damage and we were warned, which was another massive step to take. The staff were wonderful I can't wish for a better place. The support was incredible. We chose to stay at the hospital rather than come home. Every time I came home I couldn't cope with being at home. I had to be near him. And other complications set in, pneumonia set in. And on the tenth day he gave up the fight and died. 

When they called us through the night on that tenth day they just very, very, the phone rang at three a.m. and you know, it's just your gut instinct. And I just knew that something wasn't right that they, I can't remember the words they said but it was, 'Would you just come to the hospital?' I think I thought to myself 'he's already gone' just because they were very calm when the nurse phoned us, and I'd really expected the worst when I got there. Yes it wasn't very nice but our son was still alive, just hanging on, but two of the drugs that were taken were acting really so terribly dangerous and there was absolutely nothing they could do. They'd done everything else, they had I think charcoal was put into his body at some stage that absorbed one of the drugs and it was successful. Another drug had come, completely dispersed and that was gone, but there was others that weren’t and there was absolutely, it was just too late.

We stayed with him right to the end and we stood his bed, and we stayed with him right to the very end.  Because he never regained consciousness the whole time we never had any conversation with him from the moment when I left the house with him, he was just saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I should never have done this, I love you very much, I’m so sorry”.  And he walked into the ambulance. And that was the last time we actually spoke.

I went back to Intensive Care the following day after losing our son to collect his belongings. I actually took a few deep breaths and I actually opened the door of ITU that I'd been in for the last ten days backwards and forwards seeing my son in that bed. And when I got back that day, the following day, there was somebody else in there, somebody else fighting for their life. And I just suddenly looked at life in a different way, this is the other thing in the Intensive Care is that you are cocooned. That world and the world outside, it is a different world. You are totally and utterly in that room with all these people who are fighting for their lives and you don't see anything outside. And that's okay, that's okay at that time but when I went back the following day and my son's not there and there's somebody else in the bed, that is life for you. 

The one thing I did, I had to, we had an inquest. I had to go and identify, and I never thought I could do that. And I did, and I'm glad I did because he didn't have any of the tubes in him and he looked absolutely lovely, absolutely lovely, beautiful skin, face, everything. He was just asleep, just had his eyes closed. A neighbour came with me, my husband couldn't come and, from that day, I wanted to go to see him every day. I then said to my husband, 'You must go, you have got to go'. And he, 'I, oh I can't, I can't'. And then he just went without saying anything to me, he just did it on his own and then I couldn't keep him away. He was there every day, right up until the funeral, he just stayed with him the whole time. 

Visiting our son every day was something that I think everybody should do it's, I think it's really important, really important, because once the funeral's here it's just far too late and you can't look back and say, 'I wish I'd done it, I wish'. It's not frightening, it's not nasty. It's just very peaceful and very lovely.