The Woman Who Stole My Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

tried to stand up and my legs wouldn’t work.
    When Ryan came home and saw the state of me, he was gratifyingly contrite. ‘I didn’t realize … Can you walk?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘And you still can’t swallow? Christ. I think we should ring an ambulance. Should we ring an ambulance?’
    ‘Okay.’
    ‘Really? It’s that bad?’
    ‘How do I know? It might be.’
    A while later an ambulance arrived, with men who strapped me to a stretcher. Leaving my bedroom, I had a stab of sudden shocking grief, as if I had a premonition that it would be a long, long time before I saw it again.
    Watched by Betsy, Jeffrey and my mum, who were standing at the front door, silent and scared-looking, I was loaded into the van.
    ‘We could be gone a while,’ Ryan told them. ‘You know what A&E is like. We’ll probably be hanging around for hours.’
    But I was a priority case. Within an hour of my arrival a doctor appeared and said, ‘So? Muscular weakness?’
    ‘Yes.’ My speech had degenerated so much that the word emerged like a slurred grunt.
    ‘Talk properly,’ Ryan said.
    ‘I’m trying.’
    ‘This the best you can do?’ The doctor seemed interested.
    I tried to nod and found that I couldn’t.
    ‘Can you squeeze that?’ The doctor gave me a pen.
    We all watched as the pen fell from my clumsy fingers.
    ‘How about the other hand? No? Can you raise your arm? Flex your foot? Wriggle your toes? No?’
    ‘Of course you can,’ Ryan said to me. ‘She can,’ he repeated, but the doctor had turned to talk to someone else in a white coat. I caught the occasional phrase: ‘a fast-moving paralysis’, ‘respiratory function’.
    ‘What’s wrong with her?’ There was panic in Ryan’s voice.
    ‘Too soon to say but all of her muscles are shutting down.’
    ‘Can’t you do something?’ Ryan beseeched.
    The doctor was gone, being dragged across the room to another crisis.
    ‘Come back!’ Ryan ordered. ‘You can’t just say that and then not –’
    ‘Excuse me.’ A nurse pushing a pole ushered Ryan out of her way. To me, she said, ‘Just get you on a drip. If you can’t swallow, you’ll get dehydrated.’
    Her search for a vein hurt, but not as much as what happened next: a catheter was put into me.
    ‘Why?’ I asked.
    ‘Because you can’t get to the toilet on your own. And just in case your kidneys stop working.’
    ‘Am I … going to die?’
    ‘What? What are you saying? No, of course you’re not.’
    ‘How do you know? Why am I speaking so funny?’
    ‘What?’
    Another nurse showed up, wheeling a machine. She put a mask over my face. ‘Breathe into that, good woman. I just want to measure your …’ She watched yellow digital figures on the screen. ‘Breathe, I said.’
    I was. Well, I was trying to.
    To my surprise, the nurse started speaking loudly, almost shouting – numbers and codes – and suddenly I was on the move, being whizzed on a wheely bed through wards and corridors, on my way to intensive care. Everything was happening really fast. I tried to ask what was going on, but no sounds came out. Ryan was running beside me and he was trying to decipher the medical language. ‘I think it’s your lungs,’ he said. ‘I think they’re shutting down. Breathe, Stella, for God’s sake, breathe! Do it for the kids if you won’t do it for me!’
    Just as my lungs gave up, a hole was cut in my throat – a tracheotomy – and a tube was shoved down into me and attached to a ventilator.
    I was put in a bed in the intensive care ward; countless tubes ran in and out of my body. I could see and hear and I knew exactly what was happening to me. But, except for being able to blink my eyes, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t swallow, or talk, or wee, or breathe. When the last vestiges of movement left my hands, I had no way of communicating.
    I was buried alive in my own body.
    As tragedies go, it’s quite a good one, no?

Saturday, 31 May
     
06.00
    It’s Saturday but my alarm goes off at 6 a.m. I