Lucky

When I was at school, we played rugger. It was a deep and respected tradition; one that could be painful, but that didn’t usually lead to death. Mainly it led to weedy little oiks like me dressed in itchy shorts and canvas-rough shirts getting barged into by the strapping sons of farmers and cordwainers as they lumbered about the pitch. I think there was a ball too, but I hardly ever got to touch it.

During one game I did manage to pick up the ball, but was immediately kneed violently in the mouth by a giant called Paladin who grabbed my dropped ball and scored a try. I blubbered through bloodied lips and a shattered tooth as I limped back to the change rooms.

My tooth never healed properly and a few years later, after I had left school, the remaining stub became more than usually painful and inflamed. The civil war between Edward Heath’s Conservative government and the unions was in full swing; times were tense, the weather was crap and I spent half my waking time sponging rising damp off the wall of my rented basement room in Forest Gate, E7. Plus I had no money and my bicycle had a puncture. Gloom descended.

I definitely couldn’t afford to go to a full-price dentist to get the tooth seen to but on a whim contacted an East End dental hospital where a kindly receptionist advised me if I could wait a couple of weeks, I could be used as a teaching subject and so would have to pay nothing at all: perfect!

I turned up, sat in the chair surrounded by student dentists (and an expert) and was diagnosed with an invasive but fortunately benign cyst at the base of the damaged tooth. It needed draining and removing before the tooth could be repaired. To sighs of admiration from the students, the expert deftly made a fingernail-sized incision in my gum and hauled out a tiny balloon of pus, almost drowning me with sterile saline fluid in the process of keeping the wound free of bits of that morning’s breakfast toast.

Sadly, at the time nobody was aware the saline fluid was actually not sterile: it had been contaminated by rat urine at the lab where it was produced. Within a week, I was lying delirious in my sweat-soaked bed in Forest Gate, lapsing in and out of consciousness as a rare strain of rat-borne Streptobacillus moniliformis attacked my body. My joints ached, my head pounded, I developed blotchy rashes and became weak as a kitten as my temperature went through the roof. I couldn’t talk properly, couldn’t eat anything and was vomiting bile. I went downhill fast.

After a couple of days of getting worse, my flatmates decided to phone my parents to tell them I was very sick; it might be a good idea to come and take me back to their home in Silverstone. My parents weren’t that keen as it was mid-winter, it was a long drive, and to make things worse the nation’s miners had all just walked off the job for more pay.

This had led to rolling power station blackouts so all the house and street lights, traffic lights and road signs were plunged regularly into total darkness. Even pubs had to use candles — it was that bad. Not an ideal time for a rescue trip to a strange city.

My flatmates attempted to rouse me enough to visit a doctor, but I couldn’t even get out of bed. They called my parents again, who agreed to come and collect me from my by-now stinking and fever-raddled room. They arrived late in the evening, in the pitch black, and with the help of my flatmates carried me to the car by torchlight. Together they laid me out on the back seat, tried to get some fluids into me and covered me with a couple of blankets to keep me warm and moderate my fever and tremors.

Then my parents attempted to find their way back home. After half an hour of getting ever more frustrated and lost in a gloomy maze of unfamiliar (and unlit) London backstreets, they spotted a couple of policemen on the beat. My father pulled over and asked them which was the way north, to the motorway and back home to Silverstone.

The bobbies were helpful with directions, but they had noticed me lying on the back seat — a pallid, spasming, groaning and sweat-covered body under a blanket. Like all good bobbies they were curious if not suspicious, and suggested it might be better to take me straight to the nearest hospital instead of making the long journey back north. My mother, a nurse, protested she could cope but the bobbies insisted (it turned out later they thought I was a drug overdose) that we go to a local emergency department.

One of them got into the car and personally directed my parents to the nearby St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, one of London’s most ancient and highly respected medical institutions, handily situated next to Smithfield Market for breakfast once I was better.

We arrived at St. Barts shortly after, I was trolleyed into emergency, assessed, and the doctors gave my parents the news. I was dying; they gently suggested that I would probably be dead by next morning.

The fevers and other associated complications had been so aggressive that my internal organs were giving up. They called the chaplain just in case they had to give last rites. By this time, according to the admission chart, I weighed just 25 kilos.

I was wheeled into an isolation room, festooned with drips and catheters, attended by nurses in anti-contagion suits just in case— the pathologists still couldn’t establish exactly what I was suffering from. I was kept alive with an oxygen mask and sucrose and saline drips, and by a nurse constantly sponging me and talking to me. My body was so weak I had developed bronchitis, pneumonia and septicaemia, and was being injected with every antibiotic they could think of plus at least two lumbar punctures to try and help identify the root cause of my sickness.

But amazingly, and thanks to St. Bartholomew’s astonishing standard of care, I made it through that first night. I even managed to ask for Horlicks the day after that. Helped by a diet of slops and Guinness (really), I survived. Slowly, over several months, I changed from a bag of bones back to a normal young man, albeit with ongoing breathing problems; my lungs had been filled with large amounts of fluid and infected mucus. As rats were involved, I liked to think I beat bubonic plague.

It appeared later that other people had probably died from the effects of that same batch of infected saline; introducing a highly toxic bacillus into the bloodstream brings an extremely poor prognosis. I was very, very lucky.

How lucky? The doctors told my parents that if they had driven back home that night I would have been dead by the time they arrived. And that if they had taken me to any other hospital than St. Bartholomew’s, the chances of my surviving more than one night would also have been almost nil.

Today, I still marvel at the coincidences and the luck that allowed me to survive. If my parents had collected me a few days earlier, I would have likely ended up in a provincial hospital without the standards of expertise and care that undoubtedly saved my life. I would have died.

If the miners hadn’t been on strike, the street lights would have been on, and my parents wouldn’t have got lost: they would have driven me back home to die.

If my parents had stopped to ask anybody other than those two policemen, who suspected me of having overdosed, they would probably have been given correct directions and would have driven me home to die.

If they had asked for directions a few minutes earlier, or later, or anywhere else in London, St. Bartholomew’s wouldn’t have been the nearest hospital. Same result.

So many almosts, so many only-justs. Life can certainly be a lottery, but the chips fell in my favour that night. Today, to make sure of the best odds, I have stopped playing rugger.

Want to see more photos? Click HERE. Want to read more of my stories from the road? Click HERE.