Married To The Vent

I eventually took up weight training at Uncle Norman’s gym and followed a strict diet to build up the muscles.  I trained everyday for two hours with a strict diet taking protein amino acid tablets for about 6 months. However, on the night of December 12th 1996 I was rushed to hospital after collapsing during a training session. I had complained of pains in the back of my neck.  My uncle rubbed some cream in and I carried on training, then I had a twinge in the back of my neck and started running around screaming saying, “I can’t breath!”  My uncle phoned for an ambulance.  Before the ambulance arrived, Toby and Juliet, who was a lodger, arrived on the scene summoned by Uncle Norman within minutes to comfort me.  As soon as the paramedics arrived I collapsed at their feet unconscious. From then I can’t remember what happened until I regained consciousness in ITU at Adenbrookes Hospital a few days later.

I was told that when I was transferred from Colchester Hospital to Adenbrookes ITU, the paramedics in the ambulance had to revive me using “electric shock”.

I awoke in ITU with a tube down my throat to help me breathe, but I was told that I was continually biting it (I do remember that) so I had a tracheotomy performed to let me breathe with the help of a ventilator.

When I woke up again, I couldn’t see or move any bit of my body apart from blinking my eyelids.  I remember hearing a nurses voice saying “Hello, darling” and stoking my head but I couldn’t see or speak to her.  I think it was a couple of days before I started to regain consciousness, hearing this “lovely voice” of a nurse called Jane who kept comforting me.  When my family came in to see me, they said “Carl – can you blink your eyes if you can hear me”.  Then they knew that I could hear and understand them and they told me that they would go through the alphabet and that I could blink at the letters I needed to spell words to make a sentence.  This was a long process to communicate but we had to do that from then on.