At 19, looking forward to one last summer as a spoiled teenager, I had to cope with my first real trauma – and suddenly take care of my siblings
“After we called the ambulance and saw Mum off to hospital, did we just go back to bed?”This is a conversation I had with my sister a few weeks ago. This is when I realised, 12 years after the fact, that once we’d dealt with the emergency of finding Mum unconscious on the bathroom floor, I must have gone into shock.
I remember so clearly calling the ambulance; they had a lot of questions. Younger readers won’t necessarily understand this but back then many homes had telephones tied to their walls by little wires. You couldn’t take them out of the rooms they were in and ours, weirdly, was not in the bathroom. So to get the answers to the operator’s questions I had to keep running to the landing to ask Dad. Dad was pale and concentrating on keeping Mum breathing.
I remember so clearly pacing out to the main road, in my dressing gown and slippers, to wave the ambulance down and direct it to our tucked-away home at the back of a housing estate. The next day I learned that Mum had something called viral encephalitis. This was a string of sounds I had not heard before. It’s an inflammation of the brain that needs hospital treatment and can result in serious brain damage. Mum was in and out of consciousness in the hospital bed and still relapsing into fits occasionally. I’m extremely fortunate that I only experienced the reality of living in a traumatic situation at 19.
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