When the people you love almost die, time stops behaving the way it used to. Two days became a country I had never been to before, and could not leave. This is what those two days were like, from where I was sitting.
Watching him decline
Gary did not look like someone with the flu by the second day. He looked like someone leaving. The colour was wrong. The breathing was wrong. The way he answered questions was wrong. I knew, in the way that partners know, long before any of the official words were said.
The two waiting days
The hardest part was not the diagnosis. The hardest part was waiting for the system to do what the system was supposed to do, while the person I had spent my life with became someone less and less recognisable in the bed in front of me.
I learned, in those two days, what every caregiver of a critically ill patient eventually learns. You can love someone and be entirely powerless. You can be in the room and not in the story. The most important decisions are being made by people who do not know your husband, in language you have to translate as you go.
I went into hospital with a husband. For two days I did not know who I would be coming out with.
What I tell other families now
I am not a clinician. I am a wife who watched the line in front of her husband move very close to the wrong side of itself. What I know now, I would have done anything to know then.
Trust what you see. If your person looks worse than they did an hour ago — pale, blue-tinged, struggling to think, struggling to breathe, struggling to stay present — that is information. Say it. Keep saying it. Use the word sepsis. Ask the question.
You are allowed to ask. You are allowed to ask what is being done, when, and why. You are allowed to ask whether sepsis has been considered. You are allowed to ask the consultant, the registrar, the nurse, and the receptionist, in that order if necessary, until you get an answer that makes sense.
Take care of yourself. You cannot pour from an empty cup, and there will be a long road afterwards. Eat. Sleep when you can. Accept help. The recovery is not just his.
For caregivers, by a caregiver
If you are sitting next to a hospital bed right now and the person in it is the centre of your world, please read the For Caregivers page. I wrote it for the version of me who needed it two years ago.
Why I co-wrote the book
Gary's story is a story of a man and a 2.6%. Mine is a story of two days, a hospital corridor, and the conversations no one warns you to prepare for. Both stories are true. Both deserve telling. 2.6% Chance of Survival: How I Beat the Odds is the version with both voices in it.