Free Before It's Too Late by Jane Isaac Page A

hospital like himself. But unlike Jackman, whose injuries were mostly superficial, Alice hadn’t regained consciousness. A CAT scan discovered a blood clot on her brain. Emergency surgery followed. Brain damage was suspected, although nobody, not even the surgeon who carried out the surgery was able to predict a recovery.
    The days and weeks of worry and fatigue that followed slowly sucked the energy out of him as he travelled back and forth to the hospital, walked up the steps, down the long corridor to the stroke unit, the shiny floor squeaking under his shoes. Celia trotted beside him, the dutiful daughter, having finished her first year of university exactly six days before the accident. The routine became automatic, programmed into his brain. Each time he paused to rub the antibacterial cleaner into his hands and check with the duty nurse for an update. Finally he entered his wife’s room where a plethora of machines pumped and bleeped and kept her alive.
    For a while the outside world ceased to exist. He was stuck in a time warp, drifting through the days of hospital visits, bedside vigils, consultant appointments.
    The diagnosis, when it finally arrived, changed everything. Suddenly, consultants weren’t talking test results and treatment, they were talking palliative care as the prognosis wasn’t good.
    He recalled the specialist’s office on that day, four months after the accident. It was barely a box with a filing cabinet and a desk full of brown envelope files and loose paper notes. Dr Simmons had asked Jackman to sit down. The grooves around his eyes had deepened as he’d leaned forward and said, “As a result of the accident your wife sustained a brain haemorrhage in her basilar artery.” He’d lifted a hand to indicate the lower back part of his skull. “She is suffering from locked-in syndrome.”
    The consultant’s fingers wove in and out of each other as he explained the condition that reduced her to the paralysed state she now endured. “While Alice is aware of what is going on around her, she has no control over her body. Even her eyes are in a state of permanent paralysis.”
    “I have to be completely honest with you,” Dr Simmons had continued. “Currently, there is no known cure. Most patients pass within the first few months of onset and those that survive rarely regain functions. There have been incidents recorded of patients regaining some control and communicating via eye movements or even sniffs. There’s also been a few notable cases where a full recovery has been made,” he paused, “but they are extremely rare.”
    The consultant’s words had tailed off into the room as he spoke about the need for permanent care for the future. Jackman could feel Celia’s fingers tighten around his forearm, the desperation that engulfed them both, the indelible reminder of his wife’s permanent condition and the fact that their life would never be the same again.
    ‘Aware of what is going on around her.’ Those words had clung to Jackman in his darkest hours afterwards. He couldn’t imagine anything worse – it was like being a caged animal, sheltered in every respect from the outside world, but with no control over your functions.
    The slam of a door in the car park below snapped him back to the present. The police had been very tentative about his return to work in the early days. He’d understood the need for caution, nobody wanted a rogue cop on the loose, especially not on major investigations when clear judgement was imperative. But he’d never given anyone reason to question his judgement. The anger that now rose within him was a manifestation of everything: fate for subjecting his wife to such a condition, the police for forcing him into prolonged counselling, Janus for ordering him to attend. In truth, talking about the incident just served to remind him of the permanent shadow that had followed him around over the past twelve months.
    Still, this was the first time he’d