And it was not a miracle.
I have had eleven weeks and about four conversations with people who are qualified, and every single one of them has been careful with me, and none of them has used that word.
It was a medication schedule.
There was a sedation taper running from the November.
A staged reduction. Agreed, documented, with a plan attached to it and a consultant’s name printed at the top of the page.
That is not an unusual thing. It is an ordinary thing that happens on wards like that every week, and when it works nobody ever hears about it.
It was stopped in the January.
I have seen the page now. It is a printed schedule on a clipboard that hangs on a hook beside the door, which is the same hook I had walked past about four hundred times.
Not for a medical reason.
By an administrative decision about cover and continuity during a staffing change.
One line. Crossed through in blue biro. No signature beside the amendment, no date, no initials — which is the detail that the review has spent eleven weeks on and which I am told is the whole of it.
And nobody told me.
Nobody told me because I am not the person the form goes to.
And because the person the form goes to had changed twice between the November and the February.
And because in a building that size a thing like that does not fail dramatically. Nothing explodes. No alarm goes off, which is the part people find hardest to believe.
It just stops moving.
And then four months pass. And everybody who comes into that room is working from what is in front of them that day, which is correct and current and says nothing at all about what was supposed to happen in November.
Four months of my wife being held deeper than she needed to be.
I am not going to overclaim this, because the people who have been kind to me since have been very careful about it and so will I be.
Nobody is saying she would have woken in the January. Nobody can say that and nobody has.
What they are saying — in writing, now, after eleven weeks of review and two meetings I was not in — is this.
Four months of a stopped taper is four months of nobody finding out.
That is not the same as four months of harm, and it is not nothing, and I have had to learn to hold both of those in one hand without dropping either.
And her grandmother had not sent that child in to heal anybody.
That is the thing everybody gets wrong and it is the thing I got wrong for about a week afterwards, including out loud, to a nurse, who was kind enough not to correct me.
She had tried to tell me herself.
Three times. In that corridor. Standing next to a trolley.
In English she finds difficult, about a schedule on a clipboard that she passes four times a night, every night, for eleven months.
She cleans that ward. Eleven months on that corridor, five nights a week.
She wipes that hook. She wipes the wall behind that clipboard.
She reads those sheets the way you read a bus timetable you have stood under every day for a year — not because you need it, but because it is the only thing in front of your face while your hands are busy.
She is not medically trained. She has never claimed to be, not once, including under direct questioning by two people in a meeting room in the May. She knows what a schedule looks like when it has been running and what it looks like when it has stopped.
And all three times I thanked her and turned away.
I have reconstructed all three conversations since and none of them lasted longer than about forty seconds.
In the first one she said the word schedule and I said thank you, yes, they’re very good here.
I have no memory of the second one at all. She has. She wrote the date down.
