In the summer of 2012, I was sitting in the gym at my school, nearing the end of a biology exam. Out of the blue I felt a sharp pain in my chest, but I worked through it and soon it calmed down. A few hours later I was back home getting changed from my suit into something more comfortable when the pain came back, but this time it really hurt. It actually knocked the wind out of me and I had to sit on the floor for a while. I thought I was having a heart attack, so I put my clothes back on and called my dad. I wanted to tell him I thought I was in trouble – mostly just so one of my parents knew what was going on with me. Lord knows you can’t call my mum with this kind of news too. The details are fuzzy, but I think I called him before calling 999. I recall finishing the conversation with him upstairs, then somehow crawling downstairs to open the front door. I then moved to the sofa and called 999, citing a heart attack of some sort. Then I blacked out and woke up to a paramedic attaching things to me. We sat on the sofa for a second and an old neighbour of ours was there – turns out my dad called my mum, and my mum called her to come check on me. She had packed an overnight bag for me with some random bits of clothing inside. The two of us got into the ambulance and off we went.
This was very scary; I could hardly breathe, and the lack of oxygen was wreaking havoc on the rest of me, including my senses. I recall the flashing lights and loud sounds as well as people blocking the road much to the driver’s dismay. I was greeted at the ambulance by a wheelchair and a team of people who got me from ambulance to bed in a second. Then I was monitored closely for a while until I believe they were satisfied it was not my heart and most likely my lung. I don’t remember this part too well, but apparently a certain doctor by pure chance happened to be in A&E that day and he was a sort of specialist with this type of thing. He came and diagnosed it as a minor spontaneous pneumothorax, basically a small tear in my lung. It’s common in tall skinny people but not often one this young.
Two years later, I was at a music festival in Spain. All was good, and we had a group of people in our room to party a little before the music started. Yeah, we went to a festival and stayed in a hotel. Anyway, I went to open a bottle of something and gasped. The air had been knocked out of me and I could hardly breathe. I knew what was happening, somehow managed to tell someone, and hit the floor. I woke up being carried by two people, we were in the lift heading to the lobby, and then again I blacked out and reawoke outside sitting on the stairs of the hotel. There was a huge panic of staff and my friends. First the police came, they thought I had overdosed. The Spanish police were an absolute nightmare to deal with, they wouldn’t let the ambulance come and were being difficult. Eventually they got through and put my on oxygen and took me to hospital. My friend rode in the ambulance with me as he spoke Spanish.
This hospital was nothing more than a village hospital, really not equipped for what I was going through. Once they had me settled and my friends had taken enough photos with my corpse, I was alone in A&E. People were rushed in and out, screaming. Pretty sure I saw someone die too. I saw an x-ray of my chest on a wall in front of me, the right lung was large and healthy, the left lung was shrivelled to a third of its size. I knew that couldn’t be good.
They kept me in there for ages, around five days. I was moved to a quiet room alone and my friends came to visit me when they could. One sent me a picture of him having sex in my bed back at the hotel, and one brought weed into the hospital. The food was great though, it was all fresh produce and lots of fish. Every few hours they drew blood from me and when I had regained enough strength, I asked them why and got no answer. I knew they were drawing it badly as it was extremely painful, and I’d never felt this much pain from a blood test before. My arm was marked by the needles too. I knew it was my lung, not drugs, so I requested they stop. They also gave me a tablet every few hours and when I looked it up it was a very strong medicine for the kidney or liver. I stopped taking that too. They wouldn’t let me leave without an adult as I was just under the age of 18 so my mum and stepdad had to fly out to come and get me. They were in the US at the time!
We then found out that I wasn’t allowed to fly in my condition.
They came, signed me out, and we spent a lovely week in Valencia. We found a room in a fancy business hotel in the city, got a nice car, and did nothing but eat and shop all day. One great memory is that we drove to a random small village totally off the grid and found an amazing restaurant near the sea. We also hit up the beach a few times – oh, and we kept all the receipts for the insurance of course. The insurance company was rather helpful for this next bit too as they arranged an ambulance to drive us from Spain to the UK. Yes, to drive us all the way home.
On our last day, we met this ambulance crew of three Spanish men who did not speak a word of English – I needed a doctor with me the entire time. We got into the back of this small ambulance, and started our drive. It was going to take two or three days, certainly with two nights at different hotels en route. It’s a bit of a haze, but I remember very clearly how he turned to us and said that the Pyrenees could be a problem for me as we had to cross over them. As we went up, they watched me very closely, and the higher we got the harder it was for me to breathe until I almost passed out. As we descended, I slowly came back to life as I could draw breath once more. We worked our way North through France, stopping at amazing truck stops with fantastic French food. We crossed the channel by ferry, due to the pressure of the tunnel, and they drove us through London back home.
The visual of these three Spanish men standing outside our house is now quite funny, but at the time it was sad. We had grown close to these guys and they watched over me with great care. We asked them if they’d be okay driving back and they sort of shrugged and said they’d follow the map. They drove off, and that was that.
The next day or maybe two days later I was taken to see Dr Creer – the same doctor I saw in A&E. He did an x-ray and ran some tests. We waited in his office and when he came back, he sat down and in his thick calm South African accent he told me I would need an operation and it could not wait. We were fairly scared, although at this point I had become stoic about it all. He reaffirmed there was no time to waste because I only had one functioning lung, and so he called his friend, Mr Hayward. He was a specialist in this sort of thing, one of the best in the country, and a close personal friend of Dr Creer. He phoned him, interrupting him in the middle of a golf game. He explained that I was a “young lad” with this spontaneous pneumothorax, previously a minor one now a major one. Eventually they worked something out and the next day I was going to go to the prestigious London Clinic to start the next wonderful chapter of this journey.
The London Clinic is more like a hotel than hospital. The cars parked outside were Bentleys, Range Rovers, many chauffeur driven. Walking past the different rooms and floors, we could see the kinds of people that came to the Clinic. I remember when we got in and I unpacked, my dad found their food menu which was no different from a high-end restaurant, and they had a separate wine list of about ten pages. My mum however was fully focused on me, taking no time to appreciate the absurdity of our situation. I was trying to enjoy my experience and take it all in. Mr Hayward came in later that day and my parents told him the situation with our insurance; they were playing hard to get and did not want to pay for any of my treatment. He told us he’d deal with it. When he came back a while later, he said it’s all cleared and they’ll cover everything. Apparently, he gently explained to them that he was only going to operate on me here, with his team, in this place.
He sat on the end of my bed with a cup of coffee and some notes, and haphazardly explained the operation. To him, this was as mundane as brushing your teeth. We were half expecting me to die during the operation (it felt like all the staff were expecting me to die too). You have to take off your underwear to put on the hospital gown, but I didn’t want to, so I wore my underwear secretly. The surgeon came in with a pen and drew on me – the points where things would happen, and they wrote “L” all over me, to ensure they knew it was the left side. They also want to wheel you to the operating theatre but I said I really didn’t want to as I wasn’t unable to walk. So, I broke two policies and walked in, saying bye to my dad at the entrance to the theatre. They were also extremely nervous about the operation as they said I was two stone underweight, and also they had never seen this with someone so young.
It was cold and I was a bit scared. It’s not a calming place to walk through. I had to lie down on a cold metal slab while they put me under. It was sweet though, the anaesthetist who I’d met before held my hand, as did his assistant. They went to put the injection in my arm at the elbow but it was so badly damaged from what happened in Spain that they had to go in my wrist – I remember hearing them discussing it. I thought about some people who were special to me, and a second later I was awake but on my side, and in a great deal of discomfort. I soon blacked out and didn’t wake (at least I can’t remember) for two or three days.
I believe I was alone when I really came to. I felt a numb pain in my chest and looked down to see a messy setup holding a large tube to the inside of my chest. I followed it left and saw it was attached to a large bucket, inside I could see a transparent reddish liquid. Below it was a pump and then I realised what was going on. There was also a needle in my wrist attached to a very strong painkiller. I could press that button maybe four times a day and one day they registered over 400 clicks from me. I think I was also quarantined for a while, because I had come from Spain and they wanted to make sure I picked up nothing from the hospital there. People came in wearing hazmat suits and no one could see me for a while; though this was probably at the start of my time there before the operation.
People came to visit; I remember my friend sitting opposite me as I was in a chair. They liked to move me from bed to chair to practice coming back to normal function. One friend looked at me and the oxygen tube leading to my nose fell out, it did this every so often and wasn’t an issue. I pretended to faint and he panicked so I woke back up and said it was only a joke. Another friend came to see me but I can’t remember at all which is strange. My dad worked down the road so he popped in, and my mum would hang around as much as she could. I was in extreme back pain too and there was only one nurse who could arrange the pillows in a way that allowed me to sleep with relative ease. I also remember my mum adjusting the chair and doing it too far, crushing the pipe to my lung so I couldn’t breathe, and I told her to stop but she panicked and held the button frozen, so my stepdad took it off her and reversed it.
I had a male physio who was very hard on me, and I was not reacting well to it at all. I had to cough, yawn, and breathe into a tube to make three balls float. Just to let you know, these balls will all rise if you do a completely normal breath into the tube, and I could barely make the first one move. We swapped him out for a young lady who was much gentler, and soon I was taking my first steps again. The second day of walking was excruciating but I wanted to keep going, they told me not to but I wanted to walk down the stairs. I held my bucket of lung fluid, drip, and painkiller combo stand and literally walked down the stairs to the entrance of the hospital, which was more like the lobby of the hotel. The security guard and I had become a bit friendly and I told him I wanted to walk outside; I wasn’t really allowed to but I did anyway. I stood in the sun, taking in the smoggy London air, and felt like I was alive again. Nurses were emotional but concerned just in case something happened, and I walked back up and fell asleep from the strain.
After maybe a week I was ready for the tube to be removed. Mr Hayward came in nonchalantly and told me what he was going to do. Literally, at my bedside, he would pull out the tube and staple me back together. He asked me if I wanted to look inside myself as it was likely the only time I would be able to. I think I did, but my brain must have wiped it out as we aren’t supposed to see inside ourselves in that way. He pulled it out, there was a strange sound as it plopped out of me, and he stitched me up with these giant metal staples. He put me back together and left me to rest and recover before leaving.
I had a thick bandage over my chest and was given strong medication to get me through the next period. I took them at the exact time I was allowed to as the pain was unbelievable. Showering was a nightmare too. One day I took more tablets than I was meant to and my mum called the hospital panicked, they said I would have a strong sleep but that I’d survive. Fuck me was that a strong sleep, felt like I had died and been revived.
A while after this I went back in to Mr Hayward’s office so he could remove the staples. We shook hands and that was it. Other than a few check-ups with Dr Creer afterwards, I was in the clear. I’ve been warned there’s still a chance for my other lung to decide to burst. And I do get pains in my operated lung – it’s glued to my chest wall so won’t collapse again. Overall, it was most certainly a life changing experience and it still affects me to this day. I often consider how close I was to death. I’m fortunate for having come out of the situation alive and relatively healthy. Sometimes people go into hospital and hear “We’re going to fix you” and sometimes they go in and hear “We’re going to try”. I was told I was going to be fixed, and I was, and here I am.
