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IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH
When Rebecca Armstrong married her husband Nick seven years ago, she had no idea how acutely her wedding vows – and love – would be tested…
How one woman’s wedding vows were put ot the test
While I will always be Nick’s wife, I am also now his carer, advocate and therapist
On my wedding day in May 2009, one of my friends told me that she had never taken off her wedding ring. I thought that was very romantic – and about the least practical thing I’d ever heard. What if I was going swimming? Or it was one of the rare occasions I made pastry? But I have often thought about what she said in the years that followed, especially since 13 February 2014, when paramedics handed me a bag containing my husband Nick’s possessions, including his wedding ring, as well as the clothes that they’d had to cut off him at the scene of the accident. His ring was perfect (unlike his shattered watch and mobile phone) except for one thing: it wasn’t on his finger.
He was unconscious in A&E, having been hit by a car, and I was holding his personal effects in a cheery bright-orange carrier bag that looked like it ought to have come from Sainsbury’s. When we’d stood in front of our friends and family and said that we would love each other in sickness and in health, I don’t think that either of us Above: Rebecca and Nick on their wedding day in 2009 had any idea that we’d be tested on this particular vow. But in a split second, our lives, and our marriage, changed for ever.
***** When Nick and I met, I was in my early 20s. Although he is 12 years older than me, Nick has always been young at heart, obsessed with Lego, Star Wars and video games. He worked in public relations and I was climbing the career ladder at a national newspaper. Within a year, we’d bought a flat together.
Having owned a home before, Nick ended up looking after all the ‘grown-up’ stuff. Paperwork, bills and boilers were his responsibility. Paying the mortgage and the cleaner, as well as being the one who remembered birthdays, wedding anniversaries and other family events, were my areas. Nick had been married before and had a young daughter, Mia, who we would see every other weekend. Looking back, apart from Mia and work, we had few responsibilities, and made the most of it with holidays and meals out.
Nick was my partner in crime, my backup and my best friend. We spent all our time together and he could never understand why couples would want to do anything else. ‘I
just want to be with you,’ he’d say. I felt the same way, except perhaps when he’d been shopping and bought yet another gadget or collectible that broke one of the very few rules I imposed in the relationship: don’t buy anything bigger than your head without asking me. I’d try to be stern, but he’d just make me laugh with the madness of what he’d brought home. (‘A turtle-shaped foot stool? Just what we need!’ ‘Oh good. Another telescope to add to your collection.’) His approach to packing for holidays was similarly maximalist – who takes all their kitchen knives, a restaurant-sized peppermill, a remote-control jetski and two games consoles for a week at the beach? My husband, that’s who.
We’d jokingly ask each other, ‘Will you marry me?’ from time to time, and I’d tease him by saying that second marriages were a triumph of hope over experience. So when he actually proposed, in a tiny Sardinian restaurant near our flat, it took me a minute to realise that this was the real thing. I accepted happily but quietly (I couldn’t bear the thought of the waiter serenading us) and we threw a combined engagement and birthday party (Nick’s 40th) to celebrate.
Once we were married, life didn’t feel that different. It was novel, at first, to refer to ‘my husband’, but we went about things in much the same way. Nick got into cooking, changing from a ready-meal fan into someone who would often greet me in the evening with a three-course, home-cooked meal. Then one evening he went out to buy eggs to make an omelette for dinner – and he’s never been home since.
Nick was knocked down on the high street near our house. I was having a drink with colleagues when my phone rang, showing a withheld number. The policeman on the other end of the line told me that my husband had been hit by a car and that he was unconscious at the scene.
The police picked me up on a street corner near my office and took me, sirens blaring, to the hospital, where Nick had been taken by air ambulance. Sitting in a dim corridor on a rigid seat, accompanied by two policemen who were incredibly sympathetic but who could give me no information, I thought that if I didn’t tell anyone, if I didn’t call our families, if I didn’t make a fuss, everything might be fine. It didn’t take me long to realise that I was wrong. I was ushered in to see Nick. I heard a doctor say, ‘She’s the wife’ – this turned out to be a phrase that unlocked doors in the months that followed. I remember Nick lying there cold and still, about to be taken to the intensive care unit (ICU). I cried and stroked his arm, telling him it was going to be OK.
Nick was in the ICU for a month. Although he opened his eyes, there was nothing behind them. He breathed through a tube, was fed through a tube and was hooked up to a bank of machines. His mum, brother and I didn’t understand what much of the information scrolling on the screen above his head meant, but that didn’t stop us studying it endlessly.
The morning after the accident, I rang Nick’s former wife. It was the first proper conversation we’d ever had, and while the reason for it was heartbreaking, it gave me the chance to tell her how lucky I felt to have her daughter in my life, and what a great mother she was to have raised such a lovely girl. At the time, Mia was 11, and terrified of hospitals. In order to keep her up-to-date with what was happening to her dad, and to try to make the impersonal white lines of the ward less frightening, I took a different cuddly animal from our extensive collection to the hospital each day and put it in Nick’s hand for a photo. (I’d love to pretend that the turtles, foxes, cats, crocodiles and more were hers, but actually, her dad and I had bought them for ourselves.) Gradually, Mia asked me to zoom out a bit more each time, so she could see her father’s hand, then his arm, then his whole bed. Eventually she built up the courage to start visiting him in person.
While I was taking furry friends to Nick’s bedside, my flesh-and-blood friends were taking care of me. Though the flowers that people sent were beautiful and helped to take my mind off the fact that, for the first time in my life, I was living on my own, my best friend Sophie doing my laundry when my washing machine broke and bringing me casseroles were the gifts I needed most. My family were constantly in touch, and the occasional night I spent back home with them was a welcome, wine-filled respite from a strange new world.
As the weeks passed, Nick moved from the ICU to the trauma ward, then to the high-dependency unit of a different hospital. I didn’t know if he would ever wake up, and if he did, whether he would know who I was – or even who he was. I covered the wall by his bed with photographs of us, of Mia and of our friends, and put up a whiteboard to communicate with the doctors and nurses, because tracking down the staff who looked after Nick was almost impossible. It took me weeks to learn that whereas visiting time was strictly in the afternoon, the doctors were only available in the morning. I wish someone had told me.
I sat and read to him, and told him my news, how Mia was
I would travel home in tears, back to a flat empty of Nick but full of memories
doing at school, what our friends were up to, what new piece of naughtiness my teenage sister had achieved. Then I would take the bus home with tears rolling down my face, back to a flat empty of Nick but full of memories. I missed him lying in bed next to me. I missed his voice, his smell; how he could make me crack up with a single look. I missed the surprises he’d buy me and arguing about whose turn it was to make the tea. Would I ever experience any of these again? If he survived, would he be the same? And if he didn’t…I couldn’t let myself think about it. One day I opened my banking app and ‘Hello Vole’ flashed up on the home screen of my phone – Vole being Nick’s pet name for me. I rushed off for a cry. Nobody but Nick would ever call me that.
Every time Nick moved hospitals, or even wards, I was thankful that we were married. Life was unimaginably difficult, but it was made slightly easier by my being his other half, his next of kin. I was the one that the doctors updated, and I recorded on my iPhone every conversation we had so that I could send the information on to friends and family when I was too upset or weary to recount what they told me, and because I was determined to capture any bit of information that might prove useful. Diffuse axonal brain injuries. Heterotopic ossification around his joints, which would make movement painful. A state of disordered consciousness with a sleep/wake cycle. Blood clots. Seizures.
Another move, this time to a regional rehab unit in a hospital one hour’s drive from home. The hospital was close to where Mia lived, and near two friends, Samuel and David, who put me up every weekend for months. They gave me moral support when Nick’s bank froze his account and I had to contact 30 companies to take over his direct debits. They comforted me as I waited months for the Court of Protection to recognise that I had my husband’s best interests at heart and allow me to act on his behalf legally and financially. (Although Nick and I were married, we’d never even considered joint bank accounts, let alone setting each other up with legal power of attorney.) They celebrated with me when, that June, Nick started to make sounds that were eventually decipherable as words.
Nick’s voice was croaky, and to begin with he talked nonsense, muttering and grumbling, except when he clenched his teeth, went red in the face and shouted, ‘No!’ at what seemed like random intervals. But being able to speak – and yell – meant that he could be fed by mouth rather than the tube that had been surgically inserted into his stomach. I carefully spoonfed him strawberry yoghurt, the first food to pass his lips in months (I’ll never look at a pot of Müller in quite the same way). It was a magical meal. I had a couple of sessions with the ward’s therapist. He told me that the divorce rate for couples where one person had suffered a traumatic brain injury was high, and asked what the word ‘duty’ meant to me when I told him that I had no intention of becoming one of those statistics. Duty meant sticking around when the going got tough. I think he was trying to give me a get-out, but it wasn’t an option I could countenance. He also explained that, in time, and with planning, Nick and I might be able to do some of the things that we used to love. It would be a much slower pace of life than we’d had before, but it would be a life.
Sometimes I’d get Nick’s wedding ring out and put it on my finger. It didn’t feel right – it was his to wear, not mine. But slowly, as the months passed, more and more of Nick started to come back. He was angry and horribly confused. I had to make him a sign that read ‘I am not losing my mind, I am finding it!’ because he thought he was going mad, and to constantly reassure him that he was getting better. On the door to his room, however, was a sign to reassure the other patients and their visitors: ‘This patient is on a social interaction programme. Please do not be alarmed by his shouting.’
Eighteen months ago, Nick moved to a residential care home to continue his recovery. He was horribly thin from months of a liquid-only diet, and his body was contorted. He couldn’t sit unaided, let alone walk, and his right hand was unusable. While he has made some progress in his time there, he needs – and will continue to need – 24-hour care. Everything from eating to washing to getting in his wheelchair involves two carers and, in the case of moving him, heavy-duty electric hoists.
But his move to a ‘home’ rather than a ward was a positive one. Gradually he began to get a few bearings
In the end, it’s not the ring that matters. It’s the person you’re wearing it for
back, and learned to use a TV control. Although Nick is very private and doesn’t mix with the other residents, he agreed one day to go to the cinema – if I came, too. Sitting watching a Hobbit movie, holding hands in the dark, was the first time in more than a year that things felt normal. Now I drive him around in an adapted van to accommodate his wheelchair and we go for lunch, go shopping and visit Mia.
I don’t know how I would have done it without my family. They’ve comforted me, taken me on holiday, explained to Nick why I needed a holiday, and been incredibly supportive towards him, too. Before the accident he’d try to get out of visiting them at all – now he wants to go every week.
It’s hard to find any privacy in a care home, but sometimes, when we shut his bedroom door (I shove a doorstop underneath so no one bursts in), it’s just the two of us. It was during one of these times, at the start of last year, that he asked me to marry him. ‘But we’re already married, sausage.’ He didn’t remember – but said that he wanted to marry me again. I suggested that we renew our vows, and as we planned for the ceremony, some of his memories came back to him – our best man’s speech, my mum getting tipsy, the London bus we hired. His brain still had – and has – the capacity to trip us up. He told me he wanted to invite his grandparents, and I had to tell him that they had both passed away. He’d been to their funerals, but he had no memory of it.
It wasn’t just invitations and food to be organised this time around; Nick’s physical condition meant that he needed carers with him, and because of his wheelchair, my parents’ house, where we were having the ceremony, had to be risk assessed. I had a list of things to do in case of emergencies – traffic, bad weather, Nick falling ill – and his carer had a big box of his medication to hand. On the morning of our second big day, Nick was wrestled into a shirt and suit by his carers at the home while I got ready at my parents’ house. He looked so handsome in the sunshine. I’d had to find myself shoes that could cope with pushing a wheelchair around, and I wore a wide skirt several shades darker than the early autumn sky. My sister sang ‘Thinking Out Loud’ by Ed Sheeran and the first line, ‘When your legs don’t work like they used to before…’ made friends and family reach for their tissues.
Then came the important bit: getting his wedding band on his finger. While his right arm and hand are immobile, his left has become his lifeline. The last two fingers are curled and painful, but at his insistence, I wrestled his ring back on. He looked at it in wonder. ‘I’m never taking it off again,’ he promised me. So romantic – but, in the end, it’s not the ring that really matters, it’s the person you’re wearing it for.
***** Things aren’t the same as they used to be. We live apart for most of the week because my job in London involves long hours, and nights at the care home mean sleep broken by bells and carers. I call him every day at 4pm and 9pm, and if I’m late, he summons a carer to call me for him. He can’t work the phone himself but he knows what he wants. While I will always be Nick’s wife, I’m also now his carer, his advocate, his therapist and his tea-maker-in-chief. He is lovely, but exhausting. I thought I’d never hear his voice again, which reminds me to be patient when he’s asking me to do 17 things at once because he can’t.
Our goal is to find him a care home in Kent, near my family, and, one day, to be able to live together in an adapted home. Sometimes, when I pore over forms about funding and care fees, it seems like an impossible goal, but last month he finally moved to a new care home. We’d spoken about having a child before the accident, but now, on the whole, I’m relieved that I only have Nick to look after. Mia is a constant presence in our lives, and her courage and kindness towards her father make me proud to know and love her.
It’s fair to say that married life hasn’t been what either of us expected, but I knew what I was signing up for, and I love Nick. In sickness and in health.
Rebecca is features editor of the i newspaper and writes a column each Monday about Nick’s recovery