July 29th, 2014 - Steven Foreman
I was sitting at one end of a huge eight-seater table in the dining room at my brother’s house, located out in the countryside near Retford, in Nottinghamshire, in the UK.
I was alone, miserable, and bored. It was my 62nd birthday.
I was half-heartedly looking for a red piece to fit in the area of a jigsaw puzzle that had red buses, red telephone boxes and red post boxes all jumbled up all over the place. It was a melange of scenes from London, where I was born. Between the red bits were Black Cabs and London ‘bobbies’, those iconic Metropolitan policemen with their tall, slightly conical police helmets that, in reality, are hardly seen these days, as they mostly wear tactical equipment.
At the other end of the beautiful dining table were boxes of medication and the plastic compartmental tray with days of the week marked on each compartment. One of my other activities was to regularly top up the tray with the nine different tablets I had to swallow each day. That was as boring as the jigsaw puzzle. I often dropped the little brown tablets and couldn’t see them on the brown carpet.
This was my daily routine for the past few weeks, after my brother took me in when I was discharged from hospital.
I had spent around six months in hospitals; three months in Critical Care in the Aga Khan hospital in Nairobi, Kenya, followed by two months in Intensive Care in Sheffield hospital, and a month undergoing laser surgery on my damaged trachea in Worksop hospital, which eventually failed.
I was pale, weak and fed up. I was only just learning to walk properly again. I hadn’t had an accident or anything, it was just that I had spent so long bedridden, my legs had withered and had no muscle or strength. My hair was wispy and sprouting due to all the steroids I had been given, and I looked awful.
On top of that, I had a tracheostomy breathing tube in my throat, with a speaking valve. It was debilitating and a bloody nuisance! Having to keep removing the inner tube and cleaning out the gunk.
I could do little but go for a walk each day, if the weather was okay.
That morning, July 29th, I had managed to go up the country lane about 40 meters further than the day before, returning to the applause of my brother and sister-in-law.
This was huge achievement, but I was not out of the woods yet.
In front of me lay a heart operation and months of cardio rehabilitation, and, eventually, physical reconstructive surgery on my trachea, which was damaged when someone gave me an emergency tracheostomy that saved my life, but severely damaged my windpipe.
On that day, 29th July, I had trouble believing I would get through it all. I had trouble believing that I would ever see my wife and kids again, who were in Africa. I was very despondent, and if it had not been for my brother and his wife, well, I don’t know what would have happened.
Why Africa? Well. that is where I had been living and working since 1994. It is where I married and had two kids. On this day, July 29th they were living in a cheap rented house, in Kitoro, a village near Entebbe, in Uganda.
In January the same year, I had been working as a Security Advisor on an oil rig in El Kuran, in the Ogaden desert – a disputed area of Somaliland, Ethiopia. I was six months into my tour.
One night, I had a heart attack and collapsed in the sand outside my tent. I was airlifted out by the Flying Doctors to a hospital in Nairobi, where I suffered a catastrophic cardiac arrest, which required a record time of CPR and an emergency tracheostomy.
I had a gastro-intestinal bleed out and kidney failure (in fact all my organs failed). During my stay, I had seven blood transfusions and kidney dialysis, and suffered pneumonia, an ear infection and a bladder infection. I was so badly damaged, that the doctors told my visiting family that they had to prepare for my funeral! At the end of my stay there, before being airlifted by Flying Doctors to the UK, the word “miracle” was used in every sentence when talking about my survival. I still couldn’t talk or walk, but I was alive … just!
But that evening, July 29th, my birthday, my brother and his wife took me out for dinner at a nice restaurant, where we were joined by one of her sisters and her husband. The sister had been a nurse her whole life; retired now, but she kept in touch with a lot of her old colleagues, one of who was the senior cardiac nurse who had treated me in both the Sheffield and Worksop hospitals, and who had told her (in confidence!) that she had observed that I was such a strong person, she knew I would come through this ok.
The evening cheered me up and boosted my spirits.
And the nurse was right.
By November I was back in Africa, engaged as the Security Manager on a gold mine in Kenya --- but still with the damned tracheostomy tube in my throat! That tube was, eventually, a year later, removed in Charing Cross Hospital in London, where my trachea was reconstructed with a stent and a skin graft taken from my leg.
But on the 29th of July 2014, I could not envisage what I would be doing in ten years’ time.
On that day, ten years ago, I could not see past the jigsaw and the tablets.
Steve Foreman is British, an HM Forces Veteran (Army), and a recently-retired security contractor/advisor, who has lived over 30 years in Africa. He now lives back in the UK. Steve's work has appeared in Twisted Dreams, Aphelion, Close to the Bone, Siren's Call, Hellfire Crossroads, in two "Amok" and two “Gypsy Shadow Publishing” anthologies.
His articles have appeared in BBC Wildlife, Soldier magazine, Combat & Survival magazine, SCUBA magazine, Church of England Newspaper, African Travel Review, Land Rover World magazine, Your Dog magazine, Travel News and Lifestyle magazine (Kenya), The Dar Guide (Tanzania), Daily Mail newspaper (UK), and others.
The charity I care about is The Veterans Foundation.