Wires

I see it in your eyes - you'll be alright

Oct 18, 2023

Stopped in my tracks

As I pottered in the kitchen recently with my sixteen-year-old daughter, both of us cradling a cup of tea with my ‘mum songs - just for me’ playlist delighting me in the background;‘Wires’ by Athlete came on, and stopped me in my tracks. Obviously at some point I had added that to my playlist, yet it had never before penetrated the algorithmic loop of Adele, First Aid Kit, Fleetwood Mac and Dolly Parton (love a bit of country). In that moment it took my breath away, and transported me with the force of Harry Potter’s fireplace straight back to the Special Care Baby Unit in the aftermath of Bel’s birth.

When our mini baby Bel was taken away into intensive care four hours after she was born, and we were told to take photos of her in case she didn’t survive her first night, ‘Wires’ was one of the songs that played again and again on the interminable ‘Magic FM’ radio loop in the paediatric unit, with the percussive sounds of medical machinery and the pad of soft footed nurses laying the consistent backing to all tracks.

“You got wires going in

You got wires coming out of your skin

You got tears making tracks

I got tears that are scared of the facts”

Facts can be scarce in the moments when everything changes. One minute I had a newborn with me, albeit after a traumatic labour and emergency c-section, but none of that mattered as she lay there softly breathing. I knew I would do it all again in a heartbeat. I smiled as she started to gently hiccup in her perspex cot next to me; it looked so sweet. The next thing I knew, the nurse had alerted the paediatrician and she was gone. It wasn’t hiccups. It was seizures.

My husband was called away with her as I couldn’t walk. Snippets filtered back to me, confused and alone, in the world before smartphones - lumbar punctures, white blood cells, brain scans, brain swelling. Things that swirled in the hazy soup of my exhausted and drug-laced mind, not quite able to settle into a coherent recipe.

Meningitis and Morphine

Eventually a word came back that I did understand, but was simultaneously not able to comprehend.

Meningitis.

My baby girl had meningitis.

As I tried to clear the fog and grasp some threads of lucidity around how this could be, what it could mean and what we were facing, a nurse decided I needed to rest; and although I don’t remember consenting, the next thing I knew my thigh had been injected with a shed load of morphine. Scarily blissful.

The next few days were a blur of meetings, expectations, confusion, questions. Our world shrunk to the size of a pin head. Leaving my solitary room felt vast and terrifying, a bewildering maze of doors and corridors to navigate between me and her (which quickly became so familiar), and then, there she was.

“Running, down corridors, through automatic doors

Got to get to you, got to see this through”

Whilst the prognosis slowly crept from 25% chance of survival through the possibility of cerebral palsy to likely ‘just’ deaf, we learnt to change nappies through the sleeves of an incubator as if on some 80s game show, waiting for Bruce Forsyth to jump out at any moment. My husband’s extraordinarily hairy arms looking like King Kong grasping Fay Wray. Although in this case, Fay Wray was deeply asleep and not making a sound at all.

Got to get to you, got to see this through

I see hope is here in a plastic box

I’ve seen Christmas lights, reflect in your eyes

I fed her every 3 hours with the paltry teaspoon’s worth of milk my traumatised body managed to express (no fridge storage needed for me). Firstly via the nurses, and then finally, I got to hold her and feed her myself. It was in those moments, when she managed to flutter open her eyelids, that her eyes penetrated me like sparkly black diamonds, telling me that she would pull through. A glimmer of hope and steeliness reflected back at me.

The Magic of radio

I sing this next line to her 16-year-old self at the top of my voice in the kitchen, a surge of emotion almost overwhelming me as she sits there quietly nursing her cup of tea, ever so slightly bemused, but letting me hold that moment as she intuits that I need to.

I see it in your eyes, I see it in your eyes

You’ll be alright

I see it in your eyes.

You’ll be alright.

[She should feel lucky I didn’t launch into ‘Amazed’ by Lonestar which also featured on the Magic Radio carousel along with Iz Kamakawiwo’ole’s version of ‘Over the Rainbow’. Back on the neo-natal ward I used to blub-sing the lyrics ‘every time our eyes meet’ and ‘baby I’m amazed by you’ when I was feeding her, knowing that it was a terribly cheesy love song, but hey, it worked in the moment.]

She asks me (when I take a pause between belting out ‘Wires’ verses): “did you really think I was going to die, Mum?”.

Well, I was paralysed from the waist down, on morphine, hadn’t slept for 3 days and wasn’t at my most highly functioning, so I’m not really sure what I thought. I was also a fiercely eternal optimist at that time in my life, so that outcome was probably beyond my comprehension.

“What about dad?”. I don’t know, we’ve never really talked about it...*

My husband would go home every night, the two of us forcibly separated at that awful, bleak time where the hospital rules made him leave me, rendering both of us apart and alone in our pain - for whose benefit I’m not entirely sure. The only upside being that he could rest properly (no chance of that for me with totally unnecessary ‘observations’ being taken of me every 3 hours with maximal lighting and door banging), bring back decent food, and print the photos of her that we had taken that day. Each morning he would return with pictures of her that he had sat printing in the early hours (so actually not resting at all), and blu-tack them to the wall by my bed so that I could wake up and see her, even when I could not see her. It’s really only now seeing these that I can appreciate how knackered he was too.

Bending space and time

Time bends in situations like these, just as it does in grief. Only a handful of hours prior, I had been pacing the corridors (different ones I think, but who knows?) in labour, laughing with my ante-natal friend about the state of the NHS super healthy ‘white bread jam sandwiches’ with their curled up edges. Having contractions, drinking tea that peculiarly transitioned between nuclear and lukewarm in a heartbeat, sneaking back for the jam cardboard just to give myself a sense of agency. It felt like decades ago.

Once in neo-natal, every second felt like hours. Waiting for news, waiting for updates, waiting for food, waiting for my first postpartum poo, waiting for visitors, waiting for my catheter to be removed so I could shower, waiting until I could see her. The nights alone - interminable. The only thing to do was rest, although that wasn’t actually possible as I couldn’t lock my door, or make it properly dark, or stop people coming in. I wasn’t allowed to leave.

When my best friends came to visit, I begged to leave the unit so I could have 5 minutes (on the floor below) with a cuppa. It took a great deal of convincing, much guilt-laden reprimanding from the nursing staff and a bleeper before I was allowed to go. It was 10 days before I was allowed to go outside of the building. I vowed then I would never commit a crime. Incarceration was not for me.

But then, things accelerated in a positive way. She improved day by day, she got stronger, more responsive. Her fits became less frequent. Her appetite grew (although I could not fulfil its demand...). She was allowed into my room, then she was allowed to stay with me all night, and then suddenly we were allowed to go home.

There’s no place like home.

I don’t remember much about that part, in fact I don’t remember leaving the hospital at all, but come home she did, and three years later she passed a hearing test. None of the possible outcomes had manifested.

Then someone turned the egg-timer upside down, and before I knew it, another decade and a half of sand had passed through the hourglass.

Dancing Queen

Tonight is the eve of her 17th birthday, and she continues to take my breath away. I have watched those deep and soulful eyes navigate childhood, arriving at her present pit stop on the race-track of life as the incredible, sensitive, gentle and thoughtful young woman she has become.

As I sit here approaching midnight, wrapping up ‘L’ plates for her first driving lesson, hiding them alongside the ‘Colin the Caterpillar’ cake that epitomises the ‘beer and sweets’ dichotomy of young adulthood, I am filled with wonder. (Baby I’m amazed by you - anyone?!?)

The overwhelming feeling is...well I’m going to hand that one back to Athlete.

First night of your life curled up on your own

Looking at you now, you would never know

Happy birthday mini-baby Bel 🎂💕

*To this day, my husband and I have still never really talked about what happened, as just as we were beginning to process the events, my brother tragically died out of the blue, changing our lives irrevocably. The whole neo-natal experience got packaged up into a little box and put away, and there it has largely stayed. Writing my book has reopened the conversation, as has connecting with the wonderful community on Substack. Whilst looking through these photos some time ago, my husband pointed out who was looking through Bel’s cot at the hospital. Yep, you guessed it. He only knew her for three months before he died, but the love is in his eyes. I think this might be my favourite picture of all time.

A bit of Google research told me that ‘Wires’ was written by the Athlete lead singer Joel Pott, about his daughter who became seriously ill after birth. I don’t know the details, or the ultimate outcome, but I have shared the experience with every bone in my body.

Has any song had this kind of impact on you? Are there lyrics that have a meaning to you way beyond what you think they may hold for others?

I’d love to hear what and why.