The Recovery Phase

Thank you all for your kind responses and blog posts.

Should you so desire, you can find out a lot about nuclear emergency planning from the Department of Energy and Climate Change website (DECC). The planning process divides the “timeline” in two: there is an emergency phase and a recovery phase. The emergency phase is the sexy, glamorous bit with heroes and heroines (heropersons), flashing blue lights, breathing apparatus, fires, newspaper reporters, headlines and so on – it’s the bit that Hollywood turns into films. The recovery phase, worthy and important but not sexy, takes the affected community back to normality after the fires are out and when the heroes have gone off to be heroic elsewhere. (Since you are probably wondering, yes, Duncan is a small-time player in the unsexy bit-no change there).

James’ predicament is a bit like this – it’s his personal Chernobyl. He is now firmly out of the emergency phase (helicopters, resuscitation, back from the brink, blood, operations etc) and into the recovery phase. There’s nothing left to operate on (apart from the removal of his neck plate in 4 months or so). His lungs are returning to normality.

He had an MRI scan yesterday and the neurosurgeon had a chat with us afterwards.
The scan showed that there had been a small amount of bleeding at the point where the spinal cord comes into the brain (the interpeduncular cistern, since you ask) and this has:

• Affected his oculomotor nerve (which accounts for the curiously dilated pupil in his right eye). If this doesn’t mend itself of its own accord, it can be corrected with glasses. What he sees is a rather blurred picture out of that eye, a bit like the effect of eye droplets that opticians sometimes use to dilate the pupil. The other eye is OK.

• Caused some weakness in his left side, which can be resolved by the physioterrorists (joke).

He still has his tracheostomy. This is necessary to manage the vomit risk. Were he to vomit, he couldn’t necessarily deal with the result by spitting it out or swallowing it – so it (i.e. the vomit) might trickle down into his lungs and that ain’t good news. So, the “trachey” stays in place for the time being. The arrangement reduces his conversational capacity to an occasional hoarse whisper. I thought that you would be interested in this – we had sputum in Bulletin 2.
He is also doped up on opiates. His chest pain (caused by the extensive rib damage) is significant. This makes him intermittently dozy. He reserves maximum responsiveness for Bean and his friends.

Apart from that, he had a good day yesterday with some old school mates (nothing wrong with his memory of various sordid teenage escapades).

What next? Our (i.e. Penny and Duncan’s) idea had been to get him over to Lorton so that we could look after him until he was better. I was thinking about this in the wee small hours one night last week and decided that it really didn’t make much sense. The Boy will get more social variety in London and more visitors. It is easier for friends, relations, work colleagues etc to drop in. Penny can operate her business from James’ flat, I can get down without much trouble. Newcastle General Hospital seem to agree with this. John Macfarlane (one of our stalwart Cumbrian supporters) looked a bit crestfallen when we mentioned this: he had wanted to go running with James before James was well so that he (John) would be able to keep up with him.

We don’t know when this relocation will be – perhaps in the next week or two? We’ll keep you posted.

Not much other news.

1. Penny and Bean have apparently both dropped a dress size.

2. I’m in trouble because I lost a casserole, brought up by Sister Barbara. There was a slightly astonished silence when I disclosed this last night on the ‘phone. “How can you lose a casserole, Duncan? I put it into the car for you, you can’t have just lost it!”

Could there be a link between these points? Anyway, should you be travelling between Newcastle Central Station, Newcastle General Hospital and 21 Simonburn Road, Fenham and you come across a stray casserole, by all means tuck in – it’ll probably help you to maintain your dress size.

Thanks again for all of your good wishes. We’ll continue to keep you posted.

With best wishes from

Penny, Bean, Alasdair & Duncan.