The Sunday Times Magazine • 41that I have moved her to tears. “Yes. He
could die. Imminently.”
You didn’t die.
Some days.
Often.
There are days when I wish you did.● ● ● ●
You are moved to the intensive therapy
unit at the National Hospital in Queen
Square, where they start you on a five-day
course of steroids. You drift in and out of
consciousness. Your mum comes in to visit
and you are suddenly alert. You have been to
this hospital. You came every month for the
injection that was managing your MS. The
injection that was suddenly withdrawn from
market in the March before you collapsed.
The injection that we don’t know yet has
caused your collapse. It will be months
before we understand the correlation.
Right now, there are still no answers.
Our children, Jesse and Mabel, are
desperate to see you. You are worse. Worse
than you have ever been. But they need
to see you. Only, when we get there, I lose
my nerve and persuade Mabel to stay
downstairs. She is 14. The baby of the family.
I will regret this decision. One of my
biggest regrets. She, perhaps more than
anyone, needed to see you. We may not
have favourite children, but they can have
a favourite parent. Jacob was hers.
The days blur as we watch you, slipping in
and out of lucidity, as if you are shutting
down, your breathing growing more and
more shallow by the day. You have a
growing team of consultants, specialists in
seizure, epilepsy, immunology, neurology,
infectious diseases, MS. Teams and teams
of doctors and nurses, drawing blood and
draining spinal fluid.
We have a result. Anti-NMDA receptor
encephalitis. Strongly positive, found in
your spinal fluid, post your lumbar
puncture. This is the game-changer. Now
they can throw everything at it; placing a
plasma exchange machine by your bed that
for five days will strip the blood of plasma,
the straw-colour fluid that contains all the
red and white blood cells, platelets, protein
and nutrients. They will take the old plasma
to test, and replace it with a fluid known as
Octaplas as they try to clean your body of
the rogue antibodies that continue to
inflame your brain.
They give you extra seizure
medications and courses of steroids andimmunosuppressant drugs. You are going
to be all right. And I want to believe this.
I want this to be true. But somewhere
nagging, tugging at hope, at optimism, is
a growing sense that it is never going to
be OK again.
Dr C errs on the side of caution too.
“We’re not out of the woods. We’re still in
the woods.” It is something I will hear him
say a lot. For a long time.● ● ● ●
There’s a call. You have deteriorated. They
need to intubate you and put you on a
ventilator. Once they do that you won’t
be able to speak any more. I drive to the
hospital. I need to talk to you.
“I love you Jacob,” I say as you drift off
into your milky, drug-induced coma.
“Deeply ... Deeply,” you whisper back.
These are the last words you will say. It is
the end of June. You will not speak againuntil January. Six months of an aching, at
times unbearable, silence. And you will
never be the same.E
verything came quickly into my
life with Jacob. We collided with
absolute velocity. Yet not without
the odd bump in the road. On our
second date I had to talk him down on the
telephone, lost en route to dinner at my flat,
in some backwater of east London with no
taxi in sight. On our third date we got giddy
in Soho and wandered aimlessly for hours,
not quite sure how to get home. By our fifth
he had virtually moved in. When I called my
mother and told her that we were pregnant,
she said — “Who? Who is pregnant?” with
bewildered disbelief. Fast. Absolute. Life
changing. Was this always how it was going
to be with you and me?
It is past midnight. And I can hear voices.
Mabel is in her bedroom talking to someone.
Perhaps she’s speaking to a friend on
FaceTime. It’s only when I get to her
bedroom door that I realise who she is
talking to. “OK ... that’s just my day ... OK ...
Daddy ...” It is months later that she will
reveal she has been recording messages to
you on her phone every night. 443 days of
messages. And we are only on day 50.
Autumn, and slowly things fall apart
around us. The lights won’t go off in the
kitchen. There is a sound of running water
coming from the drain by the basement
door, with no determinate source. The
microwave has finally given up the ghost,
defeated by a bag of instant popcorn that
nearly burns down the house.
The absence of you is overwhelming.
There is a slow, seeping realisation I have
left so much to you. The banking, the car
maintenance, the tax returns, the football
fixtures and tutors, and vet appointments.
The boring shit, that you picked up, sorted
through, bringing order to the chaos, while
I got on with my day.“I LOVE YOU
JACOB,” I SAY
AS YOU
DRIFT INTO
A COMA. SIX
MONTHS OF
AN ACHING
SILENCE.
AND YOU
WILL NEVER
BE THE
SAME
Right: “You’ve got an ology!” A young
Jacob Krichefski in the popular BT
advert from the 1980s. Opposite, top:
PREVIOUS PAGES; LORNA MILBURN, THESE PAGES: JON ATTENBOROUGH FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, BTAbi Morgan today, in London