The very next day I visited him again. I was still not ready to go on my own so had my friend Alexis with me, thank god!

When his name was called and I went up to the nurse expecting to be ticked off the list and shown through they stopped me and told me that the doctor needed to talk to me first so I needed to stay in the waiting room for him to come. My heart dropped and I’m sure I must have gone white as a sheet as Alexis could tell that I was worried. I told her that I had been told to wait for the doctor. We sat in silence, not knowing what the say to each other as we were both fearing the worst but not daring to say it out loud!

When the doctor finally came to talk to me he told me that John was in surgery. It was not emergency surgery but they needed to amputate his infected toe and they had a free slot so they took him in. I could wait until it was finished and then go and see him. He also took time to explain about the stroke. What had happened was the infection had caused encarditis (an infection in his heart) this in turn had caused part of one of the valves in his heart to break off, the pieces of this valve had gone into his blood stream and straight to his brain causing an impact which led to a stroke. He had three strike sites in his brain, two were small but there was a large one which was going to have to be closely monitored. He also needed to have valve replacement surgery when he was strong enough and when they had the infection, which was still raging, under control. So in short he had a lot going on and was a very complicated medical case. He was in a stable but very serious condition.

I waited for around an hour before I could go to see him. He was obviously still sedated and had all sorts of tubes coming out of him. He was shaking, almost shivering as if he was cold. The nurse told me that was normal. I took some time talking to him and told him what had happened but that he would be ok. I didn’t know if he could hear me but I wanted to talk to him and reassure him that I was there, just in case he could hear. Then I promised him that I would be back the next day and left.

The following day I was allowed straight in but John was still asleep. He was still lightly sedated as they wanted to treat the infection and wake him up slowly. I was disappointed as I had thought that they would wake him up straight away. But this was not the case, he was in a delicate conditon and everything needed to be done slowly.

Over the course of the next few days they told me that they would start reducing the sedatives to try to wake him up. This did not go well. He started to have seizures. Every day I would go and hope and pray that I would see his eyes, open, looking at me, recognizing me. But every day he was still sedated. Then one day they announced that he had epilepsy caused by the stroke and he was having seizures which is why he couldn’t wake up. They had to protect the brain and the best way to do that was to put him into a deep coma. The brain needed to “cool down” they told me, so he needed to sleep. They did not have the infection under control either. They had concentrated on the heart infection but now the infection that had been carried to his brain by the infected pieces of heart valve had to become the top priority. They changed antibiotics so many times until they managed to find one that was working. The infection markers in his blood were finally starting to come down. But the seizures remained, every time they reduced the sedation he suffered a seizure so he had to stay in a coma.

After three weeks of this they sent his for another MRI, this showed that the damage to his brain was getting worse and that he now had fluid on the brain. They said this to me like I should know what it meant but I am not a doctor and did not have a clue how serious this was or what the treatment was! They just told me that they had to stop trying to wake him up. Sleep and antibiotics were the best things for him now. I had to be patient, he had a lot of medical problems and it was not going to be a quick cure.

I could be patient if it meant that he would come back to me. I could hold myself and the children together. I knew that I needed to be strong and I was going to do it for him.