As the train slowed towards Waterloo Station I glanced out of the window and saw the Union Flag fluttering on top of the Houses of Parliament.
Wallop. The image struck me right in the solar plexus. It’s a much-photographed scene for tourists, but is also meaningful for me.
A great deal of my time in intensive care in 2024 was spent at St Thomas’ Hospital. When it became obvious that I wasn’t going to die, an emphasis was put on rehabilitation. This included learning to sit. It took a team of people, some equipment and doubtless a lot of patience to get me into a chair.
Then I’d be left to allow atrophied muscles to try to work and hold me upright, and to look out of the window.
The view was of the Houses of Parliament, and the flag fluttering. How I loved that view after staring at a hospital wall for weeks, when I was conscious.
Suddenly there it was again, but on a very different occasion. I was heading up to London for a day’s work, in the heatwave, meeting an environmentally proactive vicar at the Archbishop’s Park near Lambeth Palace.
So, I walked from Waterloo Station to the park, nodding my greeting to the flag, passing the ambulance’s entrance to St Thomas’s. In 2024 I was blue lighted there from Southampton General, in a coma and so have no memory of it, but it was profound to walk past it.
I found the vicar and did the interview. Then I walked on over the bridge in searing heat to meet up with an old journalist chum for lunch.
Joyous progress
‘This is no bother,’ my body was saying. ‘Remember how it was when you could see this flag before?’
Remember? I’ll never forget. Then, sitting for 15 minutes was considered good. If I could stretch it out to an hour that was a major work out, exhausting, draining, joyous progress.
Now, I’m not going to give any international athlete a run for their money, but I can walk from Waterloo to Lambeth and thence to Westminster. Liberation.
By this time, the heat was bouncing off the pavement and walls, and I was in no mood to walk back to Waterloo. Instead, I strolled to Westminster tube station and allowed myself the air-conditioned luxury of a one-stop ride to Waterloo.
When I was in intensive care, I’d watch other patients walk with a frame to the shower or toilet and think how wonderful that must be.
Now, I mostly forget how fortunate I am to be walking around, though it’s why I write this blog. But seeing the flag on the Houses of Parliament was a salutary reminder of how far I’d come and how very lucky I am.
The very next day I saw a news story about the opening of a rooftop garden for intensive care patients at King’s College London and thought, ‘Of course. How brilliant!’ Being outside makes all the difference to recovery: feeling the sun on your skin and the breeze in your hair calls you forward into life.
Having project managed a couple of RHS gardens, I now have visions of myself project managing other rooftop ICU gardens to enable others to recover faster, to see a view and smile, to feel lifted and hopeful. A girl’s got to have a dream, right?