Terry Prone: The surgeon asked Tom: ‘Is she a fighter?’ ‘Oh, yes.’ ‘Then she’ll probably survive...’

‘Anton, I’m going to need you to be quiet for the next little while. Your mother’s had a car crash and I need to work out where.’

‘How do you know she’s had a car crash?’ 

‘You know the big phone in her car? I can’t get through to her on it. Now, if it was just not working, Tess would have pulled into a hotel and phoned me from there. But she hasn’t, and she’s an hour-and-a-half overdue. That means she’s had a car crash, and I’m going to ring every garda station from here to Dublin to find out where it happened.’ 

That’s what he did. The Guards answering the phone knew the voice, partly because of Tom doing It Says in the Papers, partly because when he did overnights in RTÉ for Morning Ireland, they were used to him ringing to ask if anything had happened in their area. No, Tom, they said on this night. Not here. No, nothing like that. No crashes. Until he hit Lucan. Yes, we have her, came the answer. Not good, Tom, tell you the truth. She seems to have been hit by a much bigger car — station wagon, you know? He must’ve pulled out to pass a line of traffic, sure all the holiday-makers are on their way back up from the West, and he didn’t get back in, so the two cars collided. Maybe fifty miles an hour each? Yeah. Not good. Fire Brigade had to cut her out and she’s in Blanchardstown. Anything we can do for you? Oh, you’re heading out of Galway? Take your time. Someone here says they said she’d be in the operating theatre for hours.

Tom rang my sister to tell her what had happened. Yes, she would take Anton, no problem. He wrapped Anton up warm, got him into the back seat, and started for Dublin. Anton could hear him quietly saying ‘Poor Tess. Poor Tess,’ to himself until Anton fell asleep.

Tom arrived at Blanchardstown having unloaded Anton to Hilary, around eleven, to be told that the surgeon would be coming out shortly, that the work was nearly done. An exhausted medic with a face mask dropped to chin level eventually sat down in front of him, wiping his face one-handed to stay awake. They had put metal bolts in the legs and left elbow and were now plastering both legs. It had been bad, bad … 

‘Will she survive?’ 

The surgeon looked at Tom and thought about the question.

‘Is she a fighter?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Then she’ll probably survive.’ 

It was the next day when my mother was allowed to see me, and she never got over the sight of the unrecognisable blood-clotted, swollen, bruised, stitched head.

In the beginning, it was no visitors because of intensive care. Then it was no visitors because Tom decided they would do me no good. But he was there, every morning and every night, despite working three full-time jobs. Calm, casual. No crisis-making, no great sympathy. Just there, noting progress, policing what was done and not done for me.

When my face shrank back to something like normal, he brought Anton in for quick visits, but other than my mother, Hilary, Tom and — occasionally — Anton, nobody else was allowed to come in. The one person who broke the visitor ban was our employee, Gavin Duffy. I would hear him on the corridor, giving lip to the nurses to distract them from barring him, and then he would arrive, tell a series of outrageously funny stories about the people we worked with, and, just as the laughter headed into painful territory for me, get up and go.

Four weeks after the crash, the nurses dropped me. From a considerable height. They got me back up onto the bed and minimised what had happened. I wasn’t wearing it.

‘I’m going home as soon as my husband arrives,’ I told them. ‘Please pack up my stuff.’ 

Not at all, they said, I needed to relax. It had been a tough day and they understood I mightn’t be in great form. After you dropped me, you mean? I was going home, I told them. No matter what they said or did.

I could hear them, an hour later, accosting Tom in the corridor. Mr Savage, your wife is a little confused today. She says she’s going home. I could hear Tom saying that was fine. No, no, it is not fine. Your wife is in no condition to be released. Fact is, Mr Savage, your wife is a big heavy woman and everything except her right arm is broken, so she has to be lifted, washed, dressed, fed. Everything. You simply wouldn’t be able to do it.

‘Oh, I spent a good chunk of my earlier years lifting syphilitic oul’ fellas,’ Tom’s voice said dryly. ‘I think I can probably lift my wife.’ 

Syphilitic oul fellas? I let on not to have heard anything when they came in, still rabbiting on, faster and louder, for fear I’d start in on how they had dropped me — this big, heavy and heavily injured woman — and threaten to sue them. I sat silently while Tom gathered clothes and rammed them randomly into a bag.

‘You might get a robe on her,’ he said to one of the nurses.

Whether they liked it or not, I was going home. Warnings were issued about leaving hospital unauthorised. Tom winked at them, which confused them. Porters materialised and helped me from wheelchair into car. Tom checked he had everything and told them, with the sudden crispness of someone who suspects something has happened of which he had not been told, that he would deal with the paperwork later. Then the engine started, country music came on the radio, and I was going home, him driving more slowly than was his norm, lest he hit a pothole at hurtful speed.

‘Syphilitic oul’ fellas,’ I prompted.

He got launched on how he had taken a qualification in psychiatric social work in Queen’s University Belfast, interning at Purdysburn Mental Hospital, which at the time was effectively a dumping ground for men in the tertiary stage of syphilis. Men who, for one reason or another, had either not been identified as sufferers early enough to undergo the brutal treatments of the time, or had not been successfully treated. The last stages were known as general paralysis of the insane, which meant that the men involved could no longer walk or take care of themselves. A big athletic intern was useful in that context, and so Tom lifted, carried and cleaned those patients.

In Baldoyle, he got the car as near to the front gate as he could, and, seeing that the path from gate to front door was perhaps five feet in length, getting me into the house might have looked easy. It was not. By the time I was planted in the double bed he had brought down and positioned in the dining room of the tiny terraced house, I was ready to throw up from pain and sweat was pouring down Tom’s temples from effort. He left and came back with half a glass of water and a pill. One of the nurses had slipped a bottle of pills into his pocket as he took me out of Blanchardstown, indicating that he was going to need them to keep my pain at bay.

‘So one of them was human,’ he said. ‘Tall red-haired one.’ 

We observed five seconds of silence in gratitude to the tall red-haired one.

‘I need to go to the toilet.’

‘Could you hang on for fifteen minutes? By then the painkiller will have kicked in and it’d make the stairs easier.’ 

I nodded, which the broken bones in my face instructed me was a mistake. Gradually the pain eased and the relief created a wild euphoria which made me adorable in my heroism, I believed, as I made witty comments during the clumsy journey upstairs and downstairs. Tom might not have testified to my adorability, since he was doing the heavy lifting. Neither of us registered that the red-haired one had donated a bottle of powerful narcotics and that I was as high as a kite. Nor would we have cared. Anything was better than the whole-body agony prior to analgesia.

Anton wasn’t there that first night. His grandparents were minding him, and were prepared to continue minding him, but his father believed that the sooner he came home, the better, and that he might even be a help in ‘caring for the cripple’, as Tom put it. So the following morning, Tom washed me, changed my clothes, and left me in bed with everything in reach he could think I might need, while he went first to the Irish Wheelchair Association in Clontarf, where they lent him a wheelchair for me and taught him how to use it. There’s more to a wheelchair than meets the eye, as you soon find out as a passenger, when amateurs enthusiastically commit themselves to your forward motion to a degree that causes you to face-plant on the pavement. After that, he collected Anton from school and brought him home, by which time I had worked out a genuinely useful task for Anton to perform. My left arm was so severely broken that it was used by the sister in Blanchardstown as evidence to prove staying in hospital was imperative when she was trying to persuade Tom not to help me escape. If I wasn’t put through the physio every day, she said, I would end up with my left arm permanently bent at right angles, which would make everyday tasks ranging from putting on a dress to carrying a tray to driving a car almost impossible. I resolved to do the physio twice every day at home until I was sure I could straighten my left arm in a Hitler salute. Well, okay, maybe that wasn’t the objective, but in my defence I point out that I was pretty stressed at the time by virtue of being dropped on a hard floor.

When Anton arrived home with Tom and the wheelchair, his first question was could he do a wheelie in it. I shrugged, which was an error of judgement, since I was near the end of the efficacy period of the last dose of narcotics and my ribs didn’t want to know about shrugging. Anton got into the wheelchair and quickly became so expert that he could get his feet up in the air and sustain a position, utterly still, with nothing touching the ground other than the wheels, for several minutes at a time. I explained to him that unless I did daily physio I might end up with an arm that would not unfurl. He thought about this and explained to me the range of activities, outside of those already listed by the hospital sister, from which I would be precluded. I would not be able to wire-walk. Or use a skateboard. Or reach the press where the biscuits were kept. The two of us considered these dire possibilities for a few minutes and then I told him that I couldn’t do the physio on my own, because my body would chicken out of the necessary arm-straightening. I needed someone strong to force the arm. He volunteered immediately, and we set ourselves up in the correct position.

‘Now, let’s first see how much I can straighten it without pushing,’ I said.

Anton watched in dismay and disbelief. My elbow was on the table, and so when I straightened my arm my fist should have hit the table. Instead, it stopped a good twelve inches from it. Lifted up, my arm was resolutely bent. He would have to force it further on the road to straightness ten times. Was he up for that? Of course he was, and he did it firmly and with a will. One, he counted. Two. Three. Four. Then he glanced up from the arm and saw his mother was mauve in the face with eyes awash with tears. He stopped.

‘You must keep going,’ I growled at him.

Five. Six. By the time we got to ten, he was crying, too. Thoroughly and helplessly.

‘Maybe I’ll get your dad to help me this evening,’ I said.

If I had suggested blacklegging to a striker, I would hardly have met with such ferocious rejection. This was his job. He would do it. And he did it. Twice a day he did it, for several weeks, rewarding himself for completing the ordeal each day with a good set of wheelchair wheelies. By the third week, the arm could straighten completely, and after that it was just maintenance, which I could do single-armedly. These days, whenever I do a task that requires me to fully extend my left arm, I am always grateful to a resolute little boy who gave me that gift, albeit through much personal distress.

• Caution to the Wind, published by Red Stripe Press, is available now from all good bookshops, priced at €22.50