‘Tom. It’s Clara. Wake up!’
‘Lara?’ he slurred.
‘Clara. It’s me. Clara. An ambulance is coming. We’re going to get you the help you need.’
She tried to prop him up against some cushions as he opened one eye and attempted to focus.
‘Come on, Tom. You can do it. Look at me! Look at me!’
As he managed to sleepily open both eyes, Clara held him tight. She heard the sound of an ambulance somewhere in the distance and could tell it was getting closer. Still, it felt like hours before they barged through the door. Clara begged Tom to stay awake as the paramedics rushed through the front door that she had forgotten to close in her panic. It looked as though her haste had paid off.
‘He’s in here,’ she shouted.
Two paramedics in green uniforms rushed in.
‘Hello, I’m Josie. Do you know what he’s taken?’ said one of them.
‘I don’t. It’s all here, look.’
Clara had been far too busy trying to get Tom conscious to consider what he might have taken. It was time to leave it in their capable hands now as she stood back and watched as the other paramedic tended to Tom, and Josie picked up a half-empty strip of tablets.
‘Are there more of these around?’ she asked, holding up the blister pack.
‘Not that I’ve seen.’
‘Okay. Good. Looks like he might have passed out with all the booze before he could take too many,’ she said, as she noticed another brand-new, untouched, packet on the coffee table. The relief Clara felt was enormous. It was only now she realised that she had driven over on a surge of adrenaline. She looked down to find she was still wearing her slippers but the main thing was that she had arrived in time. Tom was going to be okay; she was sure of it. So many things ran through her head as the paramedics checked him over. She would make sure that from now on he would get the help he so obviously needed. She wished he would have told someone how he was feeling. Even if he didn’t want to tell her, he could have spoken to the Samaritans. There was always someone out there who would listen; someone out there who cared, whether a friend, acquaintance or family. The astonishing thing was that she had never noticed Tom touch a drop of alcohol when she thought about it. Even at communion he chose the non-alcoholic wine, yet now there was evidence of alcohol all around the house.
‘He’s going to be okay now, right?’ Clara begged Josie.
‘He’s not quite out of the woods yet. We’ll have to take him to hospital for observations to make sure he’s okay. He might have sustained liver damage. We don’t know what internal damage he may have done.’
Clara looked at Tom in disbelief that he could harm himself in this way. Then she agreed that he needed to be in hospital. Tom might be in less imminent danger, but nobody could tell what detrimental effect this would have on his health.
As the adrenaline wore off further, she felt tired as she looked at Tom in disbelief that this later-in-life Christian who she thought was the perfect man had been found lying here in such a sorry state. It was such a cliché that you didn’t know what people were going through, but not once on any of their dates had Clara considered that he would ever do anything like this. He had everything going for him. What on earth would drive him to do this?
She had feared so many situations: thinking that he’d gone off her, wondering if she had somehow upset him and she was being ghosted. But she now recognised that none of this was about her, nor anyone else, not even the church. Tom was fighting a battle that she had no idea about. A battle he had managed to hide extremely well.
As the paramedics were putting him in the ambulance, Tom closed his eyes and what very little colour he had drained. Clara heard Josie announce that his stats were starting to drop. The paramedics threw the door closed and the lights started flashing as the ambulance drove out of sight as Clara could only stand and watch helplessly. She was so annoyed with herself. How could she have let this happen? She knew full well that when someone went quiet this was often when they needed help the most. She had never been so cross with herself – or so distraught. If Tom didn’t pull through, she knew she would never forgive herself.
ChapterTwenty-Two
At the John Radcliffe Hospital, some people’s lives were coming to an end while others were just beginning. Surgeons, nurses and admin staff were the cogs in the NHS wheel and making a difference between life and death. For the more fortunate patients, timely intervention was saving their lives, giving them a second chance.
The paramedics had kept Tom in the ambulance for a while when they first arrived, as they treated him and waited for clearance to get him inside. At the house, they had asked Clara for his next of kin, but with no idea about his family dynamics and him having always rebuffed any questions, she had given her own name as his emergency contact. Clara was on pins as she kept her phone in her hand and paced the hospital corridor waiting for news. She had wanted to follow the ambulance but they were too fast for her and she wasn’t going to break the speed limit again. Besides, Tom wouldn’t be able to see visitors for a while yet, although Clara wanted to be there the moment he could.
Being a woman of the cloth, waiting around hospitals for visiting time was something she was no stranger to, even though she despised it after being at this very hospital as she sat beside her dying mother a number of years earlier. However, it wasn’t her first visit since then and the last time she had stood in the vicinity of Tom’s ward was when one of the students needed to have her appendix removed. Clara had been the first visitor to greet her when she came around since her parents were still flying in from Hong Kong. She had been determined that the young student wouldn’t come around alone, as she knew what it was like to have no parents beside you, no matter how old you were.
As Clara waited for the go-ahead to see Tom, she thought about his state of mind. She understood that nobody knew what was going on in someone’s head, but why would Tom do something so extreme? What had driven him? Had an incident, some kind of trauma from his past, led him to this desperate situation? Why would a man with everything to live for end up here? They were questions only Tom could answer.
It was getting late, and Clara had already hung around for two hours at the hospital. Patience was something that she normally had plenty of but tonight she was struggling. She was getting more tired and was about to get into a fight with the coffee vending machine when a young nurse approached her to inform her that she could finally see Tom. Clara forgot about her change in the machine as she quickly followed the nurse.
While Tom still looked unwell, with an oxygen tube branching up his nose, he was a much better colour than when he was last seen being wheeled into the ambulance.
‘He’s still very sleepy,’ said the nurse soothingly. ‘His body’s taken a real battering.’
Clara nodded her head. She couldn’t imagine what his body had been through. She managed to get a headache after three glasses of wine. She wasn’t convinced that her body would have pulled through at all if she had drunk that much.
Gingerly, Clara approached Tom in his hospital bed. Although there was a canula in his hand, she very carefully stroked around it.
