22. Team Elizabeth

At this point I was not eating anything (nil by mouth). My mouth was certainly moving but swallowing was a bit laborious. Brain injury was actually where Charlotte the speech therapist was based (she visited me in intensive care). So she started to visit me nearly every day. I loved this; she made me laugh. My speech was getting better by itself, just by me talking all the time. I never found this fatiguing, just funny to hear my voice modulating. One of the main jobs of a speech therapist who specialises in brain injuries is actually to work on people's eating.The muscles used for swallowing are the same for speech, so I don't know why they're not called 'swallow therapists'. (They're actually called 'SALT', for 'Speech and Language Therapist'. I was a bit confused when I could hear staff say they were waiting for 'the salt' until I worked this out.) One time Charlotte gave me a cheek massage to open up my jaw and to try and remove tightness in my face. Another time, she brushed the left side of my face with a tooth brush.

One of the first exercises she gave me to do was to hold my tongue between my teeth and then try to swallow. Bet you just tried it. She told me to do it 5 times in a row, which would take me a while. She also gave me a squeezy plastic ball to hold under my chin. I had to practise pressing it into my chest. As you can imagine, this looked ridiculous. I had to resist the urge to just throw the ball at people. These exercises both helped in strengthening my neck muscles.

Then came the day where Charlotte started trying me on soft foods. This meant yogurt and custard pots. I actually really liked them; they were just normal ones you could buy in a shop. I found being spoon fed so surreal, it was a real challenge not to laugh. Charlotte was no help, making dry comments all the time. It was a miracle I didn't choke. I think speech therapists get so used to feeding people, they forget how stange it is. It would certainly make a good youth group game. I never once coughed on a spoonful, which I think made Charlotte worried, because that could mean I had no feeling in my throat, and therefore food might be going down the wrong way. That could lead to lung infections and all kinds of problems.

I'm not a huge foody; I never really missed food. I was being fed through my tummy tube so I wasn't hungry. I think missing food when you're nil by mouth is more of a psychological thing. What I did miss was being able to down a glass of nice, cool water. I could have 'mouthcare', little pink sponges on toothpicks that were dunked in water and dabbed around my mouth, but that was a tease. It reminded me of when wine vinegar was put on a sponge and dabbed on Jesus' mouth, at the cross. Before I could taste, I didn't realise these were sometimes dipped in medical mouthwash. I would suck them, until I could suddenly taste what a bad idea this was. Mouthcare couldn't really satisfy, so I stopped asking for it. My mouth had acclimatised by then.

During this time, I was also having terrible peeing problems. I couldn't go. I would desperately need to, but turning the tap on, or even nurses dancing to make me laugh, couldn't jog my bladder. It would work eventually, but sometimes only after an hour of trying. Once Charlotte came and did a session with me, only realising at the end that, under the sheets, I'd been on a bedpan the entire time.

One day, I got a parcel. My dad unwrapped it comedically. It was navy t-shirts saying 'Team Elizabeth', in reference to the title of the blog my dad was writing about my progress. There were shirts for all the family; my Aunt Mary in the USA had sent them. I peed myself laughing. Don't get me wrong, I really appreciated the gesture of solidarity and family support. I'd just needed to go at the time, and it was a tad embarrassing to be the centre of so much support. If only people knew my reality. People knew the muscles in my control were affected, but it was literally all of them.

My parents, Aunt Ruth and I in our t-shirts