Read Online Beyond the High Blue Air by Lu Spinney - Free Book Online Page B

and the Rehabilitation ward at the Wellington Hospital, both centres of excellence specialising in neuro-rehabilitation following traumatic brain injury. The Wellington is private and the costs are prohibitive. Receiving the news that Miles is to be admitted to the ABIU feels like winning the lottery.
    The logistics of flying home are daunting. To return on a stretcher with a commercial airline would require the space and cost of nine seats, but patients with tracheostomies are not accepted so that is ruled out anyway. There are companies that specialise in repatriation by air ambulance, small jets that have the intensive care equipment to cover every eventuality, but talking to their representatives I get a chilling sense of impersonal service at great cost, that the payment is more important than the patient. Dr Stizer recommends a friend of his, a doctor who flies a private air ambulance, and the decision is made.
    Today Miles and I are flying back to England. On the runway our plane is dwarfed by everything around it. Tiny but purposeful, it looks like a hornet waiting for take-off, fragile, thread-thin legs and delicate wings outstretched. The airport is closely ringed by high mountains, snow-covered, jagged and implacable, and I cannot imagine how this tiny thing will lift us over them. Once inside the plane you cannot stand upright yet unbelievably there will be six people on board. The pilot, Dr Stizer’s friend, is a handsome, swashbuckling neurosurgeon who flies for a hobby and often ferries his own or other Intensive Care patients. His exuberance makes me realise how brittle I am, how taut and isolated is the space I’ve come to inhabit. His co-pilot looks reassuringly serious, a young man who shows great concern for Miles as he is being lifted into the plane. There is a male nurse from the hospital and he and I sit belted in with our backs to the pilot and co-pilot, our shoulders almost touching theirs. Relaxed and friendly, the nurse tells me that he is now studying to be a doctor but takes on this work when he can to earn the money and for the ride, and, I can tell, this outing to England will be fun for him. In front of me, almost taking up the body of the plane, Miles lies on his back on a stretcher and I can just about reach across and touch his head to reassure him, or reassure myself. Next to him, at the other end of his stretcher and facing us, sits a young woman doctor; throughout the journey she monitors Miles and fills in the clipboard chart she keeps on her lap. Beside her is a bank of resuscitation equipment and a portable suction machine. Once the plane has taken off we can’t talk because the noise of the engines is deafening; this air ambulance has no luxury trimmings.
    I don’t like flying at the best of times and I especially don’t like flying in small aeroplanes. This is the most physically frightened I have ever been. I fear the laid-back pilot, the tinny fragility of the plane, the grinding noise of the engines, the low altitude and proximity to the snow-covered mountains below us; above all I fear the effect of the rarefied cabin air pressure on what little oxygen is still being supplied to Miles’s brain. Half an hour into the flight I begin to detect an unmistakeable smell of burning; yes, there is undoubtedly something burning in this aeroplane. I lean over to the nurse and he leans towards me. I shout in his ear, Can you smell burning? Mmm, he says, and turns to tap the co-pilot on the shoulder. They talk closely and then the nurse undoes his seat belt and crawls, bent double, down to the back of the aircraft. I can’t see what he is doing as he crouches down but he returns calmly and now shouts in my ear, Heating, the heating, better it’s off, okay?
    I nod but I’m not okay. Miles has begun to judder, his body jerking, his head shaking terribly from side to side. The woman doctor leans forward to take his pulse