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Intensive care: experiences of family & friendsArrow
Aged 51-60
Interview 20  

Interview 20

Age at Interview: 60
Background: Husband: Part-time minister/social worker, full-time carer, married with one adult daughter. Ethnic background/nationality: White British. Daughter: Hostels officer, single, no children. Ethnic background/nationality: White British.
Brief outline:In 2004 his wife and her mother spent six months in hospital and was admitted to ICU three times because of sepsis and heart problems.


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To help his wife understand that she'd been hallucinating, nurses took her back to visit ICU when she was on a ward.

 



Husband: She had actually interestingly been into ITU, because she was beginning to remember things from the extended four week period and she wasn't sure whether they [hallucinations] were real or imagination and so… 

Daughter: She thought she was on a ship didn't she or something about that. And it was to do with the noise or… 

Husband: Well one of the big issues was that, a lot of her sort of background is Jewish Polish so a long time ago, but obviously with the sort of holocaust and stuff like that, there's that sense that relatives of hers, that she had never met, but many of her relatives would have died in that. And when she was on ITU she was in a bed near a window and when you looked out of the window you could see the hospital chimney with smoke coming out of it and that had also played into this thing about, you know, being held prisoner and you know sort of Nazi guards and things like that. And that continued to be played for a while when she was on the medical ward, they moved her into a bay away from the nurses station and she began to get better. 

Daughter: But that had already happened before she went into Intensive Care the first time when she had had the thing with the nurse, like when she was on the morphine when she had already been having… that seemed to be a recurrent sort of theme throughout really. 

Husband: And anyway when they moved her into this other bay again she had a clear view of the chimney, it was literally virtually outside the window and… 

Daughter: Haunting her.

Husband: And other chimneys with other sort of smoke coming out. It was a hospital boiler house basically is what it was. But obviously it was very unsettling for her. And so as she began to get better, one of the sort of follow-up after care nurses from ITU came to see her and we told her about this and so she said would it help if she came down to ITU. So they actually wheeled her down and she had a little sit by the bed that she had been in, and then she said, 'oh look that is what I was remember, you know this chimney, I can remember that and wasn't there somebody' - and she sort of vaguely remembered a sort of a conversation where a couple of the nurses were talking about, you know, boyfriends and things and she remembered. So it was obvious when she was there that a lot of what she was remembering was remembering rather than imagining like [laughs]. Yes so that was quite good.
Jonathan Miller - Intensive care
Intensive care - Experiences of family & friends
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