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Intensive care: experiences of family & friends

People's stories

Aged 70 +

Interview 26

Interview 26

Age at Interview: 70
Sex: Female
Background: Retired GP, married with three adult children. Ethnic background/nationality: White British.

Brief outline:In 2006 her sister-in-law sadly died in ICU after having an accident in her car. She visited her daily and took care of all the practical matters.

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She recorded music that her sister-in-law enjoyed and was very impressed when she saw one of her sister-in-law's visitors singing to her while she was sedated.
Print One of the things I haven't spoken about is music. I'd got an iPod, and she was very keen on music and one of the first things, well when I went to her flat I found that she'd got an enormous CD collection. I was amazed at how many CDs she had. And this was partly because she used to record things. She'd got a quite complicated system for being able to record things off the radio I think. And we took home a lot of these things and I put quite a few of them, she was particularly, for instance, had always been very keen on Vaughan Williams, and I put some of these on my iPod. And I went to the hospital and said, “Would it be all right?” Because she was so covered in bits of wiring everywhere that I thought it might not be possible, and I was rather nervous of all this stuff and nervous of doing harm to her. But they were very nice about it and said, “No, it's perfectly all right” and yes I should play to her. And so I did. And I didn't really have much evidence that she could hear it. But it felt quite nice to do this. And I was very moved one day coming to the hospital to find a friend of hers who was singing to her. And this was during the short period when they were slightly lightening the sedation and they were saying that she was taking some breaths on her own and it wasn't all assisted breathing. And he was singing and I felt that she was looking at him, or looked as though she was, her head was facing in his direction. And I was very moved. I was moved by his niceness in doing this. And I think he'd come all the way from Bristol and I was terribly impressed by this. And again feeling rather inadequate that my offerings of music hadn't ever been for very long. I was always rushing off. I hadn't left my iPod behind.

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