Well this is all big news. About the brother. The crocked one, currently lollygagging in the Royal Free. He’s come out of Intensive Care. Holy shit. The next step. In a forwardly direction.

Ok, so the good news is: you’re out of the ICU!!!! (Where there is a nurse at your side 24 hours of every single day and the care is brilliant and the consultants drop in 5 times a day to talk to you and they have more machines going ‘ping’ than a video game arcade in Leicester Square).

The bad news is: you out of the ICU!!!! (Onto a ‘ward’ – even though he’s in a room on the side- where normal NHS rules apply. Which are: as few nurses as possible, taking longer than is actually possible to respond to a call. No doctors around; who needs ‘em?, and thankfully not a lot of machines because he doesn’t need them any longer. Just the one that has been feeding him for 4.5 months).

And this was a problem because, as he told me ages ago; he had become completely institutionalised. Got fretful when his nurse left him for a few minutes. Then, on a ward, cold turkey. Though he can’t eat cold turkey. Nor anything else. But…

Yesterday, just before I arrived, he managed his first ‘swallow’. That reflex which we all take for granted, had long stopped functioning through disuse, so he’d been doing various exercises to fire it up again. And yesterday morning it fired. And he was actually sipping water. Without coughing!!! How good must that taste after all that time with nothing whatsoever passing through his mouth? We would have been ‘high fiving’ but due to his restricted mobility we settled for a sort of mid-level-five instead. Because this was a massive moment. The path to recovery. The path to getting out (eventually). The path to… chicken biryani, pilau rice and garlic naan!!! Eventually. You have to walk before you can run to an Indian restaurant. And walking is at bit… difficult currently. But improving with a new ‘super-zimmer’ with wheels.

More importantly is that ‘the return of the swallow’, as we’ll call this sequel, has changed his mood, his mindset, his psyche. Lifted the inevitable depression due to the “I’m never gonna get out’a this fucking place” thoughts to some light at the end of a very long tunnel. Which has changed his motivation, almost instantly. Now he’s almost eager to do his physio, rather than just turn into a temporary teenager with a ‘but what’s the poioioioioint???’ attitude.

Plus, the general ward is not really somewhere you’d wanna be hanging out for too long if you didn’t have to. Not being a ward-snob or nuffink but after the ICU, it’s like staying in the Taj Palace in Mumbai for a month then moving to the Premier Inn.

He’s doing so well, I’ve just arrived in Sicily. In the next thrilling episode of Andy’s Travels; the hunt for the Mafia (horse’s head not included. I hope.)

Happy Sunday

A xxxx