Today is exactly one year since Holly’s accident. I don’t usually attach much significance to anniversaries but I’m finding that as the 31st looms I’m reliving the events of that day in my mind, on an accelerating loop, day and night.
Each one of the many people who love Holly experienced their own version of that day. Ironically, Holly is the only one who remembers almost nothing about it. I’ve never really shared the details of my own experience because anyone I might’ve shared it with has their own horrendous memories of it, and grief can become competitive if you’re not careful. I hope that writing it down - vomiting it out into print - might help me to begin to focus on life, and love of life, rather than death, and fear of loss.
It was a Thursday, and it was hot. Richard and I had picked Frida up from Forest School at lunchtime as we always do on Thursday, and Grace, 12 weeks pregnant, had popped round for a cup of tea. Richard was in the pool with Frida and Grace and I were in the kitchen. It was about 2:30pm
Grace’s phone rang. It was Angus. I knew immediately that something was wrong - she stepped out onto the patio and turned her back to me. Clipped voice, no chat, serious. ‘Where is she?’ ‘Right, I’m coming now.’
Then the words I’d dreaded since the moment I became a mother 33 years previously, ‘Holly’s been in an accident.’
Holly was eight and a half months pregnant. She was on her way to a garden centre, alone, and Angus had received a call from Holly’s phone, he thought from a paramedic (we found out later it was a bystander) saying she was going to hospital in Lisbon. The person sent him a dropped pin of the nearest hospital to the accident scene. He had no car, as Holly had it, so he called Grace.
Grace and I left immediately, Grace driving. On the way to pick Angus up, we tried to reassure each other. It’ll be nothing. Just a precaution because she’s pregnant. They probably just want to check her over.
The route from picking up Angus to the hospital was going to take us past the accident site (Angus had been told that it happened just outside the garden centre). The road is a main north-south route, busy and used by truckers to avoid tolls. It’s single carriageway, fast and straight, but without the infrastructure to support it - no hard shoulders, no slip roads or roundabouts. Trucker restaurants and the garden centre are right on the side of the road.
Grace and I quizzed Angus for any extra information about how Holly was. We tried to stay calm and reassure each other. Three words were mentioned by Angus during this anxious journey, which to a layperson might not mean much, but to an A&E doctor and mother of a pregnant RTC victim, set off humongous and terrifying clanging clattering resonating alarm bells - ‘pain’, ‘bleeding’ and ‘a bit confused’. I remember putting my head in my hands in terror, praying that none of this was actually happening and Grace seeing me in the rear-view and thinking I was unwell, and me trying to reassure her that I was fine, that she mustn’t worry, knowing that she must stay calm, because she too is pregnant, and driving.
And then we reached a traffic standstill. We were still a couple of kilometers from the garden centre. All the traffic going towards the hospital was completely stationary, with drivers out of their vehicles, walking about. All traffic coming in the other direction had been diverted onto another road. It took a few seconds for us to be hit by the sinking realisation that this was due to Holly’s accident. Rising terror. They don’t completely shut a major route for a minor collision. We had to get through. We had to. This was the way to the hospital.
Grace pulled over onto the gravel and grass verge and just drove, lights on, hand on horn, windows open with us all shouting ‘out of the way!’ out the window. Drivers shouted at us, telling us to stop. Eventually we were waved down by the GNR - we hysterically tried to explain that we needed to get to the hospital, IT’S MY DAUGHTER!, but he told us to pull over into the garage just up ahead. Still further ahead we could see the blue lights of several bombeiros vehicles in the middle of the road so we ignored the GNR and drove on until we reached a blockade and there, amongst the chaos was Holly’s car, a purple Audi estate, squashed and smashed from every angle to half its size. I used to be an instructor on Advanced Trauma Life Support courses. The level of damage to a vehicle is vital information when assessing for potential injury. Whoever had been in that vehicle is either dead or seriously injured. Please God don’t let this be happening.
Grace and I jumped out of the car and ran to a group of GNR and Bombeiros near the car. We were near hysterical, trying to communicate that that was our daughter/sister in that car, they needed to let us through, we needed to get to the hospital. Initially, until they understood, they were obstructive and unmoving, then suddenly they understood and completely changed. It was their sudden kindness, in their eyes and voices which terrified me more than anything. They asked for Holly’s name (they knew nothing) and they were anxious to know if she was the only one in the car. No child in the car? No. They seemed relieved. I think they’d been looking for Frida. (We later found out that all Holly had said, repeatedly, was ‘Where’s Frida?’)
One of the bombeiros brought us Holly’s handbag which he’d fished out of the wreckage. It had bloodstains on it. They waved us through the accident site.
We reached the hospital in about 30 minutes, and ran into Urgência. We had to take a ticket and wait our turn for reception, and when it was eventually our turn, they had no information for us, they’d had no pregnant RTC victim in. Fortunately the receptionist was able to make a phone call and find out where Holly had been taken - to a different hospital on the other side of Lisbon. The well-meaning bystander had assumed she’d be taken to the nearest hospital, when actually she was taken to the hospital with emergency obstetrics and paediatric ICU. It took us about another hour through traffic to get there. The worst journey of my life.
We eventually arrived in the busy waiting room of Urgência and as we were impatiently waiting to talk to reception, I noticed nursing staff eyeing us and quickly averting their eyes. As reception took Holly’s details I went and spoke to a nurse, asking her where my daughter was. She couldn’t tell me anything but her eyes were bloodshot and she was gentle and kind. We were taken out of the waiting room and into a quiet area, where we were told someone would come and talk to us shortly. A woman came, a doctor I think, and took us to another area. She told us that she hadn’t been here when Holly came in, but that she knew that Holly was currently in the operating theatre. She said the surgeon would come and speak to us as soon as he was able. She told us that we needed to be strong. I said ‘For Holly, or for the baby?’ and she said ‘For both.’
She said we needed to wait and we needed to eat, and she brought us some terrible soup which tasted of wall paper paste.
Eventually a man came. He was middle aged and in scrubs and he introduced himself. He was the consultant obstetrician. This was the moment when we were going to be told if Holly was dead or alive. I remember clearly the sheer terror of it causing that sphincter-relaxing sensation when you think you’re actually going to shit yourself. This is how I remember the conversation dialogue:
Doctor ‘I’m afraid the baby is dead.’
Me: ‘And Holly?’
Doctor: ‘She’s stable at present, she’s lost a lot of blood, and is hypothermic. The uterus was ruptured. I’ve managed to salvage the uterus although she’s lost an ovary and tube. She’s gone to CT now to look for other injuries.
One of us: Will she be OK?
Doctor: I hope so. I think so.
Angus: Was it a boy or a girl?
Doctor: A boy. I’m sorry.
I’m sure more was said than that, but I can’t remember. He did ask if she had any other children. At some point I found out that the uterus ruptured and the baby was outside of the uterus, dead. And that there was an imprint of Holly’s spinal cord on the back of her uterus. And that the presence of the baby saved Holly’s life. But I can’t remember exactly when I learned that information.
Then we had to wait again before being taken down to ICU to see her. We were in an alcove in Urgência at this point (there was no ‘Relatives Room’). I phoned Richard (who I’d been keeping updated) and told him about the baby, but that Holly was still alive. César was now with him. Then I had an overwhelming urge to phone my sister. I became very upset saying the words of what had happened out loud, and started crying hysterically. A nurse came and ushered us out of urgência and into the main hospital reception.
Eventually someone came and took us downstairs to ICU. In the corridor outside ICU were two GNR waiting to talk to us. They didn’t know the baby had died and they seemed upset when we told them. They needed Holly’s name and details. They told us that she’d been hit by a lorry into another vehicle and that no-one else was injured. As we were standing talking to them in the dark corridor, some nearby double doors opened and out came a cavalcade of several people pushing a trolley with drip stands and blood bags and catheters and neck collar and blocks and a glimpse of Holly’s deathly pale intubated profile. ‘HOLLY! HOLLY!’ we wailed, but they wouldn’t let us follow her directly into ICU. An ICU doctor came to speak to us. He explained that her immediate problems were hypovolaemic shock and the resultant hypothermia. We wouldn’t know the results of her CT until the following day. Either way she was to be kept in an induced coma for the next critical 48hours at least.
They let us in individually, for a minute each only. She was pale yellow, waxy, lifeless and cold to touch. She looked dead. We all got to kiss her, whisper to her that we loved her so so SO much and we’d be back very soon, and that Frida was ok, and squeeze her icy hand. Then we had to drive home.
I was so relieved that Holly was at least alive, but still so terrified. The first 48 hours are critical but deaths from trauma can also occur days or weeks later, from sepsis and multi-organ failure. I chose to keep this to myself. It can be difficult being a doctor. It’s good to think about all the things that could go wrong, unless the patient is your child. You can know too much.
All I remember of that night was the darkness, the hugging, wondering how we could bear it, wandering around the house at 5am and randomly meeting Grace, then Richard in the kitchen, zombies.
The next day, pretending to be upbeat for Frida, waiting in the side room in ICU praying she was still alive, being told yes, she’s alive, but she has a broken pelvis, a broken back, multiple broken ribs and a collapsed lung. (And fractures of all the metatarsals in her right foot, diagnosed much later.) Then seeing her for a few minutes, and her skin being warm and her colour being better and although still unconscious, looking alive, at least. Kissing her and telling her how much I love her. How much everybody loves her.
The next day they woke her up and it was the beginning of the end of our nightmare, and the end of the beginning of Holly’s.
And that’s all I have to say on this anniversary, except, to quote Holly, ‘Love as hard as you can’.
