“Olive’s ill.” 

We laughed. Of course she was. We had just left her for the first time in months, were six hours away by coach in Cardiff, our hands clasped around cold pints, the pair of us framed by a steaming window edged with fairy lights struggling to emit their low yellow against the day. It was seven weeks until Christmas.

She was ill but she was fine. A cough, noticeable for its rasp and rattle, a chest-clearing thing you could hear upstairs. It has worsened since we left but honestly she’s fine. Happy, herself, playing. No need to worry, or come home. Enjoy the gig. 

We got back the next day. Beth’s mom admitted she soft-balled it slightly so as not to spoil our trip. Olive was struggling a bit now though. The cough was constant and her chest was rising and falling rapidly. She looked off, alabaster, her big brown eyes underscored with a smudge of tired black skin, like a linebacker’s. She was happy to see us though, showed us a new toy, generally looked like she had a winter cold that could be cured by Calpol and time. She lay snug in a red fuzzy onesie decorated many times over with Santa’s face. We’d give it another day, didn’t want to be those people who took up time and resources for every headache, wheeze, sniffle. In-between bouts of coughing, Olive sang along to Paw Patrol, Chase forever on the case.

A day later, the emergency department at the Children’s. Beth had taken her to the GP, who sent her straight to A&E with a referral and an imploration: Go now.

They didn’t like her numbers, her vitals, most worrying of which was her blood oxygen, which was well below the requisite percentage. They assured us that this was likely just the stress of the situation x the fact that the oximeter had to be wrapped around Olive’s toe because she would not offer her finger for long enough to get the desired read. They assured us it would level out soon.

Olive was irritable, dazed, combative. She didn’t like being touched at the best of times. Now a drove of strangers in odd clothes were lining up to poke and prod her, trying their best to assuage, asking what cartoons she liked, what her favourite toys were, sweets, who she liked best at nursery. The look of puzzlement on her face in the confusing place of wires and scrubs and bleeping machines, all white, bright white like we were inside of a bone, will never leave me. She made no noise except the one noise, the constant cry-scream that pled: please leave me alone. As for words, it was one broken sentence, the three sounds she would say on repeat, that week’s leitmotif, which she tried so hard to bargain us with, thinking it would put an end to her harassment: Olive Sleep Now. 

In the room — the first of many rooms we would see and know and never forget during that week in November — we had to give her a ventilated inhaler to open up her airway so that the doctors could get a better read on her. I say we because it was literally we. Mom, you pin her down, Dad, you hold her head while we strap this to her mouth and fire the inhaler’s air into her throat through a plastic tube shaped like a rocket. Olive loved rockets and I was not Dad, not technically, maybe not ever, but I was Dad at that moment, keeping the inhaler’s rocket’s vulcanised lip secured to Olive’s own biting lips while holding her head tight, too tight, too tight to ever hold a head. But they told me that I had to and so I spidered my hand on top of it with my long bicep lightly across her throat at the same time, as if I was preparing to open some tough tropical fruit, tear its dome off to get at the sweet flesh inside when really I was holding Olive, my then-daughter, in a violent grip more suitable to wrestling.

That lasted fifteen minutes. Then there was a vaporising mask that helped Olive suck down good wet air to further open up her chest, which was shallowly collapsing at an exaggerated speed. (They thought they might have to sedate her.) Eventually, an iPad showing Bluey that could be swung in a parabola over the bed by a fat heavy hinge was hung above her face and Olive looked at the screen for long enough for the doctors to complete their tests. For some reason, I thought we were done. We’d be home in an hour with antibiotics for her nasty chest infection, which we were told was the hospital’s chief condition at this time of year. It really was nothing to worry about, poor thing. 

We were sent to the observation ward, no longer in our own bit, separated from other crying toddlers only by a railed curtain that scratched along its tracks and didn’t completely breach the rail’s curved corner, leaving always a slice of hot hospital light on the wall behind the bed. I was hosting a writer’s drop-in and Beth encouraged me to go: it’s round the corner, it means a lot, we’ll be home before you.

I went; it was a success. The whole business of books felt blissfully slight after a morning of sneak-crying in hand-railed hospital toilets because my little best mate had cables draped all over her, suspended above her head, holding her there like a puppet (I had tried to keep it together like Beth, who by now was well locked in to Mom mode, an astonishing and selfless act of clear-eyed pragmatism unavailable to those outside of Olive’s bloodline). I didn’t tell anyone what was happening, delivered my thoughts on how best to get published, and walked back to the hospital expecting the observation period to be over.

Instead, we were moved to a ward. It was midnight before we were led there. Banks of square light lit up the four curtained quadrants, one for each patient. In the centre of the ceiling, a glass cube veined with thick fluorescent tubes which changed colour every couple of minutes in slow disco. The cube gave the room — known on the ward as The Annexe — a cosiness it did not deserve. 

Above Olive’s bed were oxygen tanks slid into flush hollows within the wall, like missiles on a U-boat. One of these tanks was now aiding her breathing. Without it her sats dropped too far below 95%, the minimum required for a healthy human at sea level. Because Olive was clearly ill (as in, a cold had precipitated this stay and had led to what everyone still assumed was a chest infection), the nurses allowed 92% to be her baseline, and rigged her vital signs monitor to alarm whenever her sats dropped below this. It would become a familiar refrain. 

On her monitor there was a transparent image of the human body, a bit like a bust, on which you could see colour-coded representations of the brain and heart and lungs and liver. Apart from the many instances throughout the day were she was twisted around or had to have her temperature taken — wherein a natural spike incurred — Olive’s heart was green; we were thankful we didn’t have to worry about that. 

But her lungs, without supplementary oxygen, were a pulsing yellow, threatening red — upon which the machine would start its incessant ping as her sats fell through the high 80s, down into 85, -4, -3, ever descending until one of us would hold the oxygen mask close to Olive’s face and watch as the numbers climbed and the colours, like the cube in the ceiling, changed. As soon as the sats hit 92%, the alarm would stop and, abetted by her hissing mask, Olive’s lungs would transmute back into safe and solid green.

Though not for long. It soon became clear that Olive would need the oxygen constantly rather than to have intermittent blasts administered when her numbers necessitated it. This was a problem because she would not wear the mask. Indeed, Olive’s resilience and willpower, so hopeful to behold — and promising for the future — was as this stage the biggest barrier to her getting better. She fought everything. This was common, of course it was, but eventually even the nurses began to remark on Olive’s especially powerful desire not to be fucked with. She did not push us away when we tried to strap a mask to her face, tape tubes to her cheeks, feed her gritty medicine through a fat and ominous syringe, see. No, she slapped, kicked, butted, bit. She ripped things from herself, threw them, screamed, tore at her temples in demonic indignation. Understand: this was no bratty refusal, a case of not listening, basically being three. This was inborn reaction, an acute stress response; Olive sensed a threat to her survival and threw hands to counter it. Looking back, it was beautiful. 

At the time, however, it was like she was prolonging the pain. Not on purpose, like, but we could just not get through to her that if she swallowed the medicine or wore the mask she would get better and we could go home, the place she most desperately wanted to be (Olive home now please?). If she continued, the nurses would have to intervene a little more forcefully. For now, though, they were happy to let us rest the oxygen mask on the twist of her collarbone while she dozed. If she continued to spit out the medicine and lock her jaw so that we couldn’t shoot it in, however, it might have to be delivered intravenously — but again, this was not a huge concern. In general, no one seemed too worried. She needed some strength back, some amoxicillin in her system, some oxygenated sleep. When the next morning the doctor did his rounds and said that Olive looked much better, was clearly getting enough of the drugs, could be home before we knew it, it was like a door to something had been booted down and through the splintery gap came the air we’d been gasping for, demulcent and cool.

That night I went to the chapel on the ward. Christmas lights and stained-glass windows, flickering candles, no breeze, heavy heat. In the corner, donated gifts, an old bale-arm crate filled with tins and packets, ready for the foodbank. I flicked through the visitation book, left a message of my own, thanking not God but something similar that Olive was going to be okay. I looked at what other people had written in there. Please pray for my son; My daughter, she is very sick; Dear Jesus, please give ——— the strength to come back. She loves nothing more that smiling and laughing. Just one more chance to see and hear it. Love, Dad xxx. My resolve buckled and I cried like I hadn’t for years beneath the high and watching windows.

Olive deteriorated the next day. We knew by her lack of conflict — she hadn’t eaten for days, was drinking a thimble of water an hour; it had all caught up with her. She let us strap the mask to her face without fuss. When the nurses fed the drugs and fluids into a painful catheter beneath her knuckle, it barely registered. She looked down in drunk bemusement, held up her hands, bandaged now like a boxer’s, muttered something unintelligible. We missed her stubbornness and began to fear what its absence indicated. When after a day of being fed what she needed intravenously did not produce any improvement — her sats were only hovering at 92% despite the now constant flow of oxygen; her breathing was so speedy and rhythmic it looked like she was doing a belly dance — her situation was escalated.1

First, we were taken to give Olive an X-ray. This was waved away initially, there was no need, it was — after all, time and again, always — just a chest infection. Except now maybe it wasn’t.

The radiology department was on the other side of the hospital. Getting there was a farce. Our nurse was wheeling Olive’s fluids and directing us through thick fire doors which she had to hold open with her hips as we all squeezed through. I carried a transportable oxygen kit which had required a whole new hook up in terms of tubes and cables, coiled now around our nurse’s shoulder like a rock-climber’s rope while I penguin-stepped along with her carrying a tank she promised would explode if dropped. Behind us, Beth held a shivering Olive to her chest. She’d been in bed for nearly four days. Now, in the new panelled light of the corridor, she looked spectral, see-through. In the lift’s mirror she looked small and scared. In the X-ray room she looked like she was dying.

Once inside, Olive had to take her shirt off and sit in a plastic chair cocked sideways against a Disney themed wall. That was the first time I felt truly terrified. You could count her ribs from a distance. The little soft cask of her stomach had completely caved in. Her arms, skinny anyway, were thin as wheel spokes. Would it be gauche to say I thought of Gaza? After two years of seeing images of starving children in Palestine, the sight of Olive skeletal against a wall looking up in pleading terror was too much.

For days she had only wanted Beth, Mommy. But Beth had to take off her leaden radiation vest in a special seclusion zone and so the radiographer asked Olive if she wanted Daddy instead? She did, not Daddy but TayTay, her forever name for me since she could speak. I picked her up and, with her top still off, held her heartbeat to mine. She clung to me like she’d never let go. The last time she had done that was when I took her swimming for the first time in France and she held on to my neck in sheer elation at the water and the way it lapped at her waist. That was the closest I’d ever felt to anyone, her little giggles of disbelieving joy one of the few moments of actual innocence I have ever been witness to. I carried her back the whole way like that. And then it happened.

After four days of minimal attention outside of the hourly nurses’ observations, suddenly there were ten different members of staff from different departments in our partition, all wanting to get a look at Olive. Where previously every conversation had been an open and flowing chat with the staff as they went about their sequences, now doctors in plain-clothes were whispering to each other, conferring, quite clearly concerned. It had been decided that Olive needed a greater level of care and would be moved to the High Dependency Unit as a consequence. There wasn’t time for any questions.

Once there, Olive was placed on an Airvo machine, which delivered humidified high-flow respiratory gasses through a fat, vacuum-like tube. Turbo oxygen. If after a few hours on it there was no noticeable improvement in either her sats or her breathing, we were told she may have to be ventilated in the ICU, which I knew from my constant bedside research was a huge and often fatal risk for toddlers with pneumonia — that word now finally used with conviction. More than that, the X-ray showed that Olive had a pneumothorax, deadly air trapped between the lungs and chest cavity, the cause of her inhuman breathing, like that of a small injured bird. If the Airvo didn’t also clear that, there would be further complications. For the first time someone pulled us aside to state the seriousness of Olive’s condition.

After a few hours on the Airvo, Olive sats had showed no improvement despite the machine’s flow operating at full capacity (100). It wasn’t looking good. Beth’s Mom was with us now, distraught — she’d lost a young daughter before she had Beth; I can’t imagine what seeing her grandchild lifeless and small on a big hospital bed brought back for her.

For the very first time, Beth broke down too. She had so far showed a resilience and devotion that I hadn’t thought possible outside of things far away, like fiction. But now we had answers, diagnoses, outcomes. And it didn’t look good. When I left that night — the toughest departure of my life — I genuinely feared I would never see Olive alive again. I kissed her on her forehead, told her I loved her, wobbled out of the ward in a chimeric state, like I was floating above myself, watching, so sure I was witnessing the end of one life and the start of another.

I left my phone on loud, tried to sleep, was just drifting off when it pinged. The staff had decided on letting the Airvo do its thing overnight before making any final decisions on next steps. Well into the night, it had worked. Her sats were sitting in the high nineties. Her chest had calmed, rising and falling more naturally, no longer the jackhammer it had been. When I got there the next morning, Olive was sitting up. She recognised me, said TayTay in something that wasn’t a whisper, held up a sequined dinosaur that my sister had brought in for her — rub one way and it was green; reverse your hand and it gleamed silvery-gold. She even had chips on the way, could you believe. When they came and for the first time in a week Olive fed herself some food, Beth and I broke down. The change was staggering. We felt like someone had died only to get a call that said sorry, mistaken identity, you relatives are alive and well.

As the hours went by the Airvo continued. I could’ve kissed it. Olive’s sats were maintaining at 95% as the nurses began to lower the machine’s flowrate. At one point she hit a sats score of 100% while the Airvo was only operating at 20. Her colour came back. She became aware of the bruising on her hands from the catheter, attempted to unwrap the strange bandages, rid herself of the annoyance. She asked for a pink donut, for another cuddly buddy (every day we got her a new Paw Patrol character from the absurd shop outside).

We weren’t completely safe yet, though. It was found that Olive initially had Flu A, the root cause of everything we were seeing. We were placed in a sickbay and had to mask up, Covid-style. She wouldn’t be allowed home until she could breathe independently of any artificial oxygen. That took a couple more days, during which time she had to learn to walk again — her legs were architectureless after a week spent sedentary. Within another day she was doddering about the room, laughing at herself as she bumped into the bed and bin and sink unit. Silly Olive. On the day we were discharged, I was using the bed’s positional controls to pretend we were on a rollercoaster, all loops and bends, complete havoc until it stopped and we could breathe again.

That was two months ago. O is herself again even if Beth and I are not. But we’re getting there. Me and Olive just made a snow pizza in the garden using the underside of a fluorescent yellow frisbee; later her and Beth will watch Frozen under an abundant grey blanket while I sit next to them and type this. You gave us the fright of our lives, one doctor kept saying, after we were in the clear. I hear her say it every hour, thankful now that it’s only an anecdote.

Footnotes

Taylor is the co-curator of STORIE, an event which upholds the Birmingham Literary Scene by offering live reading of prose from writers both local and national. If you’re keen to explore Birmingham’s literary scene and its future, it’s a great event to – find out more via their instagram.