The Cardiac Team forgot I was there. The man lying in the bed in the Intensive Care Unit was dying. All eight of them sprang into action. I was transfixed in horror. A young nurse grabbed me and hustled me out and into a small anteroom. I felt nothing. The man was my husband and I'd seen him go blue.

Minutes later: " I'm the Registrar" said the young Asian woman " If he had survived he would probably have been brain damaged and not able to live the kind of life he was used to"

I had no idea what she meant. Is he dead? Nobody has said that he is! Who is she? What is a Registrar? I thought they married you. I'd been married twice, both times by a Registrar. I was confused.

The young good looking man from the Team, with his pager and name badge, came into the small bare room. "Come back into the Unit" he said, " Your husband has survived a massive coronary!" The Registrar gently touched my arm.

I returned, back into the overheated, depressing Cardiac Intensive Care Unit. He was alive. He smiled at me and ruffled the hair of a young nurse, and asked for a cup of tea. The whole Team had tears in their eyes. The young nurses openly wept. They were all in their casual clothes. Young people you'd see in a bar, in a club, on the beach and not realise they were part of an exhausted dedicated team of Doctors and Nurses who were on Cardiac call eighteen hours a day. Committed to saving lives. You can't plan a heart attack. You don't get booked in for a bed!

I sat with my husband until dawn. He was forty-nine years old. An ever-caring man, he told me to drive home carefully, feed the cat, bath, have a change of clothes. I'd been in the Hospital for three days as he'd been admitted to Hospital with chest pains. An emergency. He had just survived a coronary that should in reality have killed him.

I sat quietly and spoke to the Specialist. He told me my husband had been born with a congenital heart disease. It was enlarged. It's a condition that's detected at birth these days. He was a War baby.

I drove home. The only answer to his condition was a heart and lung transplant. Suitable donor required: Firstly though he had to get strong enough to consider that as an option. Heart bypass surgery was the first step.

We both knew he would never be strong enough to survive a bypass, let alone a transplant.

In the dark, quiet solitude of the night, I planned a way of mortgaging the house to raise the money to buy a new heart and lungs. Forge his signature. Yes! That's what I'll do. We can manage wheelchairs in here. Anything to save him, give him a life, buy him a life, whatever quality of life, some life is better than no life at all.

My husband survived two more days. Until the last second of his life he remained full of hope. He wouldn't sleep. He savoured every waking moment. We planned a break to Lamorna Cove in Cornwall when he left hospital. We both knew it wouldn't happen.

I'd sit by his bed, and when he seemed to drift, which he fought, as he feared he'd not waken, I talked into his ear. About the life we'd had together, private moments, our future. He'd squeeze my hand.

He had those two days. If it had been two years, twenty years in that condition, who was suffering the most? I cannot imagine putting an end to that because of what I was enduring; because it was inconvenient to me; how can anybody decide to terminate another person's life because they didn't like to see them suffer?

He was comparatively young. He was talented; a chef; an accomplished artist. He could have painted in a wheelchair. The deprivation of oxygen to his brain hadn't affected his brainpower. If it had, so what? There was waking up in the morning to look forward to. The next Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter………but it was not to be.

The attic I now use as my workspace was his studio. Evidence of his painting is all around me, including three beautiful artists palettes covered in thick oil paint and hanging on a beam as a tribute to him and the paintings he never did.

© Mornev 2000