The 50 List – A Father’s Heartfelt Message to his Daughter: Anything Is Possible. Nigel Holland

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СКАЧАТЬ looked confused now. ‘What’s a phobia?’

      ‘An irrational fear,’ Matt supplied. ‘Like when you’re really scared of snakes or spiders –’

      ‘There is nothing irrational about being scared of snakes and spiders,’ Amy chipped in. ‘Not if they’re cobras or rattlesnakes or black widows or something …’

      ‘And yours is needles?’ Ellie asked. ‘Needles being poked in your arm?’ She demonstrated on herself for me. ‘And then sucking all your blood out …’ she added, warming to the idea now. ‘A bit like they’re vampires?’

      Which wasn’t the best image to be starting the day with, frankly. Twilight has an awful lot to answer for.

      ‘Not like vampires,’ said Lisa, presumably seeing I was turning green now. ‘Nothing at all like vampires, in fact. No, it’s done by nurses, and they’re very, very gentle. Dad will hardly feel a thing, because they’re also very good at it …’

      But still a lot like vampires, even so.

      * * *

      It’s not surprising that I have a phobia of needles. From the age of five, and throughout my childhood, they were coming at me from all angles.

      My first foray into a world that would become painfully familiar happened just a few weeks after my visit to the GP, when a letter arrived requesting my presence at an appointment that had been made for me at Guy’s Hospital in London.

      Being so small still, I didn’t have much idea what was happening. Though I’m sure Mum and Dad told me, I have no memory of making a connection between my bendy toes and the trip to the big city. Going to London was, and would continue to be, synonymous with only one thing for me: a trip to go and visit my Auntie Betty.

      My aunt and uncle lived in a sprawling housing estate just off Abbey Road, and I’d go and stay with them at least once every summer. I loved going to visit Auntie Betty and Uncle Gerry. Together they ran a successful stock car racing team, which made them terribly exciting to be with. They would travel all around the country, to race their car in the national championships, and we’d set off to whichever venue we were headed for in an enormous coach that they’d converted from the standard passenger variety into something that, in its day, would not have seemed out of place in a Formula 1 paddock. It carried the stock car on the back and the inside had been adapted so that we could not only sit in it but also sleep in it.

      Trips to Auntie Betty’s were the genesis of what would become a lifelong passion for motorsport, and from a very early age, one of the highlights of travelling to London was the point when we’d go through a long tunnel on the A4, and I got that tingle of anticipation, knowing we’d soon be there.

      This was different, though. And the big difference that sticks in my mind was that rather than end up at Auntie Betty’s, as usual, we arrived at a scary place, full of incredibly high buildings. In reality not so enormous – hardly the Manhattan skyline – but to little me, they seemed so tall that they blocked out the sun. There was noise, too – so much noise. So many car engines, and bus engines – so many horns blaring all at once, as if all the traffic on the roads was really angry.

      And barking. I clearly recall the noise of dogs barking. Strange, looking back – we were nowhere near Battersea – but that’s always stuck in my mind.

      I also have a vivid mental picture of the inside of the hospital. And an equally clear one of the great men I was about to meet. I had been summoned to see two eminent physicians of the day: a brace of consultants called the McArdle brothers, who were leaders in the field of neuroscience.

      My main impression, not surprisingly for those days, was of brown. Unlike the clinically white environments you find in most modern hospitals, the office of the McArdle brothers was a symphony of dark wood: heavy wooden filing cabinets – the contents of each drawer identified with its own white, handwritten label; dark-wood chairs – one for each of them, plus a further three ordinary, dark, school chairs for me, Mum and Dad; and a hefty dark-wood desk with an inlaid leather top. Looking back, the only thing missing from the tableau was a couple of those globe-shaped glass bottles full of brightly coloured water whose function was, and still is, a mystery.

      Also in keeping with the fashion of the time, the McArdle brothers – looking rather frightening in their matching white coats – puffed merrily on cigarettes before mounting their attack. I had come to be investigated and they went at it with gusto, putting me through a series of increasingly scary tests. I was prodded and poked, inspected and injected, and at the end of it, the brothers reached their professional conclusion. Mum and Dad had been right: there was definitely something wrong with me. I had some sort of hereditary muscle-wasting condition, apparently, and to be sure they would need to do some tests.

      Everything changed for my parents that day. And, looking back, I’m not surprised; it must have come as such a shock. Though the condition was apparently hereditary, there was no history of it in either family, meaning that it must be the result of some random mutant gene.

      We returned home, and while I carried on doing all the things little boys did, largely oblivious to my ‘condition’, they could only look on as my muscles became progressively weaker and – having no experience or medical knowledge of what was wrong with me – worry about what the future might hold for me.

      Not that my childhood, from that day, was really normal. Though Mum and Dad never allowed me to dwell on whatever it was that was causing my problems (if I became tired after playing, then I rested, but they never stopped me doing anything), it increasingly impacted on my life. This was mostly because life began to be punctuated by interruptions: an endless round of hospital visits, while they tried to better understand what was causing my symptoms. There was obviously no choice but to put up with it all, but hospitals – and everything that seemed to happen within them – soon became the bane of my life. I disliked all of it – in fact, ‘dread’ probably isn’t too strong a word here. What child wants to be in and out of hospital, dragged away from his friends and whatever fun things they might be up to? I particularly hated the seemingly endless in-patient visits to the Hillingdon Hospital and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Queen Square. Both places soon filled me with anxiety and fear. And much of the reason for that was that I soon learned I couldn’t trust them. They would say one thing – normally a nice, reassuring thing – and then the exact opposite would happen.

      A particularly grim time was at the hospital in Queen Square, where, aged seven, I had to have some nerve induction tests. These tests, which I had to have a number of times, involved an electrode being attached to my ankle, and a needle, with a wire attached, put into my thigh. They would then pass a small electric current through the electrode, so that they could assess the strength of the signal in my peripheral nerves by picking up the signal in the wire.

      I think I sort of understood why they needed to do it, but what I never got my head around was what they said every time.

      ‘Now, Nigel, this won’t hurt,’ they’d confidently assure me. ‘All that will happen is that your leg muscle will sort of “jump”.’

      Which it duly did. But what I never seemed to be able to get across to them (and how nice it is to be able to make this point here) was that it was my leg, and actually it did hurt!

      As I was so young, and an ‘inmate’, which was sort of how it worked back then, the doctors would gather around my bed and talk over me and about me, and, without my parents around to explain what was happening, my only source of information about what horrors might be inflicted next came СКАЧАТЬ