When Critical Illness Strikes

“There By The Grace Of God Go I”

The winter of 2016–17 felt long. I was run down, battling one cold after another, and the daily grind of feeding and milking cows had taken its toll.

Here we were, the beginning of the season which had gone well 500 acres silaged, three pits sheeted up, and the finish line was in sight. It was only May 15th, 2017, with just one pit left to fill and 118 acres down ready.

As we stood in the field that beautiful May morning someone said, “You’ve lost weight.”

“What do you expect with all this to contend with?” I replied, half-joking.

I had had a severe headache all week while pushing grass into the pit, but the loads just kept coming as the self-propelled forager wolfed it down. That morning I’d squeezed in a bone marrow lumbar puncture, and now, as well as a sore head, my back felt like I had been jabbed with a blackthorn splinter.

The last load came in at 11.pm I pushed it up, drove straight out of the gate, and went home to bed thankful that the next day’s hospital appointment meant I’d dodge sheeting up.

Despite being exhausted, sleep never came. Profuse sweating and pain like I’d never known kept me awake it felt as though a sword had gone in under my ribs and out through my back.

“You need to go to hospital,” Jenny insisted.

“I’m not sitting in A&E for eight hours in this pain!” I snapped.

Jenny called the hospital. Would I come in if there was a bed? Reluctantly, I agreed with some relief. That relief vanished when I arrived on Ward 30, where the walls were lined with Macmillan leaflets and the sickest-looking people I’d ever seen. “That won’t be me” I thought. How wrong I was.

Within 24 hours I was having chemotherapy and blood transfusions. My best hope was a sibling donor bone marrow transplant. My sister was only seven days into a holiday in Italy. When she left, I had been “fine.” We agreed a blanket ban on social media so as not to spoil her trip and waited anxiously for her return.

The odds of a sibling match were four to one. I had only one sister and she had to get home safely first.

Of course, the farm still had to run. Cows needed milking, bills needed paying. We held a meeting of “the board” Dad would manage the farm, Jenny would look after Dad, the kids, and everything else, leaving me to focus on my new number one job, survival.

We broke the news to the children that night in the family room. They were 14, 12, and 9. It was May 18th.

One of my first decisions was to keep a daily journal so the children would one day understand what had happened and how their dad had gone from working the fields to lying in a hospital bed almost overnight.

Saturday 20th May 2017

Alarm went off at 5 a.m. Must remember to cancel it. Woke with a headache and sore feet probably because the bed’s too short. Had a Coca-Cola and some morphine for breakfast. Rock and roll.

Car has a slow puncture I rang the garage to sort it for Jenny. Ben’s got rugby tonight, the girls have a riding lesson. Set up Power of Attorney and got milk test results by text good result, let Dad know. Jenny turned up later with a fridge and a fan. GOD SEND!

And so, it went on —the first two or three weeks almost completely confined to bed. My sister took her donor tests on May 31st, but it would take weeks to find out the results.

I was now on a rollercoaster journey I’d never planned to take because this only happens to other people, right?

Monday 26th June 2017

Early evening, unexpectedly, Dr. Jones, my consultant, called in for a chat. She was on call, working late. Then she dropped the bombshell: Kate was a match!!

The raw emotion of that moment will stay with me forever. A massive mountain to climb but my tent was pitched at base camp.

Lessons from the Journey

If I were to offer any advice, it would be this:

Trust your instincts. If you think something’s wrong, act just as you would with your livestock.

Keep a journal. Record the highs and lows. (I went on to fill five exercise books, dictating when I was too ill to write.)

Call in those favours. The right people come forward when you need them most.

And above all, put your family first.

On Christmas Eve 2017, I left hospital for the last time weak, battered, and unaware that it would take another seven years to truly get my life back.

But I was home for Christmas dinner. And in that moment, that was all that mattered.                  Phil Harding, Dairy Farmer