By Sunday night, Alice is hooked up to an oxygen tank and an intravenous drip. A spaghetti dinner of wires and tubes and lines connect her to a jumble of monitors that purr and bleep and pulse. Her head is bandaged; her arm set in a plaster cast.
The family watch from behind a wide glass window as inside the room a nurse checks the machines, changes the IV drip and makes notes on a clipboard.
‘Everything went as well as we could have hoped,’ Dr Fleet is telling them. ‘The bleed has been stopped, there are no areas of pressure and of course the broken arm has been set; we have done everything we can for now. The rest is up to Alice.’
‘When will she come round?’ Laura Beech asks. ‘How long until the anaesthetic wears off?’
‘The anaesthetic should be out of her system soon,’ Dr Fleet says. ‘But as for when she might regain consciousness, it’s impossible to say. In other circumstances, Alice would have woken up by now, but as you know, that hasn’t happened. With a head injury like this, coma is not uncommon. It can last for a few minutes or hours, or it can last – well, very much longer than that.’
Mark Beech looks up, his face bleached of colour.
‘Are you saying that she could be unconscious for days?’ he demands. ‘Or weeks? Months? Years?’
Dr Fleet sighs. ‘I’m saying that we have no way of knowing.’
‘But, I don’t understand,’ Laura says. ‘The operation was a success; you’ve said so, doctor. So surely she’ll be fine?’
‘The human brain is a complex organ,’ the doctor explains. ‘There is a great deal we have yet to learn about it. In cases of head injury and trauma, the mind can shut down for a short time, even though there may be no obvious physical cause. We don’t yet fully understand why this happens; perhaps it is a way of dealing with the pain, or allowing all the body’s resources to focus on healing.’
‘Like sleep,’ Laura says, softly. ‘She’s sleeping …’
‘There are significant differences,’ Dr Fleet says. ‘At the moment, Alice is not responding well to external stimulus. Her breathing has been steady, and we are hoping to detach the ventilator shortly, but in every other respect her body is functioning at its lowest level. The coma may last for a few hours, a few days, or much longer, just as you have said. At this stage, we don’t know, but from a physical viewpoint there is no reason to believe Alice is not capable of making a full recovery. There is no longer any physical cause for the coma, so we are hoping she will regain consciousness in due course.’
‘Can she hear us?’ Laura asks. ‘Does she know we’re here?’
‘I can’t tell you that for certain,’ Dr Fleet replies. ‘Some coma patients can hear and understand what is going on around them, so by all means talk to Alice. Speak to her as if she were listening. For all we know, she may be.’
The doctor moves on to see another patient, another family, and Mark and Laura Beech go back into the ICU room to be with Alice. The lights have been dimmed and in the half-light, if you took away the ventilator, the drips, the constant flashing and bleeping of the monitors, you might imagine that Alice was just sleeping. She looks so peaceful, Laura thinks.
You would never guess that she’s drifting, lost in another world.