The hospital was a ferry and a long drive from home. So the situation presented a logistical challenge at first, and then became a new way of living. 

For a while I travelled back and forth with my other son. We were given a room to use in Ronald McDonald House in the grounds of the hospital, where we stayed among fragments of other families.

Then between December and March I was with him in the hospital the whole time. Wherever he was, I stayed. In intensive care, in the high dependency unit, and in the surgical wards. 

His condition was so volatile that leaving felt like a risk, even for a short while. Every day was a new situation, with new information, and new decisions to make. 

There was usually a fold-out bed for me. Sometimes there was only a chair. I ate and slept when I could, and became absorbed into the rhythms of the wards.  

I was most relaxed when we were in intensive care, where observations, noises and lights were continuous, through day and night. 

On the ward, I felt we were further from help. The ward rounds were only once a day, the observations only every few hours. At night, I worried about sleeping for too long, so I set alarms for myself to carry out my own observations.

As his condition began to improve and we were able to disconnect him, I’d take him out of the ward in a wheelchair wrapped in blankets. A lap of the hospital grounds gave us something different to look at. 

In the evenings when things quietened down we closed the curtain and watched football on my laptop. Or boxsets when there was no football. Ripley, Sherlock, The Crown.

As the weeks passed, I worked out the small comforts of this new reality: where the quieter corners of the hospital were at the weekend, where I could get something different to eat, and how to get my clothes washed. For exercise I would take the stairs back up to the 9th floor, 2 steps at a time.