2 1GT Thursday February 2 2017 | the times
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Deborah Ross
Melania for Dr Who! She shouldget her chance in the Tardis After a stroke
Kate Allatt foundherself ‘locked in’.It was terrifyingand lonely, she tellsLucy Bannerman
Katie Hopkins Because sheknows everything and hasknown everything since timebegan and will know everythinginto all eternity. She will putthe Daleks right: “Exterminate,exterminate? I’ll show whichrace exterminates which raceround here. It isn’t personal.I’m just saying what everyoneis thinking.’’ Odds: no one’sfavourite, but there may bea fight to see who gets to shoother into orbit in a box.Mary Berry Old, experienced,good with jam. You just can’t gowrong with those qualities.Odds: 22/1Melania Trump Not such agreat leap from First Lady toFirst Time Lady — is it your firsttime, lady? If so we recommendFirst Time Lady Lites — but shewill have to withstand somefearsome encounters. TheSilurians. Ood. The MeddlingMonk. Davros. And the Master,who was driven insane afterlooking into the UntemperedSchism on Gallifrey, so is propernuts, but has regular-sized handsand, as of yet, has never said it’sOK to grab women by the pussy.“He is proper nuts but has regularhands? He won’t feel free to grabme by the pussy? I’m in,’’ she willlikely say. Odds: 2/1 (She willtime-travel to galaxies far, faraway where she will try todescribe The Donald, but will notbe believed, even by those funnylittle chaps with the faces thatmelt off like goo.)Mrs Tiggy-Winkle Historically,the Doctor has always been“prickly’’, so she may be a shoo-in.Odds: 7/1Idris Elba Just because youalways have to include him in anylist like this. Regardless. Odds: 15/1(To date, no sign of any “male
assistants” but Salman Rushdie isinterested, apparently. “I like theidea of not having to get round tomending a fence for 2,000 years,’’he has said.)
The BBC, it wouldappear, is underpressure toappoint a femaleDoctor now thatPeter Capaldi hasannounced he isto leave Doctor
Who. A Time Lady? Why not?Sounds rather like a sanitary
pad — is it your time, lady? —and, OK, the fact any womanwill get everything done bylunchtime may curtail thenarrative, but does that matter?(Personally, I have always foundDoctor Who takes a very loftyattitude to narrative.)And now everyone is weighing
in, including Harriet Harman,Labour’s former deputy, who hassaid not only should the Doctorbe female but also her assistantshould be a man so she could “tellhim what do’’. But I don’t know.As it stands, tell a man what to doand he thinks he has 2,000 yearsto do it, and then you go and givehim 2,000 years to actually do it?This is playing right into theirhands, surely. That fence is nevergoing to get mended now.Many names have been
mooted, with Olivia Colmanapparently favourite to be ourfirst Time Lady — “werecommend Time Lady Maxi forthose heavy flow days’’ — and nodoubt the suggestions will rumbleon until the BBC announces it’s
happened upon yet another whitemale: “We weren’t activelyseeking yet another white male,but looked him up and down, andsaw he was exactly what we wereafter! What are the chances?’’ But,in the meantime, here are theother female front-runners:Kirstie Allsopp A hot favouritesince she has the requisitebossiness and probably therequisite British colonial attitude(“so many monsters, so little time,’’she will sigh) and will refashionthe Tardis as a wraparound inbright florals before showing it toJane and Mike from Putney: “It’smuch bigger inside than it looks.Great storage.” Odds on being thenew Doctor: 5/1; Odds Jane andMike will buy: 50,000,000/1since they have decided to“think about it some more’’.(Christ on a bike, how manybold floral Tardises have peoplegot to be shown before they’llfinally make up their minds?)Princess Charlotte Dead cute.Odds: 40/1
pulse in my bunged-uphead. My cold has setoff a pain in my ears.My cold laughs in theface of Lemsip andNight Nurse andsimilar. But there areno nice colds, I hearyou say, as we haveestablished, but whatyou need to understandis this: whereas your“nasty’’ cold is actuallyjust a regular coldand you’d do best toman up, mine is not.Mine is awful. Mineis the worst coldever. Have we gotthat now?
composed of the whiteblood cells that wish toexpel the virus. (Icouldn’t find outwhether, if you didn’tproduce snot, the viruswould take you over.)The cough is the snotthat’s dripped down theback of your throat andinto your lungs, whichhave only one thing ontheir mind: “Out,damned mucus, out!’’My cold is certainly
no fun. My cold meansI have to prop myself upin bed at night tobreathe. My cold meansI can hear my own
cold remembered mybirthday with flowers!’’I have a cold and
have been looking intocolds. There are manyinteresting facts aboutcolds. Only higherprimates, for example,can get them. The coldvirus can exist outsideyour body but cannotmultiply. A cold alwaysstarts with that razor-blade-wedged-in-the-neck feeling becausethe immune systemstages its first fightbackby inflaming the throat.I could go on, and
will. The snot is
I have noted thatwhenever anyone gets acold they always say “Ihave a stinking cold’’ or“I have a really heavycold’’ or “I have a nastycold’’ as if there mightbe nice colds you couldget as in: “I have a nicecold and when we’rethrough, we’ve agreedwe will write.’’ Or: “My
GETTY IMAGES
My cold isterrible.Yours isn’t
Kate Allatt woke upfrom her medicallyinduced coma feelinggroggy and confused.She remembered themoments leading upto her stroke vividly,the way that a
stubborn headache had suddenlyseemed to spread inside her skull asher three children got ready forbathtime. She remembered the face ofthe junior doctor, who only hoursearlier had dismissed it as a migraineand sent her home from A&E. Shealso remembered the noise — “themost horrific noise I’ve ever heard”— which had sounded as thoughthere was a pneumatic drill that onlyshe could hear as the blood vesselsburst in her brain and her husbandspilt his cup of tea.“What’s happening to me?” she tried
to say, not realising that her soundsmade no sense.Three days later she awoke from the
coma to find that she could not move.Figures of doctors and nurses movedin and out of the room. Outside, in thefamily room down the corridor, herhusband was being told that she wouldprobably be better off dead. Shebecame aware of conversations takingplace around her, of voices speakingabout her, but never to her.She was locked in. The worst part of
it all was that she couldn’t rememberanyone ever really looking her in theeye, trying to see if she was still there.“I’d heard people sighing,” she says.
“They examined my feet, my feedingtube and the rest of my body, but themost upsetting thing was the amountof people who didn’t look into myeyes. I would spend all day staring atthe nurses, willing them to look at me.”They didn’t.For the next two weeks she battled
hallucinations and sleep deprivation,desperately trying to catch theattention of the next person to walkinto her eyeline to prove through thepower of her eyeballs alone that shewasn’t brain-dead — she was trapped.“I’d watch the nurses in the empty bay,drinking coffee, reading magazinesand think: ‘Please come in here, I’mthirsty, I’m scared. Please keep mecompany.’ It was like I was invisible.”Fear and desperation to see her
children kept her awake at night.During the day she was terrified thatshe’d fall asleep before the next roundof checks and miss her chance to makeeye contact with the next medic toexamine her above the neck.When her family came to visit she
would scream in silence as she listenedto staff briefing her husband on hercondition. “They would say thingslike: ‘She slept well, she has been
quite settled.’ I wanted to scream:‘Oh no I bloody well didn’t!’ ”Unable to move anything beyond a
single eyelid, her mind went intooverdrive. She hallucinated that thenurse “with the sinister smile” whocame every day to top up the brownfluid in her cannula was trying to killher. A book that she’d read in herbook club, The Guernsey Literary andPotato Peel Pie Society, also resurfaced.“I imagined that every day a girl was
waiting at the bottom of my bed. Shewould wheel my bed to Guernseywhere she made me watch her drinka latte, then she’d wheel me back tothe hospital. I was hallucinating, but itwas so real for me. I was so scared. Itwas like water torture.”Allatt was 39 at the time. Her life in
Sheffield up until that day in February2010 had raced along at the typicalpace of a working mother of three,ferrying her children, Woody, Harveyand India, then aged five, eight andten, between school, ice-skating andfootball. Her husband, Mark, workedin medical sales and was often awayfrom home. Long-distance runningwas her release from the stress.For her 40th birthday she had
planned to climb Kilimanjaro. Theholiday was all booked and paid for.Instead she lay in her hospital bed,staring at the clock on the wall, staringat her toes, her fingers, the deadweight of her body, willing it to move.She could feel touch, but had no way
of telling anyone how desperately sheneeded to hold her children. “All you
want to do as a mother is throw yourarms around them and tell them thatit’s going to be OK.” It was a furtheragony when her children did comebut were advised not to cuddle theirmother, “all trussed up like a turkeywith wires and tubes everywhere”.The shock was overwhelming for
her two oldest children — herdaughter sat by her bedside, but waspromptly sick. Her middle son didn’tspeak for the next two days. When heryoungest massaged her feet and felther hair Allatt wanted to shout for joy.It wasn’t until her three friends came
to visit that the breakthrough came.“My head was facing the door. WhenI saw them I wept silent tears. That’swhen they knew I was still inside.”At their next visit, they brought an
A4 piece of paper with a handwrittenA-Z. With Jackie pointing to the lettersand Alison and Anita studying theflutter of her eyelid, after 20 minutesshe managed to spell “sleep”. She wasexhausted. They all cried.Some who read the story this week
of the four German patients withlocked-in syndrome, who finallymanaged to make communicationthanks to new technology thateffectively reads their thoughts, mighthave been surprised to hear that theytold researchers they were “happy”.
When I wept,
New technologycan effectivelyread patients’thoughts
the times | Thursday February 2 2017 1GT 3
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Yo, Barry, still on for our boys’ nightout at Hooters? Lads on tour, eh?Havin’ it large. Whoo!Ah, about that. I’ve taken the libertyof tweaking the booking.
Tweaked — hahaha. Like yourstyle. That’s what I’d do to allthose tight T-shirted waitresses.No, I’ve changed the booking.We’re now going to Hoots.
I know, mate. Love the place.“You’ve never seen a rack likethis,” they say. Mental. It’s a punon ribs and . . .Yes, I got that. I’m afraid Hoots is anoffshoot of Hooters, but without theyoung women in skimpy clothes.
[Short silence] You almost hadme there. Wind-up merchant!I’m increasingly discomfited bythe objectification of women formale gratification.
Come again?I like the food, but not women havingto showcase their bodies while theyserve it.
Are you quite all right? You realisethat when people talk about likingthe hot baps they don’t mean abread basket?But that’s just it. I do.
Are you pulling my p . . .. . . That’s why they’ve opened Hootsfor the discerning chap who wantsto focus on his meal. There are maleservers as well as female ones. Innormal clothing.
Terrible idea. What does Hootersmean other than boobs? It’s abreastaurant.Well, we’re going and we’re goingto enjoy our chicken wings.
But no onegoes to aHooters jointfor the food.That’s likewatchinga porno filmfor thecharacterdevelopment.Actually, I dothat too. Hello?Hello? That’sodd. Thephone line’sgone dead.Carol Midgley
The lowdownHoot(er)s
The patients all have advanced formsof amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Theyare, in effect, completely locked in.Unlike Allatt they are unable even tomove their eyes.Their “happiness” doesn’t surprise
Allatt one bit. “That moment whenyou finally make a connection, I can’tdescribe the euphoria. It’s like everyChristmas, every birthday and everytime you’ve held your newborn in yourarms rolled into one. I thought: ‘Ohmy God, they can hear me.’ ”Her friends wept with her. “They
said: ‘We’ve got her back.’ Theyliterally became my voice.”That A4 sheet became her lifeline
to the outside world, but some nursesdisapproved. “They would tidy it away,keep it out of sight. They said thatwhen I started rehab it would be adifferent system so I would getconfused. That was so cruel.”It was a slow and frustrating process
for everyone. Her husband, sheremembers now with a laugh, was nota natural. Once when trying to tellhim she had leg cramps, he threwdown the board in frustration. “Hesaid: ‘Kate, there’s not a word thatbegins, L, E, G, C!’ At that pointI could have rammed that boardwhere the sun don’t shine.”She spent five months locked in.
With communication, cameconfidence — and hope.“I didn’t know back then about
neuroplasticity, or the physio termslike intense repetition, but if myright thumb raised an inch then I’dspend the next day making it risetwo inches. Once that moved I foundother fingers moved, until I could flipmy entire wrist over.”
Her biggest obstacle turned out tobe the low expectations of many of themedical professionals around her.“Many of them were so worried aboutgiving false hope that in doing so, theygave none at all. They quash all hope.”Consider, for example, the book that
the rehab nurses recommended Allattread, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.“Yes, it’s an inspirational book for‘normal’ people,” she says of thememoir by the French journalist andbon viveur Jean-Dominique Baubythat introduced the horrors of locked-in syndrome to the wider world. Hedied two days after its publication.“Motivational text? I don’t think so.“They were treating me as average,
but I wasn’t average. I was a runner.If I had been a Jeremy Kyle-watchingsofa surfer then I might have given up,but I didn’t. I just thought: ‘Sod you,I’m going to show you all.’ ”When consultants suggested moving
to a care home, her best friend tookher straight to the letter board. Shespelt out: “Stand by me.”
Allatt set her own goals. She went tothe gym she used to go to and beggedthe manager to let her use some of theweights. He went one better, havingseen his own father suffer a stroke,offering her his best physio and use ofthe gym free of charge. Within sixweeks she’d gone from a wheelchair towalking sticks. With another six shewas shuffling by herself.The suggestion that the new kitchen
in her home should be ripped out toinstall a bedroom downstairs, madeher determined to conquer the stairsherself. Her kitchen remains intact.She focused every fibre of her being
on being able to run again by the firstanniversary of her stroke: February 6,2011. It’s on YouTube for everyone tosee, a joyous “shuffle”, as she describesit. “Running was the goal that workedfor me, but everyone has their ownpassion. Some people improve, somepeople don’t improve as much, buteveryone should be encouraged to bethe best that they can be.”Allatt is about to mark the seventh
anniversary of her stroke. She walksher two dogs for a couple of hoursevery day and makes a living as amotivational speaker. Later in the yearshe and her youngest child, Woody,are going to go on a “mum and son”holiday to Abu Dhabi and Dubai.She cites Christine Waddell, from
Co Durham, and the Finnish bloggerand author Kati Van De Hoeven, whohave both been living with locked-insyndrome for almost 20 years, asinspirational figures. “So many peoplesay that they wouldn’t want to live ifthey couldn’t wipe their own arse, butthat changes. The will to survive isstronger than I ever imagined.”
Kate Allatt is amotivational speakerand stroke activistand the author ofRunning Free:Breaking Out fromLocked-in Syndrome(Accent Press, £9.99)@kateallatt,kateallatt.com
Kate Allatt in hospital.Top: Allatt and herhusband, Mark, afterrenewing their weddingvows post-recovery,with her best friendAlison French, top left,and children Woody,India and Harvey
they knew I was still insideMC PHOTOGRAPHY
