In Sickness & in Health: I find the silence scary

Last year, Rebecca’s husband, Nick, was hit by a car and seriously injured. Here, in one of a series of columns, she writes about the aftermath of his accident

In the mornings, when Nick is still asleep, I lie on my camp bed next to him and listen to the sounds of the care home. Some days I can hear the birds singing in the garden outside. Nick, his injuries forcing him to sleep, immobile, on his back, lets out small, and sometimes not so small, snores.

At 8am the night staff finish and the day shift begins. Greetings and handover chat filters through Nick’s door. I hear the tick of his clock and the whir of his laptop’s fan. When I’m only half awake, the noises that some of the other residents make - some who can’t speak at all - put me in mind of a menagerie. The squeak of a squeezed cat, or the groan of a perturbed orangutan that are made by people for whom I feel desperately sorry.

The medicine trolley trundles past, and the nurse pushing it will stop and grind tablets in a mortar. But there’s one noise that’s inescapable: the call bell.

Bleeeep bleeeep bleeeep. All morning, all day and all night.

Every resident has a button they can press to summon assistance. For some reason, lost in the history of the home, when residents on the floor above press their buzzers, they bleeeep bleeeep bleeeep downstairs, too. It’s easy to forget that there’s another world upstairs, full of people neither Nick nor I know. But the screech of their bells reminds us.

Nick’s current obsession is with the buzzer. When we go out for the day, he rejoices that he won’t have to hear it, and when we return he tells me, again and again, how much he hates it, how it drives him mad. He has noise-cancelling headphones hooked onto his bed rail to try and block it out. Occasionally I don’t notice its bleeeep bleeeep bleeeep, perhaps because I’m talking to Nick, or we’re watching TV. I often sleep through it. But there are other times when I lie awake hearing its insistent cry rent the air. For Nick it’s a constant source of irritation, and a reminder that he remains far from home.

I’m ambivalent about the bell - I suppose that’s the luxury of only sleeping here some of the time. But it’s also because the noise that drives Nick mad is also one that he makes use of. He can’t feed himself, get up, have a drink or shut the curtains without help, and that’s what the buzzer brings. Bleeeep bleeeep bleeeep - come here, come here, come here! I’m sure he hates having to use it, and he certainly hates it when he has to hear someone else using it.

We’ve recently spent a night away from the care home, in the rented bungalow that’s now furnished with a hospital bed and a hoist. I found local carers who came for an hour in the evening and an hour in the morning, to put Nick to bed and to get him up. At night there was no sound, no bleeeep bleeeep bleeeep.

Nick loved the silence, but I found it scary. At the end of the bleeeep bleeeep bleeeep is people who are there to help. Without it, there’s just me, and I don’t feel that I can ever give Nick all the support he needs.

The buzzer screams madness and blue murder to Nick, but speaks to me of security.