The Year That Changed My Life

An Ms Diagnosis Saw Caro Llewellyn’s High-Flying Dream Life In New York Quickly Unravel. But An In-The-Moment Mantra Is Helping The Writer Piece It All Back Together

- Caro Llewellyn

My father always told me, “I’m your fall guy.” He’d taken a karmic hit big enough for the both of us and I’d assumed — counted on it, in fact — that it meant I’d skate through life unscathed. It wasn’t that I thought his pronouncement would get me through without heartbreak or the other upsets and disappointments that come upon a person. I knew I’d have my share of those disasters. But I did believe, on the strength of my father’s say so, that nothing would physically hurt me.

My father’s life changed when he was 20. After recovering from a severe flu-like illness, he woke up one morning and tried to reach for the glass of water on his nightstand. But nothing moved. Not his arms, not his legs. He couldn’t lift his head from the pillow. He called out to his Aunt Molly, who’d been caring for him during his illness. When she hooked her arms under the crook of his armpits and tried to hoist him into a sitting position, he was a dead weight.

Upright, he slumped like a rag doll and gasped for air. Whatever was happening was affecting his lungs. Molly called an ambulance and it took him, sirens blaring, to the hospital. By the time the orderlies hauled him onto a bed, he was hardly breathing at all. My father was almost dead. By now he needed more than a ventilator — he needed an iron lung. Incredibly, the key to the storeroom where the hospital’s mobile equipment, including respirators and iron lungs, were kept wasn’t on its hook in the nurses’ station. Eventually, someone found it and hurriedly pushed one of the long rocket like machines, wobbling and clattering on its little wheels, down the corridor and parked it beside my father’s bed. Four nurses used the bedsheet to hoist him inside it. Sealing him in, they flicked the switch and listened as the machine’s bellows slowly inflated and began breathing for him.