It’s August in Mallorca and heat is zigzagging off the pavement at 9am. This is why we moved here, I think.
“Ben’s still got man flu,” I say to the head of my daughter’s nursery. She lets out a compassionate chuckle. We know how men are. Our daughter toddles happily towards the shaded garden of the nursery.
It’s now been almost two years since we moved permanently to this island. I met Ben in a mountain village in the north of Mallorca during the Covid years. After 30 years as an MC and the frontman of drum ‘n’ bass group Pendulum, he was tired of life on the road and I was looking for somewhere quiet to finish a book.
We moved to London briefly, and had our first daughter there, but then came back. We wanted our two children to play late into the evening in cobbled squares. We wanted mountains, sea, fresh produce and affordable childcare.
I have family on the island, and with my parents in Scotland I felt more like I had a village in Spain than I ever did in England. So in 2023, Ben and I packed our life into a second-hand horse trailer and onto a ferry, when I was five months pregnant with our youngest. I registered to give birth at the local hospital and started brushing up on my Spanish.
Now we’re properly settled, with a two-year-old and a one-year-old, but the island life we dreamed of in England is about to fall apart.
Ben is violently sick one night, and the next night he sweats through his sheets. I suggest that he gets a note from the doctor so his employer knows that it’s serious.
Our doctor runs some tests and tells him to go to A&E. His infection markers are concurrent with sepsis.
They put him on IV antibiotics and run more tests. Our insurance won’t pay for him to stay overnight so he comes home. The next day he goes to the public hospital, where they find a mass in his lung. By Monday they’ve identified a bacterial infection called pseudomonas aeruginosa. I google and find it is commonly picked up by patients in ICUs. It is rare for a healthy person to catch it, even rarer for them to become very ill. I feel terrible about the man flu comment.
He’s admitted onto the ward for two weeks. He’s poorly but it still doesn’t feel too serious. “Treat it like a holiday,” I say. “Enjoy time off from childcare and use it as a chance to practice your Spanish.”
The bacteria is antibiotic resistant so they keep changing his treatment. Eventually they decide they are winning and settle for one that can be administered at home. I can’t wait to have him back. He’ll be bed-bound but there will be another adult to laugh with. His mum is coming to help as well.
On the day of her arrival I call Ben in the hospital. He sounds tired but on track to come home. But I don’t hear from them for the rest of the day, and in the evening, I come in.
He can’t die now, when all we’ve done for the last six months is fight about money and who’s more sleep deprived
The ICU doctor leads us to a private room and tells us Ben had been coughing up blood, and during a procedure to cauterise, something went wrong. He lost a lot of blood and was put in a medically-induced coma. She tells us the plan is to wake him up in 48 hours.
Well, 48 hours comes and goes. The mass in his lung is an enormous abscess full of bacteria. He has developed severe pneumonia. He cannot breathe without assistance.
The doctors chat amongst themselves and I feel a surge of rage that for them this is just another day in the office, when for me it’s a day in hell.
Ben’s medication is changed a lot. The antibiotics struggle to keep up with the mutations. Everything is new. His rotating bed is new to Spain, his latest antibiotic is new to science. This situation is new to all of us.
We’ve been asked about repatriation by almost everyone we speak to. “Wouldn’t you rather do this at home?” I kindly point out that we are in Spain, not outer Mongolia. The king of Spain has a house here. The public healthcare is genuinely excellent. Even if he weren’t much too sick to travel, Mallorca is our home.
I breastfeed the baby while they tell us that he might need dialysis, that he has arrhythmia, that the bacteria has eaten over three quarters of his right lung. They tell us that when he is well enough, they will leave him on his back. Every day I see him on his front I lose hope.
“He won’t come back whole,” one doctor says, the language barrier leaving this sentence open to my worst interpretations.
I worry about the children and our finances. Ben doesn’t qualify for sick pay and we’ve burned through our savings funding my maternity leave from my freelance marketing job. Our four-bedroom house we’re renting with its pool and veg patch now seems ludicrously extravagant.
My mother-in-law and I look for things we could sell for quick cash. We narrow it down to Ben’s two marijuana plants. I hate the plants and ask some lads from Magaluf to come and take a look at them.
Three weeks in to the coma, there is no talk of waking him up. The word “when” has been replaced by “if”. You know it’s really serious when you’re asked to wait for the translator.
One day, the translator is called to speak for the head of the ICU. The wait is sickening. Ben has wasted away to skin and bone and a violent rash is all over his body. I wonder aloud why the tips of his hands and feet have turned purple. “Circulation,” his mum suggests hopefully.
The translator corrects us: “Sepsis. Multiple organ failure”.
“The situation is very, very grave,” they say. It’s the worst case they have ever seen. It’s been resistant to every antibiotic they’ve tried.
This is the first time I’ve seen my mother-in-law properly cry since she got here.
I haven’t told a lot of people back home what’s going on, for fear of making it seem real. So I sit silently as my WhatsApp groups ping with people talking about salmon sperm facials and the best place to stay in Sicily.
That night I go into the walk-in wardrobe in the house we can no longer afford and sit in a pile of his clothes. I sniff his cashmere jumpers, thinking: “You’d better wake up because you need to de-bobble your jumpers. And because the babies need their daddy.”
The girls are blissfully unaware of the chaos that swirls around our family. I wonder if they will only know him from pictures. If our favourite beach will be where we go to remember him. I swam in the sea there when I was pregnant. We always took a packed lunch and a bottle of red wine.
He can’t die now, when all we’ve done for the last six months is fight about money and who’s more sleep deprived. I’ve been clinging on to the hope that it has to get easier.
As Ben lies in hospital, I still have to trick my toddler into eating vegetables, dole out Calpol and read Mog the Forgetful Cat. Even though I feel like I’m drowning, the kids still need a bath.
One night, when I get back from the hospital Ben’s mum looks wild. An old friend has offered us his health concierge to see if she can help. She asks if we’ve considered a bacteriophage (a virus that infects bacteria). “It can be used to kill the pseudomona.” I skim an article – phages were used before the discovery of antibiotics and are still used in Poland, Georgia and Russia. “I don’t really do alternative medicine,” I say, shutting down the conversation.
Then I am up all night researching phages. By the morning I have planned to go to Georgia.
I’ve found an EU law that states that if the doctors concede that they have no more treatments, alternative medicine can be given to save a patient’s life.
In the midst of the madness my best friend arrives. We need one person whose whole life doesn’t depend on Ben getting better. She is here for the comedy relief I didn’t know I needed.
I keep sending Ben WhatsApps. I send him pictures of the children and the sea. I tell him how much I miss him and how much we’re all looking forward to seeing him again. My silly messages stare back with one stubborn tick.
I go back to the hospital. The doctor tells me they received my email. They need us to know that the microbiologist overseeing Ben’s case here is a leading world expert in pseudomonas. He really could not be in a better place.
He also tells me that for the first time in weeks, Ben’s condition has improved slightly on the day before. “The bacteria has not mutated. We think the antibiotic could be working.”
A bone marrow aspiration reveals the underlying cause of his infection: acute myeloid leukaemia. He is started on chemotherapy.
Eight months on, we have just got test results saying that for now he is cancer-free. He is now in and out of hospital and walks a constant tightrope between chemo toxicity and recurrent infection.
Doctors warned us that Ben’s recovery would be far from straightforward. His muscle wastage was so severe he couldn’t swallow, walk or breathe normally. He is currently recovering from an operation to remove an infection in his bone that has left him with a scar that spans the length of his neck. We’ve learned to take life day by day, and to cherish the time he has at home.
I now operate as a single mum of two under two. Life is chaotic, magical, scary and sad. The dream of watching the kids play together in cobbled squares is on pause but thankfully the dream of affordable childcare remains alive. Our close-knit community in Spain has rallied to help me and I know I couldn’t get through this living nightmare anywhere else.
The doctors keep telling us that Ben should be dead, but instead he is walking, driving, cooking his famous paella and making music – even when all we want is for him to sit still. Ben’s greatest gift in life is his optimism. I’ve never known anyone better at finding light in the dark. He’s given us no choice but to do it his way. Day by day, step by step, paella by paella.
Bella Younger writes on Substack
