Please take the time to read this. My friend Andy (http://andyvglnt.tumblr.com/ @andyvglnt) wrote it about my accident last year and the charity work we’re doing this week for Leicester Hospitals. (The accident took place on the evening of August 4th so Andy was actually as work on August 5th.)
This is a pretty long one. If you want to skip ahead, you’d do well to jump to the last paragraph before the bullet points. Please, please, please, link to this or the donation links anywhere you can. If you came here from a link in a tweet, go back and retweet it. This is important stuff. For reals.
On August the 4th last year I was at work sorting various envelopes into various sacks (I live a glamorous life, I really do), when I got a phone call from my mate Kyle telling me our mutual friend Liam (@ElClayton on Twitter, go and wave at him!) had been involved in a very serious car accident. Long story short, Liam was in the Intensive Care Unit at Leicester’s Royal Infirmary, and he was in a very, very bad way. He had a list of broken bones as long as your arm, and some pretty gnarly lung damage. When I got there a couple of hours later (buses are shit) I sat with his family and his closest friends in the waiting room before our friend Jamie and I were called through to see him.
When we saw him, we walked straight past him, because he was swollen to the point where he was unrecognisable, even to two lads who’d known him for many years. I remember the nurse coming over to us standing silently at his bedside and telling us he might be able to hear us, so just to talk to him. What followed was a remarkably English exchange, if you could call it one. I told him about some stuff I’d read on PunkNews earlier that day, which is the kind of stuff we’d usually talk about. It’s a frequent observation of the English that we don’t deal with intense emotion well, and it’s definitely something I saw then, desperately trying to avoid addressing the fact that one of my friends was in a very serious condition and could well die.
As the days wore on, it became apparent that Liam’s lungs weren’t up to the challenge of oxygenating his blood properly, even attached to a ventilator, and so he was transferred to the ECMO unit at Glenfield. I have no idea how it works, but basically the ECMO is a very expensive piece of machinery that oxygenates the blood when the lungs aren’t up to it. While I took this to be good news, I spoke to our friend Dan about it (his Dad is a doctor), and he said people don’t end up on the ECMO unless things are very serious indeed. There are only one or two in the country, by all accounts, and so being on one is a HUGE deal. The wolf was very much at the door, and I began to prepare myself for the worst.
In the event, the treatment worked, and after a long year of physical therapy, operations, skin grafts, wheelchairs, crutches, baffling cushioned toilet seat things, and yet more baffling sock things, Liam has made something approaching a full recovery. Much of this is down to his effort, the support of his amazing family, and his determination to get better and get on with his life as best he can, but the first bit, the real deal life and death bit was down to the incredible staff and facilities of the hospitals we’re lucky to have in Leicester. You can help Liam, and all of us that love him dearly, to thank those people, and their institutions, in a number of ways, all of which involve money going to Leicester Hospitals Charity.
- You could go to the JustGiving page Liam has set up, and donate to the Leicester Hospitals Charity that way. It’s a really easy process, and the charity is about to claim back a portion of the tax you paid on those earnings, if you happen to be a UK taxpayer. That means you can donate a few quid, and then a bit more will go to the charity from the coffers at the Treasury, which is pretty rad. Here’s the link for that one: http://www.justgiving.com/Liam-Clayton
- Alternatively, you could go and buy one of Liam’s favourite albums from the good people at Banquet Records. They’ve pledged to match the cash spent on 5 records of Liam’s choice, up the value of £200. The page to go to for that option is: http://www.banquetrecords.com/LiamJustGiving I can recommend Say Anything’s Is a Real Boy. It’s rad to the power of sick!
- Thirdly, you can go and buy Liam’s single, the rather aptly named How My Summer Vacation Spent Me from Stay Home Records, the label he co-founded and runs with our mate Kristy, over at http://stayhomerecordsuk.bandcamp.com/ You can pay a quid or as much as you like, and all proceeds (after the 15% bandcamp take for running the service) will be going to Leicester Hospital Charity.
If you can afford to help, please do. Whether or not you can afford to contribute, please spread the word, either reblogging this post, linking back to it from your site or Twitter, retweeting whatever tweet led you hear, or just reposting the donation links anywhere you think they’ll be seen by people who’d be into helping.
This means an enormous amount to me. These institutions saved my friends life. Roll that around in your head for a second. These people, and their equipment, are the very real difference between the (usually) beautiful world we see around us, and the unthinkable. That’s gotta be worth a few quid, eh? Thanks for reading.
Andy
