The person behind it
Earned in practice.
Written for everyone.
Not abstract theory. Practical wisdom learned in real situations — written in plain English for people who need steadiness and clarity when it matters most.
I came to nursing through loss. Through a wound so early in life that it shaped the direction of everything that followed — long before I had language for it.
I am the middle child of three. My older sister is three years above me. My younger sister, Vanessa, was three years below — which made me around four years old when she became ill, and six or seven when she died. I was her big brother. I was her protector. I loved her very much.
Vanessa had received all of her vaccinations as a healthy, joyful child hitting every developmental marker. She was thriving. Then, shortly after the whooping cough vaccination, something changed. She began to have headaches — the kind that are not like ordinary headaches. Screaming. Inconsolable. She had been a child full of joy, and the joy left her. Where there had been light, there was now only pain and distress that nothing could reach.
“She had been a child full of joy. And the joy left her. Where there had been light, there was now only pain — and nothing we tried could reach it.”
She went through the GP, then the specialists, then the referral to Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. My parents were together at that point, though the weight of what followed broke that apart. My father was unable to cope. My mother did not leave Vanessa’s side.
We were living in Coventry. My mother essentially moved to London for eighteen months. My older sister and I were sent to our Auntie Hazel in Bognor Regis, and stayed there while our mother kept vigil. She had no support network in London, no friends nearby, almost no resources. She had nowhere to sleep except the hospital chairs — the plastic visitor chairs adjusted as far back as they would go, sometimes the floor of waiting areas. Visiting hours were strict, even for mothers, even in the 1970s. When she could not be beside Vanessa, she stayed as close as the system would allow. She often went hungry.
The nurses who worked Vanessa’s ward noticed what was happening. They saw her commitment to her daughter, and they fed her. They took pity on her. They kept her going.
“The nurses who saw what my mother was carrying fed her. They kept her going. I have never forgotten what that kind of care looks like — and what it costs the person who gives it.”
I did not fully understand this until I was in my forties. I was too young at the time. But over the decades, the picture assembled itself — and when I finally understood what my mother had carried, alone, in that hospital, sleeping on floors and going hungry in a city where she knew nobody, something that had always been instinctive became conscious.
Vanessa had a brainstem glioma — a cancerous growth so deeply entwined with the base of the brain and the brainstem that even the most gifted international paediatric neurosurgeons who were consulted could not operate. The tumour was too enmeshed with the tissue that makes life possible. To attempt removal would have caused catastrophic nerve damage. There was no conversation about operability. The verdict, from the best available hands, was that it could not be done.
This was a known, extremely rare side effect of the whooping cough vaccination at the time. Only three children in the United Kingdom had presented with it. Vanessa had the worst case of the three. She became a national case. And she did not survive.
I was around six or seven years old when she died. I have never stopped carrying her.
What I carry is not only grief. It is a kind of knowing — that hospitals are places where families are broken open. That the person on the other side of the bed matters as much as the person in it. That the system can be full of capable and compassionate people and still leave a mother sleeping on a floor in a city where she knows no one, kept alive by the quiet kindness of nurses who noticed. That care — real care, the human kind — happens in the spaces the system cannot reach.
I became a nurse. I spent decades in the places where the pressure is highest and the stakes are clearest — cardiac high dependency, spinal injuries, coronary care, community complex care. I taught resuscitation to armed forces, police, fire services, and NHS trusts for thirteen years. I have sat in the rooms where the decisions are made and watched what happens when families do not have the language, the framework, or the confidence to speak. The Ward Wise was built from all of it.