Over the years, I've read up quite a bit about survivors and disasters and the reality of most disasters is not the Big Bang event that wrecks death and destruction (apart from the odd volcano explosion or something similar) but the inevitable slow onslaught of a million small warning signs, accumulated mini-disasters and a vague sense of a vortex spinning faster and faster until one is sucked into it and then all hell breaks lose.
Such has been our life for the past 3 weeks. A few days after I wrote my last blog in fact.
It started with Tyler throwing the garbage bag off the truck early on Sunday the 28th April. In doing this he must have dislocated his shoulder and by the time I saw him later that day in St John, he was in great pain. On Monday I had to drive him into the bakery to help start the daily baking. Amazingly our new baker Tony walked in at 6am to start with us. I say amazing, as most people we've recruited either never pitch or arrive very late - so we were aghast that (a) he arrived and (b) he could bake.
Tyler was grey with pain, but that afternoon he saw the orthopedic doctor, who put everything back (under anesthetic) and prescribed some painkillers. He's done this several times before, so I didn't think too much of it, apart from how we were going to manage with him out of action. A bakery in the Tropics is very, very hot. Ours is also tiny with our teeny shop part of the bakery.
In taking so many painkillers to keep going, Tyler started to become severely dehydrated. This meant that he was constantly nauseous and slightly loopy, so he stopped eating and was trying to keep himself hydrated with Gatorade and other energy drinks. Sometime on Wednesday, as he was so blurred with pain and dehydration, he broke his foot - although he didn't really mention it. By Friday (our busiest Friday ever) he was haggard, limping, and becoming increasingly disorientated - but amazingly he carried on baking.
Saturday was very hot and I knew we had a problem right from the get-go when I saw the order book at 5am. We had to get 80 packed lunches out to Nanny Cay by Noon and cater for 120 that night in addition to a very busy normal Saturday morning in the bakery shop. I started cancelling orders early in order to make the day more manageable, bar one.
I could see Tyler deteriorating rapidly - and on my return from delivering to Nanny Cay I asked him to cancel the remaining order of 12 cupcakes which was met with a slammed down phone. After that he sort of crumpled and said he couldn't carry on and looked visibly distraught. I managed to get him out to the truck and put the AC on full blast, but he had essentially collapsed from severe dehydration.
The shop was still full, but luckily my friend Emily who was a trained nurse arrived to pick up her loaf of multigrain, and was posted to look after Tyler whilst I tried to finish up and close up.
We got to Peebles about 3pm and Tyler was immediately admitted into ER and placed on an IV. To cut a very long story short, 24 hours later by Sunday afternoon his temperature had been spiking at over 106, he was still very dehydrated and on oxygen, his white blood cell count was off the chart and he was so ill they couldn't get the IV in, as his veins had collapsed. Things became very critical. He was being pumped full of antibiotics but there was so much going on that they didn't pick up that he also had bacterial pneumonia and various infections, which were complicating matters.
In amongst all of this I was having to do all the catering commitments which meant that I learnt how to use a deep fat fryer very quickly and also nearly ripped off the head of a rather belligerent mother who complained that the food was 20 minutes late.
It took nearly 48 hours to stabilize him and then move him out of ER into a general ward (of our small public hospital) all hooked up to his oxygen and IV's. Unbeknown to us, visiting hospitals is very much a social occurrence here. Nor did people realize how gravely ill he was (one of the visitors remarked how ill he looked...). The upshot was that on the Tuesday many kind people decided to pop in, many we barely knew or didn't even know, including our car mechanic, someone looking for a job and a church group praying over him in Spanish.
Not only was Tyler rather bemused by this all, he was also exhausted and relapsed with spiking temperatures that night. Luckily he was promptly moved into a private high care room, as by now the pneumonia had been diagnosed and was also being treated. It was only after this move that he really started to respond and stabilize and by his second weekend in hospital, he was starting to recover.
He is now home and is slowly on the mend. He's exceptionally weak (but quite chuffed that he lost over 20 pounds) but the build up of lactic acid in his body from the lack of potassium, the oxygen and the bacterial pneumonia is agony. The only thing that helps is slow walking in the salty sea, which gives him some relief and the salt draws out all the toxins. Luckily we live on a tropical island, eh?
I must admit to have seen our lives flash in front of me a few times with some very dark moments. Scariest was when we realized that all the bread recipes are in Tyler's head and he was too confused to remember them. Needless to say when he did, they were promptly written down. The young lawyer whose 12 cupcakes were cancelled, when told that the baker was critically ill in hospital was heard to say that she "didn't care" and "how dare" we cancel her order. For the record: The cakes were ordered the afternoon before and the 'party' was 8 people on a beach for a very young child who was probably more interested in eating the sand. I think I reached a watershed moment then - that it's OK to say that cupcakes are more important than a life. Suffice to say that the young lady's name and phone number remain in our order book - highlighted for future reference. A special mention should also go out to the customer who called our home, completely irate that he couldn't get hold of Tyler on his cell phone - to say that he needed his 2 blueberry muffins and a loaf of multigrain bread please, for 9am tomorrow morning.
This has obviously been a terrible setback for us and we are slowly putting our lives back together again. It has been very hard on the boys - but we 've had real love and support from good friends which has got us through the worst. I've had to focus on keeping the bakery running and have even started baking. The biggest godsend has been Tony our new baker who is simply wonderful and our lovely Vee, who has gone an extra mile + mile + a few more for us, and the bakery is thriving and growing.
I still feel too in the middle of it all now, to write anything but facts, but the bizarreness hasn't escaped me either. The backdrop to all this High Drama was unseasonal tropical wave conditions which meant loads of thunder and lightning and torrential rain - which lent a decidedly epic and biblical awfulness to it all. The soundtrack was unquestionably the ear-shatteringly loud gospel music played early morning in all the supermarkets, which always featured a fair amount of wailing and uplifting choral refrains - and which in a weird way helped. I most definitely feel like one of the Toiling Masses now, nothing 'Living the Dream' about running a real bakery and business start-up with 3 young kids and a very ill husband, believe me.
Life will eventually get back to normal again, although things will need to be different to avoid a repeat of all of this. 'Ship Happens' and 'Life's a Beach" but we'll come out stronger for it all, I know that.
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