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by Ed Vulliamy
Most people are coy about the intimacies and challenges of domestic tribulation, but not the survivors of brain injury, and especially not the formidable Sarah Tebboth, who has worked and cursed alongside her husband Stephen since his motorcycle crash. It is as a couple that they have prospered at Oliver Zangwill, 'after I'd been looked through like I didn't exist by a lot of doctors who simply can't grasp how the relatives come into it,' Sarah says.
'We've been together for 30 years,' she adds, 'and though we'd had a happy relationship, we never realised how much we loved each other. It sounds a bit Pollyanna-ish, but there is an opportunity. You're not messing about any more because you pass through the shadow of the valley of death; you realise how short the time is, because he so nearly died. The fact that it is so fragile makes life more precious.'
What Stephen, an engineer working with Cambridge University, decided was this: 'Recovery begins with the realisation that you cannot get back to being the person you were. It is when you say to yourself: "I'm a different person now and let's see how it works" that things start to happen.' The realisation that he had changed beyond a point of no return was his own, but 'quickly became part of my work here [at the Zangwill Centre]. I remember an assessment, when Andrew Bateman, the clinical manager, said to me: "Get real. You are not going back to work in a couple of days." That advice grew into an acceptance of what had happened to me. It ended the denial phase, and I realised I could start to heal.'
Sarah proceeds to be almost as merciless as she is loyal in recollections of her own ordeal, alongside that of her husband. She talks about how 'I was insane for the first weeks - completely mad, you lose a layer of skin, just pleading: "Please don't die, just please don't die."' She recalls the intensity of the intensive care relatives' room at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, 'friendships with people you never see again', and how 'I used to talk to him for hours and hours even though he was unconscious, and tell him jokes'. She also remembers 'the first time we laughed together again - in an intensive care ward - at some doctor, I think'.
Sarah talks about how the sexual disinhibition common among coma survivors 'started to show itself even on the rehab ward, and is very difficult for wives to handle ... But in fact,' she says, 'Steve has not been sexually functional since his accident. Not good - Pollyanna your way out of that one! It's a problem and may remain a problem, but we're working on it.'
The conversation becomes more and more uninhibited: 'I mean, you are more rigid now, darling,' she tells her husband, 'though being an engineer you were always borderline.' 'I suppose so,' agrees Stephen. 'I've certainly lost all sense of social nuance.' 'He's far more dependent than I or he would want,' she continues. 'It seems a little tough, but it was important to him and to me that he was an independent, active individual, not an appendage. It's exhausting always being the advocate, and there's the whole, "Does he take sugar?" factor, people putting on that soppy voice because of his physical disability, which at least is a badge of some kind, and that sympathetic face, without seeing the real damage.' To which she adds: 'We try to deal with that by not giving a fuck what people think.'
'But at the root of it all has been that first, basic question,' says Sarah. 'What have I got? Who is my husband? Can I live with this? And the answer in my case - though by no means all - was yes. It's not really because I love him, it's more because I like him, we can still make each other laugh, and I like living with him. And I'm extremely proud of his toughness.' 'Yes, I always tended slightly towards the wimp before,' offers Stephen. 'Well, that's rubbish, actually,' scolds his wife. 'But it's true that now you've been tested.'
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