“These are the hands” became a kind of anthem for the NHS. How ironic and unfortunate then, that the writer of that poem, Michael Rosen, spent six weeks on an ITU, cared for by those hands.
Rosen has now published a book looking back at his year with Covid-19, ‘Many Different Kinds of Love’. Since he was himself in an induced coma while ventilated, he has only islands of recollection for the acute period of his infection. So instead of trying to fill the gaps, he reproduces extracts from the journal written by his carers on ITU: nurses, physiotherapists, speech and language therapists. They show the efforts made to orientate people in a disorienting world of high tech medicine, but also how NHS was completely reorganised to cope with the pandemic.
Alongside the messages from the health professionals are the texts of e-mails from Rosen’s wife Emma, forbidden like so many others, from visiting her sick partner. As Michael’s health improved he would fret about how his family would interpret his silence and lack of replies.
The second half of the book mostly comprises Michael Rosen’s observations about the carers around him, the changes in his body, and the slow process of rehabilitation and recovery. Gradually he regained strength and function, but every stage seemed impossible at the time and dreadfully slow. Mostly these are prose poems, and it is worth reading them slowly as poetry, both for their inner rhythms, and for the sense that time went very slowly, matching Rosen’s fear that at each stage he might not improve further.
Overall, Michael Rosen’s illness and recovery has taken the best part of a year, from when he first caught Covid-19 in early April 2020. The poems give an insight into the effort of long-term rehabilitation after serious illness, full of respect for carers, as well as honest and wry observations about where communication can and does go wrong. It also gives a sense of his bewilderment.
In March 2020 Michael Rosen was already angered by the Conservative policies towards managing the virus, a laisser-faire approach which implied that older people were expendable or at least less valuable than the rest of the population. He was already speaking out on the subject before he got sick. A year later, and the rage simmers between the lines of poetry, sometimes hidden by the sorrow, and sometimes breaking through.
And then he returns to the job of getting well – climbing the stairs, walking without a frame for the first time, attending scans on his heart, his ear, his eye, his throat, all the parts of his body damaged by the virus and the interventions needed to keep him alive. As he replies to an aggressive tweeter, ‘I’m not half the man I used to be – I’m busy trying not to be dead’. And he returns to his family, those whom he loves and who love him, observing on the way how he is changed, and the effects it has on them. Now he keeps to himself some of the (boring and burdensome?) minutiae of his body’s story, that ‘unreliable narrator’. Luckily his sense of humour seems intact.
Many Different Kinds of Love will repay reading and re-reading by all health professionals, ‘the hands’ for whose efforts Rosen is plainly profoundly grateful.
Rosen, M (2021) Many Different Kinds of Love: a story of life, death and the NHS, London, Ebury Press
James, K (Oct 2020) Experience: I help coma survivors fill in the gaps, The Guardian 9 Oct 2020, at: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/oct/09/experience-i-help-coma-survivors-fill-in-the-gaps