After that first awful night when she couldn’t recognise him, Laura moved back in with her parents, and for a time Ed was convinced her illness would be a temporary thing – that some strange infection would be discovered that would explain the delirium. The delusions. A week on antibiotics and everything would be OK. Surely?
And now, many weeks on, they still had no diagnosis – here in this fancy private hospital. With the fancy private specialist.
‘So you haven’t even tried antibiotics?’ Ed repeated – irritated now by his fancy, bright orange chair which exactly matched the ‘accent splash’ in the blue and orange curtains.
Laura was one for ‘accents’。 A lime cushion here. A citrus throw there . . .
‘There’s no infection,’ the consultant repeated. ‘We’ve run every possible test.’
Ed glanced once more around the room. He wished they were back in the UK with the nice, reliable NHS. He liked the NHS. He knew where he was with the NHS with its tired look and its practical furniture. OK, it was horribly underfunded and it didn’t have coordinated decor with fancy accents, but his experience across the few dramas of his lifetime – appendicitis and a broken leg – had been good. The staff brilliant.
He was still struggling to understand the Canadian health-care system. When he agreed to move to Toronto with Laura, the deal was they’d give it a year. He understood why she wanted to be near her parents, and having no real family left himself （Aunt Cathy lost interest and contact once he passed eighteen） it made absolute sense. Laura’s family were welcoming and kind. Also doing well commercially. The job offer from her father was difficult to resist.
But right from the off, Ed had worried about the unfamiliar health care. He had wrongly assumed that Canada had an insurance-based system like America; that everything would be horribly expensive. One night he had a row with Laura in England. What if I have a road accident? We could be bankrupt . . .
She had smoothed his forehead and smiled, just as she did when he woke from the dreams in the middle of the night with the car bouncing down the embankment. She explained that Canada’s health care was free, just like the NHS – funded through taxes. You had to pay for prescriptions and top-up services but that was nearly always covered by employment insurance.
So there is insurance?
Not like America, Ed. It’s fine. It will be fine.
And now it wasn’t fine because Laura’s condition ventured into the terribly tricky territory of mental-health services and they were sadly as complex, funding wise, in Canada as anywhere else in the world.
This private care and specialist appointment was being paid for by Laura’s father to speed things up. But Ed was conscious that private bills could very quickly become very large indeed, unless Laura could be properly diagnosed. And swiftly treated and cured.
She’d been referred by her own doctor who’d almost sounded excited when he said he had never come across anything quite like it. It was distressing but also a fascinating case.
Ed glanced again at the blue-and-orange curtains. Fascinating was not a word he would use.
There had been so many appointments already. He’d been asked a million times if Laura had suffered a head injury. Any unusual behaviour before this episode?
Over and over he told them the truth. No. He was as baffled as they were. Laura had been fine. And then suddenly she hadn’t recognised him. It was just like his childhood. Playing tennis one minute. Orphan the next.
At first when Laura moved back in with her parents, she was calm and for the most part behaving normally in every aspect of life, unless and until anyone referred to Ed. Her parents had managed to convince her that she should stop thinking about him. That the episode that had so upset her would pass. She just needed to rest and very soon would see that Ed really was Ed and all would be well.
But this strategy collapsed whenever they tried to reintroduce Ed. They arranged low-key visits from Ed, pretending he had just ‘popped by’。 But however casual the approach, the episodes never stayed low key; they always ended in a meltdown. She would start screaming at her parents, demanding to know why they were not searching for her real husband. Why the imposter Ed was not in police custody.
This consultant – Mr Price – had himself arranged to observe one of these ‘meetings’ in the more-controlled environment of the hospital. They used a visitors’ room painted green for its calming effect and dotted with huge pot plants in terracotta planters. Ed had strangely felt quite hopeful as he was led into the room to see Laura and her mother. Maybe a change of environment would help?