When a small amount of desk space means the world

In Sickness and in Health: This weekend, after realising how much it meant to him, I helped him to get it just so

(Rex)

Last year, Rebecca’s husband, Nick, was hit by a car and seriously injured. Here, in one of a series of columns, she writes about the aftermath of his accident.

Woe betide anyone who tries to put a mug, plate or paper on Nick’s chest of drawers, aka his desk. I try to explain to him that, in a small room, sometimes things need to be shifted about during mealtimes or when his carers are getting him ready. The other day, exasperated by my entreaties, he explained, at full volume, why his desk was sacrosanct. “This is all I have. I can’t move, I can’t leave this room, all I have is what’s on that desk. And I don’t want anyone touching it.”

So that left me feeling pretty heartless. Still, as I told Nick, he has so much more than what’s on his desk. He has friends and family who love him, a house full of his things and he has a future, however slowly it’s emerging. I’ve tried to make his room as much as a sanctuary as possible, not least because Nick has never been one for forced socialising, so spending time in communal areas is anathema to him.

I’m mostly thankful that he doesn’t remember the wards he stayed in earlier in his recovery. Four neurologically injured men to a room, with all the snoring, shouting, tooth-grinding, weeping and wailing that that entailed. If he could remember them, though, as I do (I had a proper, wake-up-sweating nightmare the other night about Nick being sent back to hospital to a shared ward, because of how he’d now react to it), he might be a bit fonder of his little room.

On the day that he moved here, I arrived first with a car full of his possessions. Unloading the boot, I felt weirdly as though I was starting university again, but at the same time that I was a worried parent wondering if my darling would ever settle in.

The posters and photos that I’d brought didn’t seem to cover as much of the magnolia walls as I’d hoped, and the noticeboard I’d Blu-Tacked up kept falling over.

Almost five months on, Nick’s room is a work-in-progress. There are the whiteboards full of my notes to him, a birthday-present DVD player, a poinsettia I seem to be keeping alive against all the odds, a menagerie of stuffed animals, a set of bookshelves I scavenged from one of the lounges, a jar of treasured knick-knacks, clippings of this column on the wardrobe and a giant cuddly R2-D2 perched on the TV.

The desk, though, is Nick’s special place. This weekend, after realising how much it meant to him, I helped him to get it just so.

Months ago I bought him a laser pointer for showing people what he was after when they couldn’t understand him, and thanks to that, the desk was harmoniously rejigged and our marriage is intact. His new model of Boba Fett is in place, the tank for his robotic fish is correctly aligned next to an upright copy of Stuff magazine.

His Dalek Easter egg is still boxed (“I want to keep that as it is!”) and the container of condiments I kept next to it has been banished to the drawers beneath. “I love that now,” Nick said to me. “It’s perfect. I just hope that no one touches anything on it.” For their sake as well as his, I hope so, too.