Isaac

Isaac Turner: 23rd November 1998- 30th November 2021

When I started writing this in 2010 it was as a music blog. It still is. But music means nothing if it doesn't connect with you and your life. Music provokes a response, it is an emotional artform. It soundtracks your life, your events, the people you are with. It's a solitary experience and a communal one. When I started writing the blog the music I loved and parts of my life came together and while most of the posts are just about the music, my life has bled into it from time to time. I have written about my son Isaac many times. I did so on his 23rd birthday just last week. As most of you know Isaac died on Tuesday. I'm sorry if some of this comes out a bit raw but I need to get it out. I'm just going to start typing and see what happens. Please don't feel obliged to read this. 

The day after his birthday Isaac was a bit unwell and Lou, his mum and my wife, managed to do a Covid test on him (not an easy task, he could be uncooperative with that sort of thing). The test came up positive straight away. I was at work and came home early and we sorted a few medical things out, emails, phone calls to his medical team, that sort of thing. Isaac was born with a very rare genetic disease, MPS1 (Hurler's Disease). During 2000 he had two bone marrow transplants to treat the range of physical and learning disabilities that MPS1 presents. We knew then that bone marrow transplantation was not a cure, it was a treatment- it would not reverse or fix damage already done. BMT recipients need to have extensive rounds of chemotherapy to wipe out the body's immune system so that their body can accept the donor marrow. The first transplant, umbilical cord blood from Belgium, failed. The second, with me as a donor, worked but a side effect was that Isaac's immune system never regrew as it should. He had little immune system for the rest of his life and so had little protection from viruses and if he contracted an illness, he would find it more difficult to fight it. Covid was a major risk and we knew if he caught it, it would be serious and potentially fatal. We have shielded him since March 2020 but in the end it got him. 

For the back end of last week he was suffering from a cough, a temperature, loss of appetite, a bit out of sorts and grumpy with it. We put him straight onto emergency antibiotics which we'd been prescribed in case this happened. During Saturday he was worse and on Saturday evening we decided he needed to go to hospital. We phoned 111 and having listened to his medical history they sent an ambulance. I followed in the car to Wythenshawe hospital. We spent the night in A&E and at 5.30am were admitted onto a Covid ward, on a side room. His symptoms continued to get worse but he was now receiving further medicines and he was on a fluid drip. Sunday night was bad- he was often awake, getting agitated and not happy with the oxygen mask. He tried to get out of bed several times. Various medics came in to look at him and went out again. He was becoming more and more ill. We got his sister Eliza back from university in Liverpool.

On Monday we met some consultants from ICU. They asked to speak to us elsewhere, away from Isaac, which is never a good sign. We went into one of those small windowless room that they have set aside for these kind of conversations, the really shit conversations where families are given the news they never want to hear. They told us that it was very serious and that it would not turn out well. The virus was in his lungs. The medicines they have developed for treating Covid patients wouldn't be effective on Isaac due to his weak immune response. It's a really cruel and nasty virus. He would continue to get worse and he would die within days. 

Once the Covid got into his lungs, and with his weak immune system that was inevitable, it destroyed him and the speed at which it took him was horrifying.. Monday night was worse than Sunday night. Between midnight and about 3am he was unable to sleep and really struggling with breathing. At one point he told me he wanted his shoes and he wanted to go home. These were the last things he said. He was agitated and distressed and a consultant prescribed morphine to settle him. His breathing was fast and shallow. Eventually, and it took a while, he settled and stopped fighting the sedatives, stopped trying to pull the oxygen mask off and became calmer. Another consultant came to talk to us on Tuesday morning. I asked how it would pan out and what time scale we were now looking at. He said he'd seen a lot of people die from Covid and he told us what would happen. During Tuesday Isaac's breathing remained fast but he was asleep and calm. We sat with him, talking to him and holding his hands. Eventually his breathing began to slow down and then at about 1.45pm- I'm really struggling to type this now but I need to do it- he stopped breathing and he slipped away. The three of us were with him and he died with us holding him.

I cannot fault the care we received from umpteen people at Wythenshawe hospital, from auxiliary staff making us endless cups of tea and changing his sheets to the nurses and the doctors looking after him. These people have been working on a Covid ward since March 2020. I can't imagine how draining it is doing that every day. A nurse came in and then a doctor came to formally confirm he'd died. We went back into the horrible family room while they cleaned him up. Lou and I went back in to see him a little later and to say goodbye. We then waited while some porters could be called to the ward to take him to the mortuary. They asked if we wanted to walk with him to take him down. I said I did. I walked down through the hospital with the trolley as far as I was allowed to go. I said goodbye and walked back to the car park. Then we came home. 

We are heartbroken. I don't know where we go from here. The sheer number of people who have contacted us since Tuesday is overwhelming and testament to who he was. There are lots of you who I know through this blog who have been in touch. Some of you have paid your own tributes at your blogs. Some of you have emailed and messaged and left comments on a previous post. Every single one of those messages and posts has helped. Thank you. 

Isaac faced more challenges and difficulties than most people do. He loved life and it showed in everything he did. He loved people and places, he loved everyday events, he loved talking to people about them and their lives. He packed more into his twenty three years than many of us will do in three times that and although by normal standards he has died very young he has lived a full and meaningful life. He inspired other people. He has made us better people by knowing him. He was our boy. He was the centre of our lives and at the moment I cannot imagine the world without him.