Cheryl: My Story (35 page)

I heard Derek tell the doctor, ‘We’ve just got back from Africa – could it be related?’ Derek had been paranoid about malaria while we were in Tanzania. He’d taken his tablets religiously, and had taken them for longer than me. I just took them for the four days we were away and for a few days afterwards. It was far less than you’re meant to do, but the area we stayed in was not actually a malaria danger zone and I wasn’t concerned. Derek told me afterwards that something was telling him that day it was malaria, even though we’d actually been home for two weeks by now.

‘Oh my God, this is classic symptoms of malaria,’ the South African lady said as soon as Derek mentioned Africa. ‘It takes two weeks for it to take hold.’

The blood sample was rushed off for testing, and the next thing I remember is hearing the phone ring, and my mam being there and answering it. Hours and hours must have passed by now if she’d managed to get herself from Newcastle to Surrey, but I’d lost all sense of time.

Apparently it was 1am when my mam said, ‘Cheryl, you’re gonna have to get to hospital. They’ve had the results and you’ve got malaria. I’ve called a car.’

I staggered into the night with her and Derek supporting me. I was too weak to think straight or even to have much of a reaction to the diagnosis. Part of me was just relieved to know what it was, and that I was going to be treated.

I must have slept in the car and I remember waking up in the Cromwell Hospital, delirious. That was when I started accusing the doctors of trying to kill me.

‘You were just
so
scandalous,’ Derek taunted me now. ‘Are you
sure
you want all the detail?’

I told him to tell me everything because, as embarrassing as it was to listen to, I wanted to be able to piece his memories to my own so I knew exactly what had happened in there.

Doctors were trying to take my blood again as soon as I arrived. They were also covering my body in freezing, wet towels to try and lower my temperature, which I flung back at them. That’s why I was screaming at them. First they were struggling to find a vein, then there was blood pumping out of my wrist. My body was blowing up. By now my face was so puffy my eyes were like slits, and I was so swollen I looked nine months pregnant.

Someone was trying to take off my bra, saying they didn’t want to cut it off.

‘Just cut it!’ I screamed.

‘But it’s a nice bra.’

‘I don’t care. Just cut it off!’

A guy was trying to hold an oxygen mask on my face but I wouldn’t let him. I told him, ‘I know what you’re doing. You’re all trying to kill me. Don’t think I’m stupid.’

Derek said he couldn’t help laughing, but in an incredulous ‘is this really happening?’ kind of way. He said that when I shouted the only thing that moved beside my lips were my eyeballs, which was very unnerving. At one point Derek watched me breathe and tried to breathe at the same pace. He was shocked to find he couldn’t keep up, because my breathing was so quick.

Both my lungs were filled with fluid. There was about an inch or less left in each of them for air; that was all. My liver was three times its normal size and I was five minutes from having to have kidney dialysis for the rest of my life. I wasn’t aware of that at the time, thank God. There’s no way I would have coped with that.

I have random recollections, and I remember seeing a doctor’s face right up close to mine. I could smell and taste the oxygen and the plastic of the mask, and I could hear the whirring and beeping of the machines. All my senses were heightened. Everything was super sharp and noisy.

They tried to give me a drug called quinine to flush my system out but it didn’t work, and I was getting angrier.

‘You’re not a doctor, will you please leave?’ I said to Derek. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing in here but you’re getting on my nerves!’

I then flung a towel at him and swore at him to get out of the room. He said my language was absolutely shocking. Derek never swears, which makes it all the more shameful.

They put a catheter on me and I heard someone say, ‘If she doesn’t get rid of some of this fluid in the next 24 hours we’ve lost her.’

I heard my mam’s voice, and then somebody told her, ‘She may have left it too late. She should have come in sooner.’

‘She’ll be fine, Cheryl’s a fighter,’ my mam said calmly. She never, ever flaps. I don’t know how she does it.

I had the worst strain of malaria you can get. George Clooney has the other one, the one that isn’t as severe initially but lives with you and resurfaces from time to time. I had falciparum, the one that hits you like a steam train but when it leaves your body it’s gone for good. It was attacking my liver and new blood cells. That’s what it does. The body tries to shut down and your veins shrink, which is why it was so difficult getting the needles in.

My malaria count was rising rapidly. They were taking blood all the time, and the parasites in my liver were doubling.

‘We can’t facilitate her here. She needs to go to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases.’

My mam kept strong. She said there was no way she was letting any negativity in.

‘Cheryl’s tough. I know she’ll pull through.’

I was aware I had to move, and I heard someone say it wouldn’t take long to do the short journey, especially on a blue light at 5 o’clock in the morning. ‘There’d better not be paparazzi,’ I thought. Even in that state I was scared of the paps. That’s how bad it had got with them.

There was a young woman tending to me when I came round in intensive care at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases. She explained that they were waiting for me to pass water. ‘That’s a vital sign we’re looking for. It will show your kidneys are still prepared to flush waste from your body.’

It was so frightening, and I felt absolutely exhausted too. I just wanted to go to sleep and make everything stop.

I can clearly remember asking the nurse if I was dying, and feeling relieved when she told me, ‘It’s a possibility.’

‘Make this end,’ I thought. I just had nothing left.

Afterwards I said to my mam, ‘I’m gonna write me will. Bring me some paper in. I need to tell you what to do. Gillian can have most of it and Andrew – don’t give him a thing.’

I was matter of fact. I was so over it by now. The exhaustion was overwhelming, and I was too tired to take any more.

‘Cheryl, you’ll be fine,’ my mam said. ‘We’ll be laughing about this in the future.’

She told me afterwards she would slip outside and pray to God, to nature, whatever might help. ‘Please God, don’t take her,’ she would say. I was moved when she told me that. My mam’s never openly affectionate and rarely shares her feelings, and on the few occasions she’s said she loves me I’ve practically fallen off the chair in shock.

I was given loads of different drugs and I couldn’t take the oxygen mask off or within minutes I couldn’t breathe. My left lung was filled the most with fluid, and if I lay on that side or rolled over on to it by mistake I couldn’t breathe at all.

Derek slept on the floor beside me, refusing to leave. He also started to blame himself, saying we would never have gone on the safari if he hadn’t said he wanted to see a lion in the wild.

‘It’s not your fault,’ I told him later, when I could talk. ‘I’m the one that said, “Let’s go”, and we weren’t even in a malaria region. How can it be your fault?’

When I thought about it, I was sure the mosquito bites I got at the airport must have been the ones that had done this to me because they were so extreme, but we’ll never know. ‘It was just really bad luck,’ I told Derek. ‘I won’t have you beating yourself up. You saved my life.’

One day a nurse tried 10 times to take blood. It was horrendous. It felt like she had a massive needle that was digging into the bone in my left wrist, and I really lost it.

‘I’m gonna call the police!’ I threatened. I called her names I’m too embarrassed to repeat, and Derek said you could hear me right down the corridor.

When the nurse failed to get the needle in my wrist she told me it would have to go into a vein in my neck.

‘No way, I’d rather die! There’s no way you’re poking that big thing in my neck.’

‘Can’t you go in higher up her arm?’ Derek suggested.

‘You’re not a medic,’ the nurse told him. ‘Please get out of this room now.’ The nurses were fed up with Derek because he was poking his nose into everything, trying to make sure I was getting the best possible treatment.

He laughed about it later, telling me they all hated him but he didn’t care what they thought. He was there for me, not to make himself popular.

I was so grateful to him that day, because the nurse did manage to raise a vein in my left arm, halfway up, and so my neck was spared. She fitted a tap to it so that the next time they needed to take blood they could just switch it on instead of using a needle.

‘I won’t have any blood left in me system because you lot are taking it all,’ I accused her, but that’s exactly what it felt like.

The minutes dragged, and a ticking clock on the wall in front of me started to drive me insane.

‘Can you hear that tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock? It’s cracking me up!’

Derek sprung to his feet and took it off the wall. When the nurse came in she went mental and kicked him out yet again, but it wasn’t long before he was back.

At last a few drops of urine appeared in the bag I was attached to. This is what we’d been waiting for. Derek took a photo of it and I started going mad at him.

‘Are you crazy? You’re worse than the paparazzi!’

‘It’s a happy moment,’ he laughed. ‘Be joyous!’

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I finally started to feel a bit better once I was passing water again. It was my third day in intensive care by now. I wasn’t eating anything yet and was being fed though a tube that pumped stuff into my arm, but I definitely felt less poorly.

Mam brought in a bottle of Victoria’s Secret perfume so I could smell something clean, and a nurse gave me a foot massage and bed bath which helped me sleep.

When I was drifting off I could hear my mam and Derek talking about the paparazzi and about
The X Factor
. Because I wasn’t at the auditions everybody knew something was wrong, and the doctors had had to give out a press release. It bothered me. I was starting to worry about what was happening outside the hospital walls.

Simon texted: ‘Thank God you’ve pulled through,’ and I found out later that Louis had been an idiot and told the press I didn’t have malaria but just wanted time off, so I hope he ate some humble pie. The girls and Will were all sending messages, but I didn’t want to see anyone but my mam and Derek. I just couldn’t have coped with visitors and I couldn’t bear anyone else seeing me looking the way I did, because I knew it would upset people.

At the end of my fourth day in intensive care I managed to breathe without the oxygen mask, and I was suddenly so ravenous I felt I could have eaten my hand. Derek got me a load of sandwiches, crisps and chocolate from the canteen, but I could only take a few mouthfuls without feeling full. Still, it meant I was now well enough to leave intensive care, although the doctors said I would need a further week of respite care.

I begged them to let me recuperate at home, but they convinced me the London Clinic was the best place for me. They made it sound like a hotel with room service, so when I got there and a nurse arrived to take a blood sample I was horrified and started kicking off and shouting all over again.

‘I thought I was just here to rest! This is just another hospital. I’ve been conned!’

I had another stupid tube put in my hand for drugs and I was under observation. Every hour someone would stick a thermometer in my ear and check my pulse by clipping a plastic thing on my finger.

‘I feel like an old woman,’ I complained to Derek. I was all frail and bony, and I hadn’t walked for days and days.

I had a craving for raw tuna and Derek got a big carry out of sushi from Nobu. I’d always hated that type of food but I tried it and loved it. I started eating tubs and tubs of Häagen-Dazs ice cream too because my blood sugar was seriously low and I needed building up, and every day I felt a little bit stronger. After about three days someone would come and get me up and try to make me walk a few yards.

‘Ashley’s here,’ my mam had said at one point, while I was still in intensive care. ‘He’s beside himself. Do you want to see him?’

‘No.’ I replied. ‘I do not want him anywhere near this hospital.’ I didn’t even think about it for half a second.

The thought of the paparazzi taking pictures of both him and Derek at the hospital made me feel physically more ill. That’s what made my decision. That worry overshadowed everything.

Now, I look back and resent how the tabloids interfered in my life to that level. It was a ridiculous decision. What if I’d have died and Ashley never got to say goodbye? However badly he had broken my heart, I would never have wanted him to suffer like that. It would have destroyed him and I wouldn’t wish that on any anybody. I just didn’t want another media circus kicking off when I was in no fit state to deal with it.

The days went by very slowly at the London Clinic, and as my brain became more and more alert, I was doing a lot of thinking. I was making connections in my head I’d never thought of before, and they disturbed me. The most profound one will always stay with me. I thought back to when I was a teenager, taking out a loan for £100 with the ‘Provi’ man so I could buy an outfit and some shoes for my
Popstars
audition.