Original subtitles

This episode was filmed before the coronavirus pandemic.

The world might feel a bit more chaotic and a bit more divided.

It's easy to forget sometimes that there are constants.

Your home's still your home, your family's still your family,

and all the structures of our society are still there

to look after you if you need it.

Here we go.

Adult male, code red trauma. Ten minutes.

Activate the helipad.

Heart rate 200.

Open your eyes. Open your eyes.

Hello, A&E, can I help?

St George's, London.

It's all going to kick off now.

One of Britain's busiest A&E departments.

We'll carry on CPR.

Goodness me, it's all happening, isn't it?

Can you say, "Ah!"

A place where life...

Would you say I was fit, doctor? Honestly, I think I'm quite fit.

...love...

...and loss...

Oh, mum. I'm so sorry.

...unfold every single day.

For every bad thing that you see,

there is something equally wonderful out there.

Filmed across one 24-hour period,

these are the stories of a nation and its health service.

I thought I was going to die. You're definitely not going to die.

You've got too many good doctors and nurses here.

Whatever happens, it's going to be OK.

I love you.

Growing up, I'd always felt very protected by my mum.

There were a lot of circumstances that life threw at us,

but we always knew that Mum would make the right decision,

and everything would be fine...

...because Mum was there.

She protected us from the outside world,

but she has had a very, very difficult life.

PHONE RINGS

Hello, George's?

Yep.

SIREN WAILS

Yeah. Lovely. How long?

Thanks, bye.

Adult female trauma, eight minutes.

An 82-year-old woman is being rushed to St George's

after she fell and sustained an open fracture.

That's all we know, is it's an open tib fib? OK.

Consultant Melissa is preparing the trauma team

for the patient's arrival.

So an open fracture, sometimes called a compound fracture as well,

is basically when there's a wound.

Sometimes it means there's bone sticking out,

but if it's both bones that hold up your lower leg that are broken,

then it's going to be more complicated to fix,

it's going to mean it's harder to get you to walk on it again.

The patient's daughter is travelling with her in the ambulance.

On that day, I was at work.

There was a text from my husband that said my mum's had a fall.

She was out with the dog in the middle of a big field.

He said, "Yeah, it's quite bad, there's blood."

And when I arrived on the scene, my stomach absolutely flipped.

Ready, steady, slide.

SHE GROANS IN PAIN

Great, let's get handover.

Let's get her into a gown,

and can we just get proper hospital gown, blankets, Bair Hugger as well,

she's clearly cold, and get her temperature.

Let's do that as a priority.

Sure.

That's not nice. No, it's really nasty.

No.

Mm-hmm.

Sorry.

Susan, I've got some painkillers for you.

You can just use it whenever you're in pain. Thank you. Yeah?

So, what we need to do first

is get that ankle just in a better position. Have you seen it?

It's obviously a very nasty break. Looked horrible.

Yeah, it's pretty nasty, I'm sorry.

82-year-old Susan has sustained an open fracture

after falling while walking her dog.

I think she's going to need something more than Penthrox.

Why don't we just draw up some ketamine, then? Works for me.

Just some ketamine, yeah. Thanks.

Can we get 220?

Have you got any questions at the moment?

Fine, OK.

Doctors must now attempt to reset Susan's fractured ankle.

Just going to give you some medication to make you sleepy, OK?

We've got all the kit we need for plaster.

From the airway perspective,

are we pre-oxygenating her while she's... Yeah. We're using ketamine?

Susan, how are you doing?

Are you still awake?

You guys happy? Shall we just get on with it?

So, when we reduce a fracture or a dislocation,

we want to get that leg in a better position straightaway.

Well done, they're just pulling your ankle out, you're doing really well.

Well done.

Well done, Susan.

It's only a temporary move,

but the sooner it's in a normal position,

the lower the risk of complications.

Even a little cut in our skin could be dangerous,

and certainly if your bone gets bacterial infection,

that can be very, very serious, even life-threatening.

Susan, how are you doing?

You OK?

Still pretty sleepy.

Susan's daughter, Megan, has arrived in Resus.

Hello, are you Susan's daughter?

Susan, we've got a visitor for you.

Yeah?

I'm tempted to get a takeaway when we get back.

Try that new Chinese place.

Sometimes you just can't say no to buy one, get one free.

Yeah, I know. It's such a good deal.

We can do. The hot one's really nice, might get that. Large hot.

Yeah, the chilli one. The large Hot One.

Side of dough balls. Isn't it called The Hot One?

Yeah, it's all the vegetable, hot pepper.

This day has suddenly turned around.

SHE MUTTERS

Why don't we text each other? No, I'm texting my friends.

Oh, that's a diss, man.

14-year-old Tilly has been brought to A&E by her mum, Shelley,

after injuring her ankle.

Don't, makes me feel ill. It's not working. It's not working.

You mean it doesn't go that way? Don't do it, then.

If it doesn't go, don't try and force it. Ow!

Just let them do all the poking about.

Ugh. I don't want people poking at my feet.

Whoopee.

(Oming!

Hi.

Takes a little bit longer at the moment.

Mum.

I was doing gymnastics yesterday,

and I went over the vault and landed weirdly on my ankle.

It's swollen and it hurts.

It went like that, like bent round.

Yeah. But I can't walk quite normally. Bit twisted.

Generally very healthy.

Mum and mum.

'Tilly is my firstborn.'

She came out all tiny and long and noisy.

Lisa, my partner, had Tilly biologically

but, as I always say, I held her first, therefore she's mine!

Um, no.

I met Lisa at work into 2001.

She came to work at the hospital I was working in.

They do say, don't they, that people meet their future partners at work.

It's true.

No.

On one of our first dates, we were walking down the road,

and a spider walked across in front of me,

and I am terrified of spiders.

And Lisa picked it up and started talking to it,

and I thought, "Hmm, this one's a keeper."

I can remember being a teenager and thinking,

"l never want to have kids, I never want to have kids."

When I came out to my mum,

cos that's what you were supposed to do in the 90s, you had to come out,

she cried, and I think that was because she didn't think

that she'd have grandchildren,

and I think that was quite a sorrow for her, probably.

And maybe I thought that, as well.

I think, I knew that Lisa wanted to have children,

and it made me seriously consider whether or not I did,

and it isn't something that just sort of randomly happens to you.

No. No.

Yeah, a little bit, like, here.

When we first found out she was pregnant, we were just overjoyed,

absolutely overjoyed.

And you know when you're bursting, and you want to tell everyone

that you're having a baby,

and they don't necessarily react in the way that you're expecting.

And they start wondering in your head, "How did that happen?"

When Lisa was pregnant, I used to spend a lot of time

playing music to her bump,

and we brought a stethoscope so I could listen, but,

for me, when you're sitting there, you're on the side of it,

you just sort of feel a little bit left out, unintentionally.

To all intents and purposes, you're about as useful as a man.

No.

And I knew that I wanted to have a baby, as well.

Why are they all in there?

This is why we can't have nice things, cos people ruin them.

These go in the top drawer.

This is stressing me out. Yeah, I'll sort it.

PHONE RINGS

SIREN WAILS

SIRENS WAIL

An 86-year-old man is being rushed to St George's

after having a suspected stroke.

Leading the case is stroke doctor Xuya.

Stroke needs a specialist team because it's a condition

that needs to be recognised very quickly.

It can be life-threatening.

The man's daughter is on her way to the hospital.

To get a call in the afternoon from my mum,

I knew it was serious.

And she said to rush.

My father had had a fall

and he couldn't move his right arm,

and she said to me, "l think he's had a stroke, but I don't know."

SIREN WAILS

On the way to the hospital, I was praying...

to God, I was thinking, "Please, let him be OK."

Hello, good evening.

Nice to meet you.

And his speech seems to be quite slurred,

but he does have a new bump on the back of his head.

That all right? Thank you.

Filippo, I'm just going to look at your head, OK?

OK. Could you lift this arm up, could you keep that arm up?

Well done.

Can you lift this arm up? Lift it up?

Keep it “P?

Yeah? Do you know that?

It is quite important to do the brain scan without delay.

It will tell us if it is a stroke,

and whether the patient is a candidate for surgery or not.

I couldn't imagine my life without my father.

I love my father very much.

And the thought of never seeing him again...

...is a pain you'd have to learn to cope with.

Filippo, we're just going to have a scan of your head.

Do you have any allergies at all, sir?

86-year-old Filippo is being given an urgent CT scan.

Doctors suspect he may have suffered a life-threatening stroke.

I think we just need a CT, plain CT. Plain CT, OK.

Keep very still, sir, don't move your head.

If it is bleeding in the brain,

it will show a big white blob of blood on the scan.

It is very easy to see.

Hi, good afternoon, it's Alex calling from Resus.

We've got a lady who's booked for an ankle, chest and pelvic x-ray.

Susan is being sent for an x-ray

to assess the extent of her fracture,

after she fell while walking her dog.

I do remember, as a seven-year-old pushing on for eight,

really, really loving life.

Mum had met my stepfather, and I think we liked him a lot, initially.

Just that one, yeah.

He had very much two personas,

so when he was socialising, or when there were other people there,

he was very, very jovial, and he laughed a lot, and so on,

but then he had a really, really nasty way about him.

He'd be very negative all the time and also very controlling of her.

Most evenings he would start drinking.

And that was when things started to be really bad.

There was always just a slight frisson of possibility of, erm,

that there might be violence.

And one night he was drunk and he threw my mother out into the rain,

and he said, "Get out, and take your filthy brats with you."

And that was one of the few times I ever saw her cry.

Okey dokey. Back in.

Hello. You all right?

How are you feeling?

SHE SIGHS Yeah.

I used to feel sort of sorry for her that she had to live with that,

and sort of share a room with him and share a bed with him,

and that was her life and he was her life partner.

I think she was just doing the best she could at the time.

I think, looking back now, she says she wishes that she'd left.

But she didn't have a lot of options.

Hello. Hi. You've got a nasty ankle break.

It is pretty horrible.

But the orthopaedic team have come

and they've put it back into alignment, which is good.

We've taken some x-rays, but they are going to need to operate on you.

Not really.

At that moment, if I could have had any wish,

it would have been for us to be able to leave

and go back to how things were.

HE YAWNS

Do you remember that thing where they fed people dogs' milk

and they thought it was lovely?

They were like, "Eww!"

Why a cow, as well, and not...

A donkey. Do you get donkey milk? I'm sure you can.

You can get any milk, can't you?

It'd make more sense to have, like, ape milk or monkey milk,

cos they're closer to humans than a cow.

Give me some more interesting news, please.

Do you want me to carry them for you? Your shoesies.

Yeah, you just hop.

Tilly has been given an x-ray after injuring her ankle.

Are you...

Are you leaning on it?

Do you want to sit on this side, then you can lean it on me?

Sit on this side. Makes me uncomfortable.

There you go.

You're so feistily independent, aren't you?

It's true! To your own detriment, sometimes.

Yes, detriment, darling.

Not.

So, Tilly was born in May, 2005.

But I knew that I wanted to give birth, as well.

It was important to me. I hadn't really realised...

perhaps how important it would be,

and, yeah, I really, really loved being pregnant.

Tilly? Hi, come through. I'll bring your shoes.

Come in.

Eadie was born in December.

I gave birth here.

Erm, so... In this house.

Eadie likes to say, "l was born under the Christmas tree!"

And she was, so every year we have to have the Christmas tree

up and ready by the 16th,

because that's the day she was born underneath it.

So, x-ray's...

fine, so that is your two bones in your leg.

All right? This is the one that comes all the way down.

You see that bump there? That's your bump at your ankle.

Now, you're tender about there, right?

So, as you can see, that is not a crack,

that's called your growth plate, that's where your bones grow from.

And I don't think there's any problem with that.

Some people do struggle to... "What, you've got two mums?"

When the kids were little, they'd come home and say,

"Someone said, how can you have two mums? You can't have two mums."

I'd be, "But you do." She'd go, "Oh, yeah."

Generally, a lot of kids have a problem understanding relationships.

Fine, any questions? Tubigrip, shall we put one of those on?

No, we went away from that a long time ago. Yeah.

Fell out of favour. Fell out of favour a long time ago. OK.

We have very frank, open conversations

about what makes our family up, why our family's like that.

In terms of getting about?

In terms of getting about, so you're able to walk,

but what I would do is minimise how much you're doing in a day

for the first few days at least, and just wear comfortable trainers.

I asked myself that question quite a lot,

what does it mean to me to be a good mum? Not somebody else,

cos I can't be somebody else's version of a good mum, only mine.

All right. Thank you very much. Take care. Cheers, bye.

All kids really want is to feel loved, cared for,

understood, considered...

...and any gender can do that.

Cheers. See you later, take care. Bye.

Doctors have now received the full report from Filippo's CT scan,

revealing a significant bleed on the brain.

His daughters Maria and Connie and daughter-in-law Lisa

are waiting in the relatives' room.

Is it a lot of bleeding on the brain, or is it small?

So whereabouts on the brain?

Which makes sense with the right...

He has had a stroke?

So he'll definitely be staying in?

Do you want to come over? Yeah.

Papa!

No, they have to look at...

What if you fall down again in the night and really hurt yourself?

HE WHIMPERS

Shh, shh.

My father was very happy when I got married.

We had our first dance together.

It was an Italian traditional song and my father cried,

and he literally could not stop crying with joy.

He's heavy.

I remember telling my father that I was pregnant,

and he didn't believe me at first.

And then I said, "No, Dad, I really, really am."

And he was over the moon.

The first granddaughter, which he spoiled very much.

My father was happy when he found out that I was pregnant again.

That excitement, waiting for the baby, you've got everything ready.

I had already bought an outfit,

knowing that his name was going to be Antonio.

I wanted it to be a surprise.

He doesn't realise that he can't, he's had a stroke, he doesn't...

He wants to go home.

At dead on nine months,

couldn't feel him move anymore in the evening.

I woke up in the morning, he still wasn't moving.

My son had no more fluid around him and compressed his umbilical cord.

In the end, he suffocated and died.

But I had to give birth

knowing that I was giving birth to a dead child.

I felt as if I'd been shot,

and left this big hole.

Because you've carried life for nine months,

you feel them growing, you feel them kicking.

It looks like he's falling on one side.

Ah! Thank you.

'It hit my father very hard.'

He was absolutely...

beside himself.

My father just comforted me as much as possible, he stayed with me.

And there were times that he couldn't speak about it,

because the memories just made him more upset.

Other than your ankle, did you have any pain anywhere else?

No, everything else feels all right? OK, perfect.

OK, we'll give her some anti-sickness.

83-year-old Susan has sustained a major fracture to her ankle.

Doctors are preparing her for emergency surgery.

Hello, I'm the orthopaedic, or the bone doctor.

There is a break in the bone and it needs fixation.

In such an operation, the first risk is the risk of infection,

and because you have a wound already,

so the risk of infection is a little bit higher, OK?

The other risk is the risk that the bones do not heal.

OK? Er...

Any questions for me?

I know. I'll go and check with the theatre,

make sure everything is ready, and we'll call her anytime soon.

Really?

It did look rather awful.

That was last night.

No.

No. Why?

They are ready up in theatres, all right?

We're going to get you upstairs, get that leg sorted as soon as we can,

all right?

OK.

Thank you.

Hello, darling. Yeah, he's definitely had a stroke.

He can't move his right side at all, his leg or his arm,

so he doesn't want to stay, he wants to go home,

but he doesn't realise that he's had a stroke.

Can you lift your arm? Lift your arms up.

Filippo is being monitored

after suffering a serious stroke earlier today.

Doctors are assessing whether he may need surgery.

I'll take you up.

My father was worried when I got pregnant a third time,

because he was worried for me, knowing that I'd lost my son.

His grandson.

But Claudia was born a year later,

bang on Antonio's anniversary.

Same time, same place,

I have Claudia.

It helped his grieving process knowing that...

he felt that God had taken one child and then replaced with another.

And that she was healthy. He was happy.

Filippo, can I have a listen of your heart and the chest?

Good, thank you.

He's not? No.

Factors like how old the patient is,

that will tell us how likely they're going to recover from surgery.

If someone is already quite frail,

then they may not survive the general anaesthetic.

And it's always very hard to accept the fact,

you know, that you can't help the patient.

Is that because of his heart?

So he can't have any surgery?

OK.

S0 with the warfarin that you're going to reverse it,

that will reduce the bleeding on the brain?

Yeah, you just get the blood back to normal thickness very quickly,

so hopefully... And that will drain it from the brain?

My dad lived his life to the full.

He'd go to weddings and he'd be the first one up dancing,

"Not even the bride and groom have got up yet!"

"Ah, shut up," he used to say, "l get up, I dance, I love life!"

You know, he was very much...

SHE SIGHS ..such full of life.

Filippo, the last medication now, OK?

Then they'll take you up to the ward.

MARIA TRANSLATES

I'm not that bad.

He said, "l don't believe you!"

Bless him!

Filippo will now be transferred to an acute stroke unit

where doctors can continue to monitor him.

My biggest fear in a major event like that in somebody of her age

was that it would precipitate a downward slide

and a loss of her independence.

I know that in my early life I made some very bad choices.

I think things are so much freer now.

I would say it's very important to have family around,

especially when you're older.

When the children were smaller, I helped a lot.

But I think now it's swung quite severely the other way!

SHE LAUGHS

Because she has helped me a lot through it.

I just thought, it's going to be a long road to recovery,

it's going to be hard, it's going to be difficult,

and we're going to need to make lots of changes to accommodate him.

I remember at the hospital, my father said to me,

"Please, take me home, I don't want to stay."

I said, "Dad, I can't do that."

He said, "No, please, take me home."

I feel bad, because...

...he wanted to come home.

The nurses said they were preparing my father

and getting ready for the night...

...and then we could hear the alarm bells ringing.

SHE SNIFFLES

And we saw the nurses running, and they ran right past us.

Went into my father's room.

So we ran to the room.

I was with him when he passed.

I was with him when he took his last breath.

I'm glad I was there to tell him...

how much we all loved him.

To tell him that all his grandchildren are here,

I mentioned them all,

and I wanted him to pass knowing that...

we were all here.

Do you sleep quite well at night?

Yes, cos my son talks a lot as well and he sleeps very well.

LAUGHTER

PHONE RINGS Hello, St George's?

Fall downstairs, last seen two days ago.

GROANING

PHONE RINGS Adult trauma call, ETA 12 minutes.

There was blood everywhere. I thought that was it.

An unexpected rise in the patient's heart rate

in itself can be life-threatening.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media