Six months ago, Andrew Marr was exercising
in the mini-gym he’d rigged up in his garden shed.
Having been forced to give up running
because he’d worn out his knees, he’d bought a rowing machine.
Since he’s a keep-fit addict, he’d read a
new theory that short bursts of intensive exercise were just as good as the
long runs that used to be his favourite way of winding down when he wasn’t
broadcasting for the BBC.
So there he was, pulling away at the
rowing machine with characteristic vigour.
‘I was a classic male, trying to ignore
the fact that I was getting older,’ Marr recalls.
‘I was trying to do all the physical
things I could do when I was 20 years younger — refusing to accept I was now 53
years old.’
He says his aim was to row the equivalent
of five kilometres in 20 minutes — a target he had frustratingly failed to
reach before that day.
On this occasion, with a great sense of
achievement, he did it.
‘But the elation was soon replaced with a
very strange feeling. I was gasping and feeling sick. But I put it down to
achieving my tough goal.
‘Then I had a strange feeling in the back
of my neck and an abiding sense that I had just done something stupid because
something was wrong.’
In fact, although he didn’t realise it at
the time, he had torn his carotid artery, which caused a massive stroke.
Now, slowly recovering, Andrew is giving
his first interview about that dramatic moment when he almost died — and which
has turned his hectic life upside down.
‘The first sensation was really intense —
a sharp headache just above and behind my right eye. There was a kind of
waterfall of brightly coloured light — lots of colours, moving fast, from right
to left. They were rather beautiful, actually.
‘I thought it was a migraine, although I’d
never had one before. It never occurred to me it was a stroke.’
Thus he went back into the house and
proceeded to carry on as normal — cooking a meal for his family. But his
headache was still intense.
‘We all sat down after dinner to watch a
film — it was George Clooney in The American. Not a very good film.’
With typical Marr humour, he jokes: ‘I’m
very glad, as things worked out, that was not the last artistic work I saw on
this planet!’
As the pain in his head continued, his
wife, Jackie, became worried but Marr refused to let her call a doctor. He
thought it was just over-exertion and the pain would soon subside.
But a couple of hours later, when it didn’t go away, his wife again said she wanted to call a doctor.
‘I didn’t let her. I was still convinced
it was a bad headache. The colours in my eyes had gone, although I was still
exhausted, which I put down to the hard bout on the rowing machine. I felt ill,
but not very ill, so I took two paracetamol and went to bed.’
Of course he now realises that he should
have called a doctor at once and that if he had done, the consequences of the
massive bleed in his brain would have been less severe.
‘It would have made a big difference, but
I wouldn’t listen,’ he says. ‘I did have an uneasy feeling, like a good evening
that had gone wrong, but I can’t describe it as more than that.’
However, it was clear the next morning
that he had suffered a very serious injury, for he woke early and found that he
had fallen out of bed during the night.
‘All I remember is lying there, deeply
irritated. I tried to get up but couldn’t. On reflection I realise it was
because my left arm and leg were very weak and weren’t working.
'Eventually I managed to get up using my
other arm and leg, but it took a very long time to get off the floor. It was
only when I was trying to lift my foot to get into the shower, but couldn’t
raise it, that I thought something was up.
‘Then I looked in the mirror and saw the
reflection of a slightly hostile, strange man with a downwards droop of his
mouth. That was the moment when I realised I’d had a stroke.’
He says that, like most people, he’d read about people suffering strokes but never thought that someone who was fit and in his early 50s, like himself, would ever have one.
Immediately, his wife phoned his sister,
Lucy, who is a doctor; Lucy told her to call for an ambulance straight away.
With his left arm and leg still ‘feeling
as heavy as lead’, Marr says his initial reaction was ‘deep irritation with
myself’.
When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics
confirmed it was a stroke and Marr recalls one of them asking their colleague:
“Should we blue this one?” — in other words whether it was an emergency and
should they turn on the ambulance’s blue flashing lights and siren during the
journey to hospital.
Marr now quips: ‘That made me feel
childishly proud when they turned it on — as if I had passed a test.’
It was 7.30am and although there were a
number of hospitals he could have been taken to, the paramedics drove to
Charing Cross, which has the country’s highest survival rates for
strokes.
Marr’s wife and their two daughters, Emily
and Isabel, followed separately. (The couple also have an older son Harry, who
was at work.) By this stage, he says, although he didn’t feel afraid, he was
confused and not thinking clearly.
It is only now that he is able to reflect
properly on what happened and the possible causes. In retrospect, he says, he
remembers an incident a couple of months earlier.
‘I was in Macedonia filming the History Of
The World series and trying to do a piece to camera. I write all my own
material and then roughly memorise the script. It was something that I had done
thousands of times.
‘We were at the remote mountain site where
Alexander The Great was taught by Aristotle and I was standing in the mouth of
a cave.
‘But for the first time in my life I just
couldn’t get the words out. I had never failed to do a piece to camera before,
and I was bewildered. I was also exhausted beyond belief.’
The crew decided to delay filming and took
Marr to the nearest village, where he spent most of the rest of the day asleep
in the back of a car. The next day he felt fine and resumed filming. But, in
fact, he had suffered a minor stroke — evidence of which was found in the form
of scarring when his brain was scanned at London’s Charing Cross Hospital in
January.
Indeed, that stroke in Macedonia was not
Marr’s first. He says: ‘There was evidence of minor strokes I’d had before —
but I have no memory of them.’
So what could have triggered them?
Over-work? Heredity? Age?
Official statistics show that strokes are
the third biggest cause of death — and somebody suffers one in Britain every
five minutes.
A stroke is brain damage caused by a blocked blood vessel or bleeding in the brain and can occur at any age but is most common in over-65s (the risk approximately doubles for each decade of life after age 55).
In all, there are around 1.2 million
stroke survivors in the UK — more than half being left with disabilities that
affect their daily life.
Marr has his own thoughts as to why he had
one — or in fact several.
‘No one seems to know for certain what
causes a stroke, but having had time to think, I can now see that I had
been grossly overdoing things.
‘The filming of the History Of The World
series was gruelling — very stressful and involving huge amounts of travel.
Also, I was aware that the series hadn’t gone as well as I’d hoped. I was also
doing the Andrew Marr Show on television every Sunday, and Start The Week on
Radio Four every Monday. I was writing a book, too.
‘It had also been easily the most
stressful time of my personal life — and entirely my own fault.’
He is referring to the turmoil in his
marriage caused by his extra-marital affair with another journalist, which he
initially tried to keep secret by the use of a super-injunction.
At the time, he believed he had fathered a
child with the other woman, but a DNA test eventually showed he was not the
girl’s father. He then said he was ‘embarrassed’ by the injunction, and stopped
seeking to prevent the story being published.
Marr says overwork must have been a key contributory factor to his stroke.
‘I was working too hard. No one made me do
it, that’s just the way I am.
‘I’m a gulper, a gobbler-down of life. I
wolf experiences down and, that year, I pushed my body and my mind too hard and
far.’
If those were the background conditions,
then the specific trigger is easier to pinpoint.
‘As well as my workload and family life, I
was up at 6.30 most mornings running around Richmond Park. I’d done that for 30
years, it helped relieve the stress and I loved it.
‘But some years ago I snapped my Achilles
tendon. That was a warning my legs were giving up on me.
‘The doctor said I had the heart of a
35-year-old but the knees of a 70-year-old and I had to give up running. It was
then that I bought the rowing machine.’
Glasgow-born Marr, who has been a
newspaper editor as well as the BBC’s political editor, is now undergoing
physiotherapy, and is eager to return to television.
For the past month, he has been staying
during the week in a small hotel near the Neurological Hospital at Queen Square
in Bloomsbury, London, for intensive rehab for his left arm.
At weekends he’s back at his home in East
Sheen, where we are sitting in the rambling garden — within view of the shed
where he suffered that massive stroke.
The rowing machine has since been removed
and the shed, where he wrote his TV series, is more of a study. It’s filled
with his paintings and books, but he doesn’t venture down there much now.
He walks with an awkward gait because the
stroke damaged both his left arm and leg, the latter recovering more quickly.
He is able to pour us each a glass of
wine, and grabs a packet of mini poppadoms to snack on before returning to his
favourite chair.
Thankfully, the stroke hit the left side
of his brain — which means his memory and speech are not impaired. The most
noticeable difference is that his left arm is not working properly yet, and he
wears a brace on his left ankle to stop his foot from flopping when he walks.
Marr likens himself to a building that is
undergoing major refurbishment, with parts of its structure in a very delicate
condition.
‘My left arm functions mainly as a kind of
wild, malign hook, seizing and knocking over cups, cutlery, plates and so on,
with no reference to its owner’s dignity or comfort.
‘Making it to the bathroom first thing in
the morning is at least as difficult as skiing down an icy black run, with poor
visibility.’
However, despite such problems, that
characteristic Andrew Marr smile plays about his lips as he recalls the
aftermath of his collapse.
The first few days in intensive care, he
says, were a blur. Only later was he told by doctors that he almost died twice,
and that his wife had been told to expect the worst.
‘I vaguely remember arriving in the
hyper-acute stroke unit, then going to theatre for a brain scan.’
The medical staff injected dye into his
bloodstream so that when he was X-rayed they could tell how well the blood was
flowing into certain areas.
Marr says: ‘It wasn’t enormously pleasant.
It felt like having a cup of hot tea poured into my brain.’
He also remembers several consultants
standing around him, debating whether to operate immediately to remove a clot
in his artery, or to give him clot-busting drugs which one of them told him
could have ‘catastrophic side-effects’.
‘They inserted a tube into the artery via
my groin, up through my aorta and into the carotid artery in my neck. But then
they decided it was too dangerous to operate.’
Instead, they decided to treat him with drugs.
‘There is no doubt they saved my life, but
there was a second bleed into my brain. My condition seemed to be very much
touch-and-go.
‘I wouldn’t know this until later, but
Jackie was twice given the clear impression that I was a goner. If I was very
lucky, I would be a vegetable, unable to move, see, hear or speak.’
Such crises can bring couples together —
or break them apart. For Andrew and Jackie, it has been the former.
From the moment he collapsed, Jackie
hardly left his side. She has been next to him every morning when he wakes, and
every night when he falls asleep.
Of one thing he is adamant.
‘Jackie saved my life. Without her, I
wouldn’t be here.
‘It’s partly because she fought for me;
she was my tireless advocate in the hospital to get the right treatment.
‘Jackie was very strongly affected by what
happened to me. In many ways, it was much more of a shock for her than it was
for me since I hadn’t realised how close I was to dying.
‘She was very brave and very sensitive in
not telling me everything until I was stronger. And then she really carried me.
She was on the case the whole time, overseeing food and keeping my morale up.
‘She never wavered in assuming that I
would make a full recovery and get back to work. She immediately dropped
everything — including her column at The Guardian — while she was looking after
me.
‘She has been completely calming and
reassuring, as well as a great practical carer, and the whole experience
has brought us more closely together.’
Their children rallied round, too,
returning from university and school to help — even, Marr says, when they had
‘much more exciting things to do’. He adds: ‘I don’t think I could have got
through half as well as I have without them.’
Friends who have visited him since his
stroke all say they have witnessed no self-pity.
Despite his physical problems, his
intelligence has not been dimmed one iota, nor has he lost the ability to
discuss with friends the great issues of the day over a glass of wine and good
food.
I have known Andrew Marr for many years,
and he is not a man given to showing his emotions, let alone to talking about
them.
He says: ‘Some people told me after what
happened that I had to express my emotions — that I had to cry and to let it
out. Perhaps it’s my Presbyterian upbringing, but there were no tears from me —
even though there were many from others.
‘I remember thinking that if I’d allowed
myself to cry, who knows where it would stop. There are few things less
attractive than self-pity.
‘I was never angry and I never asked: “Why
did it happen to me?”
‘In hospital, I was surrounded by people
in far worse situations than I was. They were all very brave, very tough and
very cheerful. Being around people like that is a great antidote to self-pity.
‘In any case, I have had a very lucky
life. It would have been a bit pathetic to collapse at the first bit of bad
luck.’.
