Saturday, June 29, 2013

'My wife was told I was a goner': In this deeply emotional and brave interview, Andrew Marr tells for the first time how he almost died - twice

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.’.

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