Catholic Medical Quarterly Volume 75(4) November 2025
The Across Charity- Making the impossible possible
Dr Adrian Treloar
In
October 2022, while cycling to Sunday Mass, my
wife Josephine suffered a cardiac arrest. I found her 3 minutes
later lying face down and lifeless on the verge of the road. I
turned her over and “did” the resus. A nurse stopped to help
and twenty minutes later the paramedic got there. Ambulances, police cars
and even the helicopter came. Imagine my relief when, after
twenty minutes the defib trace showed ventricular fibrillation and the
machine advised shocking her. But sadly the first five shocks did not
restore a cardiac output.
It was to be 43 minutes, 6 cardioversions and two shots of amiodarone before cardiac output was restored.
But very happily, my beautiful and precious wife survived, albeit not without a severe brain injury. She remains verity unwell- she cannot walk, talk, sit or stand and she is tube fed. The is tetraplegic. But she is my delight, mother of our 8 children and 19 grandchildren. I am so glad, blessed to be and privileged to be her carer.
Early on in such an illness, you don’t think about going to Lourdes. But after five months (she was too unwell for rehab) she was sent home and has been home for 2½ years now. She remains tetraplegic with severe rigidity in all four limbs.
But
once we were home, I naturally thought of Lourdes. With her healing
pressure sores, tube feeding, needing an airflow mattress and
24 hr care Lourdes became a yearning, but remained seemingly impossible.
Eventually, I rang the Across charity and, tearfully, described her
scale of her needs and disability. Their senior nurse rang me back. “can
you do it?” I asked. “Oh yes” came the reply.
The
Jumbulance has five stretcher berths, airflow mattresses on the stretcher,
a hoist in and out of the Ambulance, and a hoist for transfer to and
from wheelchairs. There is a track record of taking the most
severely disabled people to Lourdes.
And so Josephine and I (who last went with the Across as group doctors in 1985) set off on an adventure to the south of France. More on this in the February edition. But we got there, we washed in the water, prayed and we received the blessing of the sick at Benediction. Just as Our Lady wanted. And we even got to the high Pyrenees just 2 miles from the Spanish border. The impossible was done!
Across truly do make the impossible possible. None of what the Across do can be done without money. And taking the very sick and frail to Lourdes is absolutely what we, in the CMA, want to see. And its properly set up, professionally run with the safety of vulnerable people at the heart of all they do. They have a 50 year history of doing this. There is an appeal in this edition of the CMQ for the Across. They take the sick, with doctors and nurses to Lourdes and deserve the CMA’s support. Please do be generous.
Please do support the Across