As luck would have it, I spent the summer of 2019 researching disease outbreaks and creating a database of every recorded pandemic and multiple outbreaks of preventable diseases going back many years.
The reason was that Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO was pitching to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which had a brief out regarding its vaccination work. It was a project that took me back to 1985 and my very first job after graduating with a degree in maths and statistics, when the Wellcome Foundation handed me the task of analysing how many people globally would die from HIV. This introduced me to the power of data to make sense of the world and led me to a career that I still love, three decades on.
I moved out of healthcare and ended up working for brands including the National Lottery and Costa Coffee before joining AMV and, over the years, I learned that the principles remain the same. If you gather good data, work out what it’s telling you and then ask yourself why it’s telling you that, you will be armed with the best tools to help you achieve your goals. That applies whether you’re trying to rally support for a cancer care charity or making sure consumers buy their new widescreen TV from you and not your competitor.
But I didn’t know that these disciplines, combined with determination, teamwork and luck, would one day help save my father’s life.
Roll on 2020 when those brief news stories about a new strain of coronavirus began emerging. With my newfound understanding of pandemics and having recently recovered from a fairly serious heart attack, health matters were very much at the top of my mind. I suspected something serious was happening, so I closely monitored developments – how fast were cases growing, who was affected, which symptoms were most common, what treatments were helping?
At the same time, in the wake of the end of my 30-year marriage, I’d moved to my parents’ house, which meant that, in March 2020, when my 81-year-old father started struggling to breathe, I knew there was a good chance this was more than just a winter bug. Two days after lockdown started, Dad was taken to Watford General, where doctors were of the same opinion.
As an elderly patient with existing lung problems, they told me no matter how much he deteriorated he wouldn’t be put on a ventilator and wanted to discharge him. Dad was also begging to be allowed to leave so we took him home in the belief he only had a few days left to live and it would be better to spend that time with us rather than alone in hospital.
We just wanted one last chance to shower Dad in TLC, to make him comfortable and allow him to pass with at least some of his family by his side. But I also knew from my research that some very elderly patients were surviving Covid-19. So there was no way we were going to give up on Dad – that’s just not the kind of family we are.
The risk to my health didn’t really come into it, although I did invest a couple of quid on a cheap mask and some gloves (PPE was still a university degree back then). I disinfected the house, moved my elderly mum to the ground floor and turned their bedroom into a makeshift ICU ward. I bought a thermometer, blood pressure monitor and pulse oximeter to measure his vital signs and set up a Google spreadsheet that the family GP and a doctor friend of mine could check in real time on the cloud as I updated his vitals a few times a day on my phone.
I also turned an old iPad into an online, two-way baby monitor that allowed my brother and his grown-up children in the US, and my kids, who were studying in London, to speak to and watch over him when I slept.
I’d read about doctors in Italy having some success treating Covid-19 patients with CPAP machines and, as luck would have it, my Dad had one at home to help with his sleep apnea, which worked without needing oxygen tanks. With the GP’s blessing, we ended up using it for hours every day, as well as putting Dad in a prone position for extended periods in the hopes it would help his fluid-filled lungs get more oxygen into his body.
The first three days after he was discharged were truly frightening. Dad refused food and fluids and became dehydrated. My brother and I eventually cajoled him into promising he would at least drink some water, using the stick of a return to hospital and the carrot of feeling better. It worked and he rallied somewhat, but a week on things took a turn for the worse. The data suggested to the doctors that he’d developed a secondary lung infection, so they prescribed antibiotics for that. It seems they were right, and things once again started moving in the right direction.
Dad asked me several times whether he was going to die. As luck would have it, I’d recently watched a film called Heal on Netflix, which explores the mental aspects of serious physical illness and interviews people who believe positivity can play a big role in recovery. So I avoided using the word Covid: we told Dad he had a lung infection but he was going to be fine. On days when his vitals showed improvement, I’d make a point of showing him the charts on my mobile. If they’d worsened, we didn’t mention them. Mum knows a lot about holistic healing, and after the risk of infection had reduced, she was there performing reiki and coaxing Dad’s appetite back with his favourite food.
Meanwhile, the hospital had confirmed that his Covid-19 test had come back positive four days after we brought him home. Three weeks after he’d been discharged they phoned us to follow up. They were amazed to discover Dad was still alive. We were, they told us, very lucky.
I know, and I’m grateful for every bit of it. Honestly, no-one has ever been happier than me to hear their dad complain about a weak mug of tea – a true sign that he was getting better.
But I also know that the more you put in, the more likely it will be that luck rears its beautiful head. You get lucky when you’re determined and when you have a great team around you. You get lucky when you dare to hope.
And you also find that luck shows up more often when you’ve been paying attention. The expression is "fortune favours the bold", but I think we should also say "luck visits the curious". Maybe that’s not the kind of insight you expect from someone with a background in statistics and data. But I promise you after 30-plus years of analysing data, I’m convinced it’s true, in marketing, in business and in life.
Raj Nathwani is head of insight at Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO