by Melanie Reid
A family game from childhood haunted me, the rhyme shimmying around in my head. It had come from my mother, who played it in Northern Ireland in the 1920s on the way to picnics on the beach, sometimes Tyrella, sometimes Ballywalter. We played it too, obediently, on the back seat of the car. You crossed two fingers from one hand, opened a little, over the two fingers on the other hand, creating a neat, square, inviting hole in the middle. As you offered the gap to the person next to you, you chanted:
Put your finger in the crow’s nest
The crow’s not at home
He’s gone to Ballywalter to gather shelly stones …
And then, squeezing on the other person’s finger, you shouted:
He’s coming
He’s coming
He’s nipping!
He’s nipping!
And you squeezed and squeezed, and held them, trapped tight by the finger, until they squealed for mercy.
At one of the ward rounds, in a window of comparative sanity, I remember meeting my consultant for the first time. Mariel Purcell was young, a tall cool stylish Irishwoman, with long dark hair she wore loose. She wore sassy dresses and high heels. ‘We are keeping you on the ventilator,’ she told me. ‘You have a lung infection and we are giving you antibiotics.’ Later, when I was off the ventilator, she was more expansive. It was pneumonia. I was strangely thrilled, in the way you are when you’re a kid and you’re going to have something to boast about when you go back to school. It was like being eight again, falling off roller skates and cracking a bone in your wrist. But at that point I was just frustrated. I’m fine, I tried to tell her with my eyes. The purgatory of the ventilator jammed in my mouth was becoming unbearable. I wanted it taken out. I pleaded with the nurses on my alphabet card. W-H-E-N? T-O-D-A-Y? At the weekend, they said. Soon. They lied. Lied repeatedly and prodigiously. The weekend never came. Day followed day. I inhabited some lost bit of space, some cul-de-sac on the dark side, all alone, floating along in my own ghastly spaceship of tubes and sighs. Beep-beep-debeepbeep. Beep-beep-debeepbeep.
I remember when they took the ventilator out – there was an unpleasant rippling sensation as the corrugated ridges of the tube were withdrawn from my throat, I had a fleeting vision of those perforated blue drainage pipes, the kind you dig into the soil of your garden. Then it was over and I was drawing in my own air, could talk again. My jaw and my ears ached, despite the morphine, my tongue so dry and fat I was barely decipherable. I pleaded for a drink, but they refused: it was still too dangerous for me to try swallowing. At one point Christine moved across my line of vision, dragging a machine on wheels.
‘You don’t know this, but today is a very good day, a very significant day for you.’
I looked quizzical.
She smiled her shy smile. ‘I’m taking the ventilator away from your bed space. You’re making real progress.’
At some point during that time, on a morning ward round, the doctors clustered inside the curtains round my bed and asked to do an anal examination. What I didn’t know was that this was the test to see how paralysed I was. The spinal cord ends in the perineal area, your bottom, and if you have sensation in your anus, it indicates how badly injured your spine is.
I was rolled on my side and they stood behind me. Can you feel that? Can you clench your bottom? No, I said. Nothing. They were silent, grave. I decided, in my morphine haze, to be a good hostess and fill the silence to cover up any embarrassment. After all, my body was the party, wasn’t it? ‘That’s the nicest anal examination I’ve ever had,’ I said in a jolly more-tea-vicar sort of voice, trying to lighten the atmosphere, turning my head so I could grin at them. I didn’t understand why they didn’t smile back.
The severity of a spinal injury is measured on a scale developed by the American Spinal Injury Association – the ASIA impairment scale. If you are Asia A, you’re completely buggered, basically: you have no power or sensation preserved below the injury to your spine. You will not recover function. Asia B, you have sensory feeling below the injury but your muscles don’t work. Asia C, some muscles do work but they’re very weak. Asia Ds have muscles, at least half of which have reasonable strength and they can walk. And Asia Es, lucky creatures, are normal healthy people.
I was diagnosed Asia A. Completely buggered. They didn’t tell me that. Not then.
Only the ward was real. My other life had receded to some distant place. My sanity, my compensation, was to pretend I was indeed that war correspondent on the front line, compelled to start recording this crazy story, to make sense of it to myself. Besides, it was good copy. I was finding things quite fascinating, in a rather grotesque way. By writing, I figured, I could justify my absence to my bosses at my newspaper, The Times. It’s peculiar how much of a priority this felt at the time – a measure, I suppose, of my desperate determination to hold onto something familiar and re-establish some control. Work could save me, keep me viable. At the same time, it represented escape from emotional anguish. Very few things made chronological sense to me. Unbeknownst to me, Dave came every day. Other visitors were discouraged by the hospital and he was like a Rottweiler keeping people at bay. Later I heard some of the details of events outside: Dougie had been away on an Easter ski trip in the Alps and apparently it took him a couple of days to get home; his mates performed a heroic drama-filled dash to get him to Geneva. I honestly don’t remember the moment when I first saw him at my bedside; grief and morphine have kindly erased the memory of the encounter. I hope he has forgotten too: but even now, years later, I am unable to ask him, in case I reawaken the pain. In some dark corner, I have a terrible memory of trying to give him a thumbs-up gesture with my right hand as he left, and realising with shock that I couldn’t; my thumb wouldn’t move – simultaneously realising that he had perceived the same thing. At the time I was aware only of the unbearable hurt I had inflicted on my child … and him being extraordinarily brave and composed and trying to comfort me.
Dougie’s best friends from university, I much later discovered, came to stay at our home with him to comfort him during the first couple of weeks. I thought that was wonderful, that he had friends as fine as that. He was always more of a doer than a dreamer and I realised after my calamity that he was happiest when l asked him to do practical things; it was welcome distraction. When he knew I wanted to record what was happening to me, he brought in his Dictaphone. After he had gone I asked the nurses to place it beside me on the pillow and switch it on. I spent half an hour or so rambling gently about how I’d got here, trying to be professional, coherent. I had a job to do. A job to try and keep. I expressed anger at my own stupidity in falling off. Then I ran out of energy and the machine kept running, recording my breathing and the voices of the visitors in the bay opposite mine. Perhaps in my head that corner of the ward was still a curry shop at the time, or maybe by then I was at the stage of being convinced that a crowd of football casuals had got in and were trying to steal from my bedside cabinet. Shimmying between sanity and madness, I managed to summon the wit to ask a passing nurse to hit the off switch.
The next day Dougie took the Dictaphone and promised to email the recording to London.
They must have transcribed it and put something in the paper because at one point Su Pollard phoned the ward to talk to me, which was precisely the moment I knew my spaceship had landed on another planet. Su Pollard, for those under forty, is a wacky English character actress best known for a sitcom in the 1980s called Hi-de-Hi, which I had been aware of, as a young twenty-something, as a piece of cheesy middle-brow telly for my parents’ generation. A totem of its time, like Morecambe and Wise. Su is famous for eccentrically outsize glasses and a funny voice. Good-humoured Eighties kitsch. I had never met her in my life.
‘Call for you,’ said a nurse, holding the phone, eyebrows raised, a rather amused expression. ‘It’s Su Pollard.’
It must be a morphine moment. She would drift away in a minute.
‘THE Su Pollard?’ I said.
; ‘Sounds like her.’
‘But I don’t know her.’
‘It’s you she asked to speak to.’
Too random. Had to be opiates. The nurse held the phone to my ear and I had a short, apparently lucid conversation with someone who sounded exactly like the hapless holiday camp chalet maid Peggy Ollerenshaw whom I’d occasionally seen on TV thirty years ago.
Of all the people I least expected to discuss my plight with, it was Peggy Ollerenshaw. (© Getty Images/United News/Popperfoto/Contributor)
‘Your article moved me so much I had to phone you and speak to you. You’re very brave and I send you lots of love,’ she said.
‘That’s really sweet of you,’ I said lamely.
‘I’m rooting for you.’
‘Thank you.’
I still don’t know if it really happened or not.
At night, I experiment with the only bit of my body that still answers me, that has a glimmer of feeling. My right hand, weak and floppy and fast becoming numb, fumbles down past layers of exhausting obstacles, past sheets and tubes and swaddling gowns to reach the bare skin of my hip. Exploring in the dark. The one-way sensation of touching my own warm skin, and feeling nothing back, is most peculiar, as if it is an alien I am attached to. My fingers are not giving me trustworthy signals, because their nerve connections are damaged too, and retreating further into shock. What’s so devastating is that the skin I touch feels fleecy, beautiful, devastating; all these things at the same time. Because it belongs to me but it doesn’t belong to me. It’s someone else’s; it’s like reaching down and touching your lover’s body in the night. How peculiar. Four-fifths of my body has divorced me, but it’s still attached to me. I’m two people – me and the rest of me. I am eerily still … but inside I’m screaming and waving. I’m helpless as a beetle on its back, except my legs don’t even wave to express it. My name, it would seem, is still Melanie and I am a doubly-incontinent tetraplegic. Where do I go from here, seeing I have already blurted out something about Switzerland and Dr Purcell didn’t respond?
The movie Trainspotting was really accurate, you know. The stuff about coming off morphine, when your body is a seething rats’ nest and nothing will calm it. Although I didn’t realise what was happening at the time, because I didn’t even know I had been on morphine. All I knew was that it felt worse than anything I’d ever experienced. Even though my body was paralysed and insensate, I felt that it was jangling all over, itching, shivering – compelling me to cry out for relief, for death, for anything to make it stop. Inside my brain, restless leg syndrome multiplied a million times, ants crawled inside my skin, devouring me from within. One vivid day I became convinced my bedding was soaked. The mattress and bottom sheet were sloshing in icy water: I was certain I was freezing alive, shivering, nagging for more blankets.
‘I can’t give you any more blankets,’ said the nurse. ‘You’re not cold.’
‘Please, I’m freezing,’ I wheedled. ‘Please. Be kind.’
‘Kind?’ she said. ‘Heart like a swinging brick, me.’
She wasn’t joking. She was on duty one weekend morning when they were desperately short-staffed – they often were at weekends – and running very late, taking hours it seemed to me to attend to each of us high-dependency patients in turn, log-rolling us to wash us. The morphine withdrawal must have been at its peak, for I started crying out from the sensations in my head. Outwardly motionless on the bed, I was inwardly consumed by chemical distress and bewilderment. I could see them log-rolling someone else in the distance; although I must have been imagining it, because the curtains were always closed when they were washing someone. The room kept changing in shape. I shouted again but still no one came. Of all I had experienced after my accident, in its totality, that was my most desperate lonely moment, the point when I couldn’t go on. Like someone near death, my instinct was to shout for my mother. But she was dead, I knew that, so I shouted for my sister. She lived in France and I had not yet seen her, but I had regressed to childhood; my big sister would make it better. Lindsay would make them help me.
‘What d’you want?’
It was Swinging Brick and she was pissed off.
‘I feel awful,’ I said. ‘Please …’
‘We’re busy with other patients. We’ll get to you when we can.’
I never cried out again.
Lots of other patients vocalised their distress; I listened jealously to them screaming and yelling, calling out repeatedly. I was too repressed, too polite. Posh girl in bedlam. It’s only funny now, much later. How I used to envy them their release, these unseen uninhibited souls who raged aloud, who set loose their pain upon the world at large. I wished I too could wail and curse. The way I’d been brought up, you suffered in silence, you were never rude, never made a fuss. There was one voice I often heard shouting at night – a young argumentative male who roared with anger and rage, despair coming from the deepest, darkest torture chamber. ‘Why?’ he used to shout. ‘Why can’t I fucking move? Just tell me why.’
I asked Christine about him.
She sighed. ‘Oh, that’s Snafu. He’s one of mine too.’
‘Is he OK?’
‘He’s finding it hard.’ She sounded sad. She didn’t say any more. I would find out later for myself.
In general the cursing was epic. Legendary. When West of Scotland working man meets catastrophe all he needs is a victim to let rip upon. The spinal unit had a resident psychologist, a gentle New Zealander, a bit of a waffler who must have helped some people lost in the shock of paralysis, but I found him irritating. Everything he said seemed anodyne. But then who wouldn’t seem ineffectual, with the unenviable job of counselling people in the rawest of grief? We existed in a world beyond platitudes, beyond consolation. On the ward, I still couldn’t raise my head to see anything but I lay and listened, as would a blind person, to the voices and the noises.
The darkest of five-star entertainment came one afternoon when the psychologist was sent to counsel an older man who was refusing to cooperate with the nurses. Grunt was a tiny Glaswegian hardman, paralysed from the neck down, who was taking his plight as a personal insult and was either beyond or incapable of reason. He launched a verbal assault upon the hapless Kiwi, a tsunami of violent Glasgow kisses which no curtains round a bed could confine. His tirade was loud, sustained, fluent, uninhibited and utterly priceless: the hairdryer treatment, poetry of the utterly profane, articulating all the pain and fury inside him. Grunt was no doubt a talented curser already, but neuroscience shows that swearing actually helps people biologically to relieve extreme distress, and he was going for it. The caress of the damned, it occurred to me.
‘Fuck off. Who the fuck are you? Jesus fucking Christ what’s it to you? What the fuck do you fucking want? Yer fucking useless waste of space, yer fucking stupid idiotic cunt, nah, nah, get out of my fucking face yer fat cunt and leave me alone.’
‘Now I git it why you’re upsit,’ said the Kiwi, his voice high and mild.
‘Upset, you useless piece of shit? I’ll give yer fucking cunting upset, you bastard.’
‘B-b-but it would hilp to talk, chick out some thoughts, it’s nicissary for you to ixpress yoursilf …’
‘If I could fucking move I’d fucking express maself, I’d wring yer fuckin neck. Just get to fuck … right?’
‘Yis, Grunt … I understand.’
‘Away back to Australia yer stupid speccy bastard, yer useless cunt. Someone should have drowned ye at birth.’
And so it continued. Lying on my back, silently chortling, I was joined by one of the nurses, who dashed in behind my half-pulled curtain, stuffing her apron in her mouth to silence the giggles. We shared a wonderful private, silent moment of hilarity. It was the first time I had laughed since the accident.
Perhaps it was the third week in high dependency when I became aware lots of things were starting to happen. I’d regained the breathing; now it was basic stuff like drinking normally. Previously, much as I had pleaded,
the specialist designated two-woman swallowing team, who came round and judged these things, had deemed me unfit to do so. They were the Fat Controllers of the gullet: at one point, they tested me with a sip of tea from a straw while they stood and watched, unsmiling, pens poised over clipboards. They seemed spectacularly humourless, these specialist teams. I sucked with a degree of arrogance. Of course I was fine! But much as I craved it, drinking was weirdly difficult. I found myself spluttering, coughing, and they shook their heads and took the tea away.
After that, I stopped pushing against the system. A few days later, they granted permission. A kindly staff nurse, to whom I had confided my fantasy about a latte, went and bought me one from the café. But what I had yearned for tasted acrid, strong, too hot. I turned instead, gratefully, to sucking weak, tepid, milky NHS tea – baby tea, they called it – through a straw, as she held the cup. I couldn’t believe that I couldn’t hold a cup by myself, but then I had not even started to address the size of physical loss which I faced. Denial piled up on itself; like bricks in a wall. I had nowhere near yet exhausted what Brian Keenan called the strategies of denial, convincing myself that if I could just take back control and start doing things for myself, then all would return to normal. I thought my hands would work if I really asked them to – of course they would! – so I asked the nurse to leave that day’s pile of greetings cards upon my bedclothes in front of me, rather than set them aside for Dave. Anyone can open an envelope! Surely! I tried to pick up the top card and watched with bewilderment as my fingers refused to grip. I didn’t even get to the stage of finding out they couldn’t rip paper. Then the cards slid slowly off my chest onto the floor and I watched them go, passive and helpless. So much for Get Well Soon.