by Chris Birch
What a stupid test; obviously I can do that.
Staring back at the doctor, I moved my thumb and little finger together, or at least that’s what I thought I did. But looking at my thumb, it had hardly moved.
'Is everything okay, Chris?' Mum asked.
The doctor pursed his lips, frowned and glared at my hand. I fixed my eyes on my thumb and little finger.
Move, I told them, just move together, MOVE.
As much as I willed them to, the finger and thumb wouldn’t touch. It was as if there were rolls of invisible cotton wool wrapped around them, acting as a barrier.
That was the first time I noticed the numb feeling.
I touched my left hand gingerly with my right. It was as if my left hand was slightly detached, like I had been sitting on it and had pins and needles.
'That’s really weird,' I finally blurted, still staring at my hand with a mix of confusion and worry.
'I don’t know why but I can’t... I can’t do it.’
My heart started to beat faster, my breathing became deeper. What’s wrong with me? It must be serious if I can’t move my fingers properly.
'Let me try again, just give me a minute,' I told the doctor.
I was desperate not to fail this test, as if passing it would mean everything would go back to normal.
The doctor smiled.
'Don’t worry, Chris, that’s all I need to know.’
The more sympathy he gave me, the more worried I became, doctors were only nice if there were something wrong with you.
The doctor did some more straightforward tests. I had to make a fist, which I did with ease with my right hand but once again, frustratingly, struggled to do with my left. Then he tested my reflexes by hitting my knee with a soft hammer. My right leg immediately jerked in response but my left leg managed only a slow jolt.
'Hmmm, okay,' he said.
'Is that right?' I said.
I was desperate to get some answers.
'You’re sure there isn’t a cut on my head?' I asked the doctor for the tenth time.
If they can just find the cut, then they can treat it and I’ll feel better, I thought.
I was sure that I had hit my head and the numbness, tiredness and pain in my left side were all just a side effect of the headaches I was feeling. If the headaches went, so would everything else.
'You’ve looked, your mum has looked and so have I, there are no cuts on your head, Chris,' he said in a patronising tone.
Before I could reply he had pulled a syringe from a container next to him.
'Right, we need to take some blood, just to rule out a few things,' he said.
I offered my arm and winced as the needle pricked my skin. I looked away, when I looked back he had slapped a plaster on my arm and returned to his desk.
He speedily typed on his computer before turning to me and motioning towards the door.
'Is that it?' Mum asked. 'What’s wrong with him then?'
The doctor locked his hands together as he sat behind his desk.
'I don’t know yet; it could be a few things. Possibly Glandular Fever, maybe Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, either of those would explain your exhaustion. We need to do more tests,' he sighed.
And that was it.
'Make another appointment when you leave,' he said, gesturing to the door.
I’d heard of Glandular Fever, I’d known a kid at school who had it, he’d seemed fine afterwards so it couldn’t be that serious. But Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? What the hell was that?
I wanted to ask a million questions. Why did my head hurt? Why had it come on so suddenly? How long would it last? Why did my hand feel funny? But the ten-minute appointment had left me exhausted. I could feel my heavy eyelids beginning to blink, trying to force themselves closed.
Mum worked as an ambulance driver and so was like a walking medical encyclopedia, she would be able to explain it to me later. So, I pushed the questions to the back of my mind, pulled myself up onto my feet and walked out of the door, focusing on the welcome thought that in a few minutes I would be back in my bedroom and able to sleep.
When we left the surgery I could sense that Mum was bursting to get into the car so she could tell me exactly what she thought of the doctor and his comments. We opened the door, I slumped my tired body into the seat and she immediately started talking.
'What a load of rubbish,' she started.
'Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is constant exhaustion, it doesn’t come on all of a sudden. It isn’t like one day you’re walking along fine and the next you have it,’ she tutted. 'It doesn’t explain your headache either.’
I took a deep breath, the thudding pain in my head drowning out Mum’s voice.
'We’ll make another appointment with someone else, Dr Thomas is good. I’ll call in the morning and we will see her.'
Mum carried on as she reversed the car into our garage.
Mum helped me into the house and back up to bed. I was worried but too exhausted to focus on what might be wrong. I tried to cling on to a simple thought instead. Maybe I just need to sleep off whatever it is?
After a few more days in bed, Mum woke me to tell me that my blood tests showed I didn’t have Glandular Fever, she told me to get up as we had an appointment with Dr Thomas.
Once again I traipsed into the car and then waited patiently in the doctor’s waiting room. I looked down at the creased and faded magazines on the table, and then around the room at the other patients. Opposite me sat an old lady with wiry grey hair and a thin face, her skin covered in age spots. But as I hunched my back and held my aching head in my hands, crippled by pain, she sat up straight and smiled to herself as she read an article in a women’s magazine. I’m twenty years old and I’m in worse shape than an old lady, I thought to myself.
For the first time, it dawned on me that whatever was wrong with me might not suddenly go away as quickly as it came on. I could feel like this ... forever.
We were summoned into the treatment room and a short lady with black hair welcomed us with a smile. Her aqua-blue blouse offered the only colour in the beige room. She did the same tests as the other doctor and then handed me a note for my boss.
'I’m signing you off from work for four weeks, we should know a bit more about what’s wrong then,' she said plainly.
'F-f-four we-eks?' I managed to mutter.
I was still struggling to speak, the left-hand side of my mouth felt like it was full of marshmallows. She noticed my shocked expression.
'We don’t know what’s the matter at this point, take a month off work to be on the safe side, if you feel better you can go back early,' she suggested.
My symptoms hadn’t lifted, in fact, I had started to notice more, there was a slight droop in my left eyelid now but I didn’t want to be off work. I just wanted everything to go back to normal.
What if work think I am faking it? I can’t even tell them what’s wrong with me, I thought, worried that I would get into trouble.
'I want to hand the letter in myself,' I told Mum, 'that way they can see I’m really ill.'
Mum frowned back at me. 'I don’t think that’s a good idea, Christopher.’
When you break your leg, or cut yourself, people can see what’s wrong with you, it’s obvious but no one could see my symptoms and I didn’t even have a name for my illness. Suddenly it dawned on me that people might think I was pulling a sickie, trying it on.
'I want to do it, Mum, just let me,' I snapped.
Talking took so much effort, I didn’t have the energy for an argument. I hoped she would know from my tone that I had made my mind up.
Mum gave me a sideways glance. Her face softened. It was like it had finally registered with her that being ill was getting me down.
'Okay,' she said simply with a shrug of her shoulders.
We made the short journey over to the bank. I wasn’t up to the drive over to the branch where I usually worked, but my old boss in the local bank could pass the letter on. If h
e sees me himself, he can tell my boss I am really ill, I thought.
But the appointment had zapped all my energy and when we arrived at the high street, I couldn’t summon the strength to pull my legs out of the car.
'I’ll take it in for you, love,' Mum said softly.
Humiliation burned through my body. I couldn’t even walk ten feet into the shop in front of me.
Moments after walking through the sliding doors, Mum came back out, my old boss following behind her. Trying to ignore my headache, I forced my mouth into a smile.
'Your mum has explained what’s happened, Chris,' he said, speaking through the open car window.
'We will pass the letter on, don’t you worry about work, you just get yourself better.'
My eyes stung and I swallowed tears. Something told me I wouldn’t be back at work for a very long time.
A week after I had the accident the headache continued to cling to me. Time wasn’t healing me, and neither were the stronger painkillers I had been prescribed by Dr Thomas. Time dragged. The four weeks I had off work stretched out in front of me, with nothing to fill them but the same question, what’s wrong with me?, going round and round in my head. I felt like a zombie, only going out of the house to visit the hospital for endless tests.
As each day passed I became aware of strange sensations in my body but still had no diagnosis to explain them. My whole left side felt like it was dragging me down, sliding to the floor. Every now and then I would get a tick in my eyebrow which spread all the way to the back of my head, as if an electric shock had run through me. It would come on suddenly, every five minutes, so that just as I could feel my body relax into the early stages of sleep I would be shaken awake again.
The drowsiness had disappeared; I was suffering too much to sleep now. I spent most of the time just staring at the walls of my bedroom, because the noise of the TV was too irritating to bear and I couldn’t focus on a book. The searing pain in my skull was still there. It felt as if a balloon full of pressure had encapsulated my head. If I can just burst the balloon, break the pressure, the torturous feeling will go away, I thought.
Hours would pass with me pushing my palms on my head to create pressure, pressing down on my skull in frustration. The sensation briefly distracted me from the agony. I had never experienced pain like it before; it was all-encompassing. I couldn’t concentrate on my thoughts, I couldn’t distract myself ... all I could think about was that pain in my head.
When I was able to have a conversation, I found myself getting confused and not being able to say the words I was trying to think of. After spending all day trying to remember the name of the white machine on our dining room table, I finally asked Mum.
'You know, you make things with it, with a needle and thread,' I suggested, exasperated.
Mum gave me that same pained expression that seemed to have been permanently etched on her face since the accident.
'The sewing machine?' she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
'That’s it,' I agreed.
Mum’s stare lingered on me. Things like that were happening a lot. There seemed to be a fog of confusion that clogged up my brain.
'My words are all jumbled because of the headache,' I explained, half-heartedly trying to appease her, but it hadn’t reassured either of us.
It wasn’t just my words I couldn’t control; I started losing my temper more often too. The simplest things Mum did began to really grate on me, even though I knew she was just trying to help.
One lunchtime, like she had done at every other lunchtime since the accident, Mum crept into my bedroom to try and make me eat something.
'What do you want in your sandwich, Chris?' she whispered.
'I’m not hungry, Mum,' I snapped.
I was fed up with being in pain, I didn’t have the energy to eat and moving my jaw was painful.
'You need to eat,' she fussed.
Then she reached behind me as I lay in bed and fluffed up my pillows.
'JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!' I barked, before turning my whole body away from her.
I could hear Mum sighing and then, a few seconds later, the door creaked and she left the room.
Every day I got angrier, and although Mum knew I was just lashing out because I was ill, I could hear in her voice that it was hurting her feelings. It wasn’t like me to get so cross, and I didn’t like it. I was sure it was just because of the agony I was in. When that went, I knew I would go back to normal.
After a few weeks of being housebound, my friends and family started to ask Mum for updates. I’d turned my mobile off, not wanting to be disturbed, so they called her instead.
'Dan wants to know if you’re okay, he thought he might pop in and say hello?' Mum said chirpily.
She put what must have been the twentieth cup of tea that she had made that day down on my bedside table. They were never drunk. She would be back again in ten minutes to remove the untouched, and by then cold, tea. Something told me she did it more for herself than for me, a way to keep busy and keep her mind off worrying.
She kept on with her bright idea. 'Might be nice to have a visitor, Chris, you’ve not seen anyone since you’ve been poorly,' she suggested.
The tone of her voice was still positive but there was a slight shakiness to her words that betrayed how concerned she was really feeling.
I didn’t even have the energy to lift my head up to see Mum, so how could I possibly speak to my friends?
'No, Mum, don’t let anyone visit,' I pleaded, keeping my eyes closed.
'I’ll let him know you aren’t well enough yet, then,' she said, still with that fake cheeriness.
She paused at the door, looking back to where I lay on my bed, with my eyes shut and my useless left arm tucked down alongside me. I heard her take a deep breath.
'Don’t worry, love,' Mum said.
'The doctors are doing everything they can to find out what’s wrong. You’ll be back to yourself before you know it.' She came across to pat me gently on the head and smiled brightly at me.
She was trying to keep her spirits up for me, maybe she thought that if we acted like everything was normal, then it somehow would be. But I couldn’t avoid everyone forever and after a few weeks, Mum let Nan come to visit me. Dragging myself down the stairs and onto the sofa in preparation, I felt like a rare species ready to be inspected.
We still had no idea what was wrong with me as the doctors kept saying they needed to do more tests and so I was still worried that people might think I was putting it on, being a drama queen. Somehow, having a visitor felt like a test. But as soon as Nan arrived and I saw her sympathetic, soft face, I felt myself relax slightly.
'Oh, love,' she cooed and then lowered herself down to hug me as I stayed lying down.
A whiff of lavender greeted me, the same perfume she had been wearing her whole life. Whenever I passed lavender bushes it reminded me of her.
'I’ve been so worried,' she said.
I could see her eyes watering, tinged slightly red. Seeing my nan’s reaction to me made my illness all the more real. Nan sat down and tried to make conversation but I zoned out, as if I were on a conveyor belt, moving further and further away from Nan and Mum, their voices became part of the whirring white noise in the background. The searing pain had returned and no matter how hard I tried to claw myself back to Nan and Mum and hear their conversation, I couldn’t. The only thing I could feel was agony, overwhelming agony for the next five minutes.
A moment of respite came and as the painful twinges eased off I pushed myself to listen to my mum’s voice.
'I’m going to go and see your great-uncle Monty this afternoon, Chris,' Mum said.
Monty? I didn’t know a Monty. I waited for the name to resonate with a face but there wasn’t one. More than that, I felt like I had never known anyone with that name. Mum must have recognised my confusion in my puzzled face.
'Y’know, in Abertysswg,' she smiled.
I pondered it. The
town name was familiar, it was only a few miles away but I couldn’t think of anyone I knew who lived there. As I continued to look confused, Mum repeated the same thing.
'Uncle Monty in Abertysswg,' she said, again and again, as if repeating it would make it suddenly register with me.
I’d never heard of this person and the more she kept repeating herself, the more annoyed I got.
'What are you talking about, Mum?' I said, ‘you aren’t making any sense.'
She was adamant.
'You must remember him, Chris,' she sighed.
This went on for five minutes and what had started with confusion began to turn into annoyance. She was talking gibberish and that was the last thing I needed.
'You’ve got the name wrong,' I said.
'No, Chris, he is your uncle Monty,' Mum barked.
Anger began to burn up from my gut. I didn’t know whether it was frustration at the pain I was in, or the conversation itself but it was becoming impossible to keep my rage inside. I desperately tried to recall some kind of memory of a Monty but no face was matching the name.
'YOU’VE GOT THE NAME WRONG, I’VE NEVER HEARD OF HIM, HE DOESN’T EXIST!' I suddenly erupted.
Mum and Nan stared back at me in stunned silence, but I kept going.
'THERE IS NO MONTY, YOU’VE GONE MAD! YOU AREN’T MAKING SENSE,' I
bellowed.
I was shouting at the top of my voice, releasing all the anger and frustration that had been building up in the past few weeks. I stopped and took a breath. Nan and Mum looked shocked.
I had never really lost my temper like that and I had certainly never spoken to my mum in that way before.
Her face folded into a frown, turned to the side and then she just stared at me, looking me up and down as if I were a stranger she was inspecting, as if she didn’t recognise me at all.
Silence set around us and the atmosphere felt prickly and fraught. Mum looked worried.
'I don’t know why you don’t remember him,' Nan whispered, as if to herself rather than me.
They both seemed to know who this person was, but I just couldn’t recollect. Exhausted, I made my apologies and wearily climbed up the stairs to bed, then shut the door behind me. When I sat down, the familiar blistering shock of pain swept through my skull and down my neck. I felt lost.