Of course, my baldness wasn’t exactly the same as Dr Enderby’s. While I could have grown hair if I’d chosen to do so, Dr Enderby no longer had this option. He’d started to go bald at the age of eighteen, and was completely hairless by the time he finished medical school. And while my hairlessness was (like Lex Luthor’s) the result of a terrible accident, Dr Enderby was bald because of genetics. He didn’t need to examine his DNA to know this. He had two bald brothers, who were also doctors at Bristol Royal Infirmary. Dr Enderby (the neurologist – Dr Enderby Number One, as I thought of him, even though he was actually the youngest brother) told me that he and his two brothers made a point of never meeting up within the hospital grounds. This was because most patients found hospitalization to be an unsettling experience, and seeing three bald doctors with identical name badges could only make this worse. Dr Enderby was a pretty funny man when he wanted to be.
He was also quite a strange man. In his own way, he was probably as weird as Dr Weir. As well as being a neurologist, he was also a committed Buddhist. This meant that he didn’t believe in God or heaven but he still thought that we should all be nice to each other because this was the most skilful way to get through life. He also believed that regular meditation made you a better, wiser person (though this was not the primary reason he suggested it for me). He said that meditation helped you to rely on your own inner resources to cultivate happiness and guide you through life’s various stresses, and in the godless Buddhist universe, being able to rely on your own inner resources was particularly important.
Dr Enderby’s views on God and meditation were definitely linked to his views about the brain. On his office wall, he had a funny little plaque with spidery black writing on it – like old, joined-up handwriting. And this is what it said:
The Brain is just the weight of God –
For – Heft them – Pound for Pound –
And they will differ – if they do –
As Syllable from Sound –
The first time I saw that plaque, I had very little idea what it meant, and absolutely no idea why there were all those dashes and random capital letters scattered all over the place. (Mr Treadstone, my then future English teacher, would have red-penned each and every one of those.) But I loved the way it sounded nevertheless.
When I eventually got round to asking Dr Enderby about the plaque, a few years later, he told me that it was the last stanza from a poem by a very old, very dead American poet called Emily Dickinson. When I asked him what it meant, he wouldn’t tell me. Instead he asked what I thought it meant.
‘I don’t know,’ I said after a few seconds of scratching my crew-cut. ‘I know what the words mean, but I can’t make sense of them all together.’
‘Hmm,’ said Dr Enderby. Then he scratched his head for a bit. ‘Well, what do you think the difference between a syllable and a sound is?’
‘There isn’t all that much difference,’ I said. ‘A sound is a sound, and a syllable’s kind of a sound too. A syllable’s a chunk of sound in a word. Or sometimes it’s the whole word. Like the word “sound” is a sound made of one syllable.’
I wasn’t too satisfied with the way I’d explained this, but Dr Enderby seemed to understand. ‘So maybe that’s the point,’ he said. ‘Maybe they aren’t all that different. Just like God and the brain aren’t all that different.’
‘How can God and the brain not be different?’ I asked, frowning.
Dr Enderby smiled and adjusted his glasses. ‘Well, for each of us the brain creates a whole, unique universe. It contains everything we know. Everything we see or touch. Everything we feel and remember. In a sense, our brains create all of reality for us. Without the brain, there’s nothing. Some people find this idea scary, but I think it’s rather beautiful. That’s the reason I like to keep that plaque on my wall, where I can see it every day.’
I told Dr Enderby that I was still a little confused at this point – what with him being a Buddhist.
‘When I look at that poem, God’s just a metaphor,’ Dr Enderby explained.
‘So you don’t think that God created the brain?’ I asked.
‘No, I don’t think that,’ Dr Enderby replied. ‘I think that the brain created God. Because the human brain, however wonderful, is still quite fallible – as both you and I know. It’s always searching for answers, but even when it’s working as it should, its explanations are rarely perfect – especially when it comes to very big, complicated questions. That’s why we have to nurture it. We have to give it plenty of space to develop.’
That was the gist of what Dr Enderby told me. His brain had spent a tremendous amount of time thinking about the brain.
The first time we met, he said that my ‘first fit’ was probably not my first fit. It was more likely my sixth or seventh or thirteenth or twenty-third – but no one could tell me for sure. As I’ve mentioned, in the months preceding my collapse in the kitchen, I’d been having lots of strange, out-of-place thoughts – thoughts involving weird pictures and sounds, and often weird smells. I’d dismissed them as daydreams, even though they felt more like night dreams – short, peculiar night dreams that would start without warning and then, just as quickly, dissolve back into the present. Furthermore, they’d been bad enough, and frequent enough, to draw comment at school, where I’d been diagnosed with ‘concentration issues’.
After I told Dr Enderby this, he said that mine were ‘classic’ symptoms of partial epileptic seizures originating in the temporal lobes, and usually, at this point, he’d be asking me if I’d suffered any significant head injuries in the past eighteen months. But in my case, this was unnecessary. Dr Enderby could see my scar with his own eyes, and he already knew about the meteor. Everybody knew about the meteor.
Nevertheless, I still had to go through a lot of physical tests before Dr Enderby’s final diagnosis could be made. He shone a torch in my eyes and prodded and pinched me in various places to test my sensations and reflexes. Then I had to have blood tests, and then an electroencephalography, where they attach wires to your scalp to measure the electrical activity in your brain. In case you didn’t know, epilepsy is all to do with excess electrical activity in the brain. It works as follows.
Everybody’s brain is a hive of electrical activity, and usually all the electrical signals behave as they should – they start, spread and stop as required. But in an epileptic fit, something abnormal happens. The neurons start sparking erratically, more or less at random, and instead of a narrow, regulated current, you get a chaotic flood of electricity pulsing through the brain. And the specific symptoms you experience tell you where the electricity has gone haywire. So jerks or twitches or convulsions indicate electrical activity in the motor cortex, the area of the brain responsible for controlling movement, and hallucinations indicate problems with one of the perceptual centres. And in a generalized epileptic seizure, there’s a complete loss of consciousness, which indicates that the malfunction has spread through the whole cortex to the brainstem. This is what I experienced in the kitchen and what most people would recognize as an archetypal fit. Dr Enderby said that an epileptic seizure was like a thunderstorm taking place in the brain – a storm that temporarily knocks out all the communication links so that any messages from the outside world get either lost or scrambled. All that’s left is your brain talking to itself.
Needless to say, my electroencephalography showed lots of abnormal spikes. Along with all the other evidence, this pretty much confirmed the provisional diagnosis of epilepsy, but it couldn’t give any insight into the underlying cause – for this, I had to have an MRI scan, which uses giant magnets and radio waves to create a 3-D map of your brain’s structure. Dr Enderby warned me that in more than half of all cases, no physiological cause for epilepsy is ever found. But in my case, there was good reason to suspect that a physiological cause would soon be discovered – as indeed it was.
The MRI scan showed subtle damage to my right temporal lobe, which was exactly where Dr Enderby expecte
d to find it. But discovering a physiological cause for my epilepsy was not necessarily a good thing. Structural brain damage made it highly unlikely that my symptoms would clear up of their own accord. I’d probably suffer further seizures, which would have to be controlled with anti-epileptic drugs.
Two weeks later, this is exactly what happened. I had another generalized seizure and was put on anti-epileptic drugs. I’ve been on them ever since.
BRAINBOUND
Here’s what came next, condensed.
My fits got worse. I could no longer go to school. We had to house-swap with Sam and Justine so that I could stay home while my mother continued to work. My world shrank down to five small rooms. I had strange visions. I read a lot. I continued my correspondence with Dr Weir. I got used to managing my condition. I gradually got better. And one day, about a year down the line, I was well enough to return to school. We got our house back.
Now here’s the expanded version.
Things got much worse before they started to get better. Shortly after my original diagnosis, I was having generalized seizures every week and complex partial seizures most days. My epilepsy was severe and poorly controlled, and seemed, at first, completely unpredictable, which is what made it so debilitating. I couldn’t go to the supermarket with my mother for fear of collapsing in the cereal aisle. Of course, during a full seizure, I’d be happily oblivious to all the drama. It was only in the woozy aftermath that I could take stock of my humiliation. Often there’d be tears and dribble. Often there’d be a fair amount of urine. Often there’d be a small circle of gawking onlookers. People are always drawn to scary and embarrassing public displays, and they don’t come much more scary or embarrassing than watching an eleven-year-old boy convulsing in a puddle of pee.
Soon, going outside became one of my main triggers. Or more specifically, as Dr Enderby told me, it was the heightened stress of worrying about public seizures that was triggering my public seizures. I had to learn to manage my anxiety.
This was not something I had much chance of managing. Every time my mother tried to take me anywhere, I’d immediately start to panic, which would trigger a fit. The only places I felt safe were at our house, at the shop, in the car and at the hospital. It doesn’t matter if you have a fit in the hospital, because everybody expects that kind of behaviour in hospitals and there are hundreds of people ready to take care of you. I wasn’t even slightly worried about having a fit in the hospital; and, for this reason, I never had a fit in the hospital. My condition was cruel and stupid.
But in those early days, it wasn’t just the frequency of my epileptic fits that kept me at home. It was also the side effects of the anti-epileptic drugs. For the first couple of months, before my system had properly adjusted to the carbamazepine, I was all over the place. My mind felt dull and foggy. I was constantly tired. I often felt sick and dizzy. My head hurt. My vision wobbled. My legs wobbled. I started to acquire what my mother generously called ‘puppy fat’. Eventually, I was prescribed more drugs – strong painkillers and anti-sickness pills – to counterbalance the effects of my other drugs. This helped for a while, but the fits still showed no sign of improvement. So my dose of carbamazepine was increased and the side effects, having begun to die down, enjoyed a new lease of life. Dr Enderby said that we shouldn’t be worried. Each patient was an individual, and often it took many months to get a prescription just right.
In the meantime, my mother said that she wanted to start me on a complementary therapy – something homeopathic. Dr Enderby was reluctant to support this decision. He said that while there were some alternative therapies that had been proven helpful in treating epilepsy, homeopathy was not one of them. From a scientific standpoint, homeopathy had never been proven helpful in treating anything. And often it could be a distraction (an expensive distraction) from those treatments that had been proven effective.
My mother calmly pointed out that she knew several people who had benefited enormously from homeopathic medicine.
Dr Enderby calmly pointed out that he knew of lots of people who hadn’t. Then he started talking about placebos.
A long, patient and fruitless argument followed.
Eventually, Dr Enderby conceded that it would be okay for my mother to try me on a homeopathic treatment as long as I also continued to take my prescribed medications. To be more specific, this is what he said: at worst, a homeopathic treatment certainly couldn’t harm me.
After consulting a homeopath, my mother put me on cuprum metallicum and belladonna – copper and deadly nightshade. I started on a 12X concentration of each, which meant that the active ingredient had been diluted down to one part in a trillion. Later, when this had no noticeable effect, the dose was increased to 24X – one part per trillion trillion. Later still, I was put on a 100X deadly nightshade pill. This dosage was even more diluted and potent. In fact, it was so diluted that its very existence was like a raised middle finger to four hundred years of scientific progress. Specifically (and I’m not making this up), if you took a single molecule of the active ingredient in deadly nightshade and dropped it into a glass of water the size of the known universe – well, the belladonna pill I was taking was approximately one hundred million trillion times more diluted than that.
This was probably why Dr Enderby didn’t think a homeopathic remedy would do me any harm. In that concentration, deadly nightshade is no longer deadly. But I only realized all this much later on. At the time, aged eleven and a half, the homeopathic pills were just two more pills on the daily pill pile. I was taking at least six a day at one point, and asking zero questions.
Because I could no longer leave the house, I could no longer go to school; and because I could no longer go to school, my mother had a problem on her hands. She could not afford to stop working, but I was much too young and much too ill to be left on my own. A full-time babysitter was also out of the question. My mother wanted me close by so that she could be there the second I had my next fit, and home and work were separated by a ten-minute drive.
Our house was (and is) located in the village of Lower Godley, about six miles northeast of Glastonbury. You may not have heard of it, but that’s okay. Lower Godley is a very small village. It’s basically just a long, straight road with houses on either side, fields beyond the houses, and a little bulge in the middle where there’s a shop and a church and a post office. It has a population of about four hundred and twelve and a very infrequent bus service. About the only interesting thing I can think of to tell you about Lower Godley is the following: Lower Godley implies the existence of an Upper Godley, but (for some reason no one in the village knows) there is no Upper Godley. If it ever existed, it doesn’t any more. It’s also possible that whoever named our village thought that Godley on its own was a stupid name for a village, and so added the ‘Lower’ more or less on a whim. I don’t know. But for whatever reason, the village ended up with a somewhat misleading prefix, and this is by far its most interesting feature.
Anyway, to return to the point, our house in Lower Godley was too far away from my mother’s work for me to stay there in the daytime without her worrying, and this is why we ended up swapping homes with Justine and Sam. My mother, I should tell you, owned the flat above the shop as well as the shop itself. She had bought both with her inheritance money, which she had come into when my grandfather (her father) died from a heart attack, soon after he discovered she was pregnant with me.
Sam and Justine didn’t mind swapping houses for several reasons: first, our house in Lower Godley was much bigger and nicer than the flat above the shop; second, it had a garden filled with interesting wildlife; third, they were happy to help. They also didn’t mind looking after Lucy. Lucy couldn’t come with us because the flat was too small and was surrounded by unfamiliar roads and alleys, so it wouldn’t have been safe to install a cat-flap. And since Lucy had always been an outdoors cat, my mother didn’t think she’d like being confined.
‘At least it would stop her from procreating,�
�� I told her, very sullenly.
I was upset because I wasn’t crazy about being confined either. But after we’d moved, I realized that the flat really wasn’t big enough to accommodate the cat. It was barely big enough for my mother and me. Apparently, we’d managed to live there before, up until I was about three years old, but I didn’t really remember this. And I was much smaller then, so it probably didn’t feel quite so cramped.
The five rooms in the flat varied in size from small to extremely small, in a gradually descending hierarchy, like a set of those Russian dolls. My mother’s bedroom was the only room approaching normal size. After that, the kitchen was a little smaller, and the living room smaller still. The bathroom was so pokey that you could use the sink, the shower and the toilet all at the same time, though not without consequences. And finally – bottom of the heap, smallest doll in the set – there was the ‘box’ room. Sam had managed to squeeze a desk and chair in there so she could use it as an office for whatever it was she did. I, however, managed to squeeze an entire bed in there. This left a foot-wide corridor of floor space and a door that could not be fully opened. Originally, my mother had insisted that it wasn’t possible to fit a bed in the box room and said we’d have to share, but she had underestimated the extent to which I valued my privacy. Possible or not, I was determined that my bed was going into that room, and after I’d removed the wheels from its base and taken the finish off the doorframe, it slid in like a Tetris block. Then, after a great deal of soul-searching, I decided to sacrifice the strip of room in which I could walk to a very thin bookcase. On the bookcase I put a lamp and my meteorite. This left just one corner of my room in which I could stand up – a space considerably smaller than the inside of a phone box.
The Universe versus Alex Woods Page 6