by Nikki Ridley
‘What the fuck have doctors got to do with anything?’
‘Well … you’re in hospital.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you ODed.’
‘Oh … shit!’ he’d say.
The he’d sleep. Then he’d wake. Then we’d start all over again.
Aside from being blind and confused, Paul woke up hungry – ravenously hungry. Ferociously, insatiably hungry.
The poor guy was so skinny, and all he wanted to do was eat. He had no idea from minute to minute where he was or why he was wherever he was, only that he wanted food – and heaps of it.
The hospital food was totally insufficient, so each day on the way to the hospital, I would stop at the shops and at Steers to get him those big tubs of yoghurt, and cheeseburgers. He loved those yoghurts. He’d floor them, and he would devour a cheeseburger in about three seconds flat. Every day. It seemed as if he couldn’t reach a point where his hunger was satisfied.
My mother and I continued to visit each day for several weeks before he was well enough for us to think about getting him out of his bed – or ‘cot’, to be more precise.
We wanted him to start moving around, because his muscles were beginning to atrophy from lack of use, but the doctors insisted that we wait for his brain swelling to go down and for him to go for the scan before we started trying to move him.
It took weeks for the swelling to go down sufficiently for him to be taken for the scan, but when he was returned to the J.G. Strijdom, we weren’t told anything that we didn’t already know. They told us that the scan had revealed areas of damaged brain tissue, but that they couldn’t really say one way or another what disabilities would result. They couldn’t say that it would definitely be this or definitely be that, only that it would definitely be something.
It is amazing how little is known about the human brain and how it works.
The only thing that they could say for certain was that the scan indicated problems with his short-term memory. Well, I could have told them that! He really needn’t have gone for a scan to obtain that piece of information.
With the scan done and his brain swelling sufficiently reduced, we were permitted to move him – and the task then became to encourage him to start trying to walk.
For this we took advantage of his ever-present hunger. We bribed him with chocolate.
We discovered that Paul had a ‘thing’ for chocolate – like many drug addicts, I believe. (I used to take slabs of chocolate to my best friend when she did a stint in prison. She had just wanted chocolate and more chocolate.)
We also discovered that Paul could hear a chocolate being unwrapped from fifty metres away. It was uncanny.
No matter how quietly I unwrapped a chocolate, Paul would cock his head and say, ‘I can hear chocolate!’
I’d say, ‘You’re a freak, man! How did you hear that?’
It was very helpful that he had this chocolate radar, because we could use it to encourage him out of bed. I’d stand out in the corridor, by the lift, and unwrap a chocolate, and that would invariably bring Paul to his unsteady feet.
It proved a much needed aid in a very slow and torturous process. Paul was very weak, and his legs were shaky and unstable. In addition to that, he was far from being used to being blind or even beginning to cope with it.
Nevertheless we persisted … and then came the glorious day that we could take him outside.
The J.G. Strijdom had a really big garden, and we would start on one end – Paul and myself, with my mother often sitting on a bench on the other side with a chocolate.
Paul was still very distressed, even though he was being medicated. He was also still very confused and unable to remember much for any length of time. So we would walk, and he would keep asking me what the hell was going on.
When someone approached or passed us, he would ask who the fuck they were and what they had to do with it all. Still swearing, and still unable to comprehend the big picture.
He had no trouble recognising us – me, my mother and his family members – because he remembered us from before the overdose. His long-term memory, though severely compromised, was much better than his short-term memory.
Paul was very rude when he was confused, but in his moments of clarity he could be charmingly polite.
The doctor would sometimes come and say hello to him during these walks in the garden, and Paul would blurt out, ‘Who the fuck are you?’
I’d tell him that it was a doctor, and then he’d say, ‘Oh! Good morning, sir!’ – as if he hadn’t actually just sworn at him.
Paul still had all this ‘stuff’ going on in his head – residue from the nightmare he’d been in while in a coma. He’d still get panicky and think that he couldn’t breathe, and beg over and over for someone to ‘help him’ and ‘let him out’. He was very anxious, and so I had to find ways to calm him and distract him from his inner world. Again counting on his love of music, I encouraged him to sing while we walked. We’d sing ‘Angie’ by the Rolling Stones, and ‘California Dreaming’. I remember that one in particular. I’d sing the first part – ‘All the leaves are brown’ – and then he’d carry on. He could remember many of the words.
Then I’d take him for food at the garden tuck shop, and that became another ritual exercise, because he had a ‘lazy side’ – I think it was his left side – and I used this time to try to encourage him to use that hand. If he wasn’t pushed to use it, it would just lie limp at his side. So I would put his drink into his other hand to keep it occupied, and his sandwich into his lame hand so that, ravenous man that he was, he would have to lift it to take a bite.
We would do this every day. The singing and the tuck shop, walking up and down, up and down, till he could sit on the bench and have his chocolate.
I was dedicated to helping Paul. He couldn’t help himself, and even though our relationship had been over for years, I had truly loved him. We had been together for a long time, but, apart from that, we had grown up together. He had been my boyfriend and my best friend during my teenage years. Those are important years to spend with someone.
We carried on until the last of his brain swelling dissipated and he began to build up some muscle tone, gradually regaining strength and mobility, and a sense of continuity from day to day, to the point where he could be moved into a general ward. Then he really became a handful.
Because he was now stronger and able to move around, he began getting frustrated on top of everything else. He was in a permanent state of agitation – blind, confused, distressed and unable to function fully without help. His mental, psychological and physical conditions, coupled with his inability to see what was going on around him and his lingering inability to make sense of where he was and why, were a recipe for disaster. He wasn’t receiving quite the same attention on the general ward as he had been getting in intensive care, and this left him with too much time to start getting frightened – and aggressive. He wasn’t coping, and aggression is in any case common among people with brain injury.
It was a government hospital. I don’t want to say that the doctors and nurses didn’t care. They did, but they didn’t have the time to give him the constant attention he needed – they had many other patients to attend to. There was no one outside of visiting hours to sit with him and explain things to him over and over as we had been doing. The nurses had a job to do. They needed to get his drips changed and his bed made. They needed to get him washed (it would be many years before he regained sufficient co-ordination to do that for himself without help), and they needed to get him fed. They went about doing their job in an understandably perfunctory, and what might be perceived as rough, manner, and that didn’t help things either. Paul was desperate for attention, and their practical and dispassionate manner with him fed his aggression.
He began getting seriously ‘snarky’ with them, and it wasn’t long before Paul was moved to the psychiatric unit, because no one could cope with his attitude.
As if thi
ngs weren’t bewildering enough for him, he was now surrounded by mental patients who harassed him and took advantage of his blindness to steal his things.
I had no idea that they were going to move him until it happened. I went to visit him one day in the general ward, and he just wasn’t there. When I found out he was in a lock-down ward for the insane, I was horrified, and I was even more horrified when I went in.
The patients were all sedated – Thorazined out into a state of near semi-consciousness, and when people are like that, a strange thing happens. They lose their sense of space, so they walk up and stand right next to you. Like on you. It is extremely disturbing – even when you can see them. It must have been ten times worse for Paul.
When I went in, they surrounded me and started demanding cigarettes.
‘GIMME a cigarette.’
‘I don’t have any cigarettes.’
‘Gimme a cigarette!’
They don’t listen to you, and they are right on you, and they won’t move away. It upset me, and it upset me even more when I learnt that one of the patients had taken a jersey I had given Paul. Paul didn’t have much stuff, but most of the little he did have got taken from him. He was powerless to stop it.
Paul was scared in that place, and to make matters worse, Kate had left for America, and Paul’s parents were in Ballito. I decided right then and there, on that first visit, that Paul could not possibly stay there. I called my mother and told her that there was no way we were leaving him in this place. I didn’t care how difficult it would be, but I was bringing him home.
My mother and I obtained the necessary permission from Paul’s parents that day, and the next day he was released into our care.
I still remember so clearly walking through the door of the psychiatric unit to collect him. There was a long corridor leading from the entrance to the ward, and as I walked in and called Paul’s name, he came flying round the corner at the end of the corridor and ran towards the sound of our voices. He couldn’t wait to get out of there. He was barefoot as he ran, because someone had stolen his slippers.
It was all I could do to persuade him to wait long enough for us to get what little was left of his things together. He wanted to leave the minute he reached me at the door, and he held on to my arm like a frightened child. He would not let go for love or money. There was no way anyone was going to get him back in there! It must have been really terrible for him.
Paul was very distressed about Kate. He kept asking for her – where was she and why wasn’t she coming to see him? All in this plaintive and sad little voice.
‘Where’s Kate? I want to see her.’
‘She’s gone, Paul,’ I’d tell him. ‘She was planning to go overseas and everybody told her that she must go. What was she going to wait for? She had stuff to do, Paul. She had to get on with her life. She’s gone. I’m sorry. She had to go. Don’t be a selfish bastard.’
Six weeks after his overdose, we took Paul home and put him in our spare room. They had given us his medication at the hospital – an anti-depressant, an anti-psychotic, a sedative and a sleeping tablet. All of them to be administered three times a day.
We had known that Paul was going to be a handful, but in fact we’d had no idea.
He would not sleep. At all. We gave him Rohypnol to try to make him sleep. Rohypnol is very powerful. I could take a quarter Rohypnol and sleep for twelve hours, but we would give Paul two whole tablets and he would sleep for fifteen minutes. His body was too accustomed to chemicals, and he was too agitated.
Day or night, Paul was awake and demanding care and attention. We couldn’t just leave him to his own devices. He was still too disorientated and uncoordinated to be left alone, even in his room. He would just bang about and injure himself.
He wouldn’t sit still for even a minute. He would do anything to have an excuse to get up and move around.
I’d beg him to just sit still for ten minutes and he’d say, ‘No. No. I have to go to the toilet.’
He would have just been, so I’d tell him that he didn’t need to go.
‘No. No. I do. Let’s go. Gotta go. Gotta go.’
So we’d go. I’d help him up, and then halfway to the bathroom, he’d say, ‘Just kidding!’
It was maddening.
We spent a lot of time walking in the garden, just as we had done at the hospital, and we listened to music. We talked a lot. Paul could remember quite a bit from when we were together, so we would talk about London, the people we had known and the things we had done. He could remember that, but he still couldn’t remember anything from one day to the next. His brother, Mark, would come and visit and bring him pizza, and Paul would be so thrilled to see him. The next day he’d do the same, and Paul would be just as thrilled, because he’d think this was the first time Mark was visiting him.
I had to keep him busy as much as possible. It was exhausting as much as it was pleasant to reminisce and spend time with him out of the hospital. He couldn’t do anything for himself. He couldn’t use a knife or fork to eat, and he would damage stuff in the house if left alone because he wouldn’t keep still.
Since he needed round-the-clock care, Mark hired nurses for us. Paul needed a day nurse and a night nurse, but he was impossible, so we went through about five nurses in four days.
He also wanted a cigarette. As desperate as he was to smoke, however, there was no way we were going to give in to that. No one in the household smoked, and we decided that while he was at it, he may as well give up everything. In any case, if I had given him a cigarette, he would probably have burnt the house down.
Paul became extremely distressed about the cigarette situation, despite not having smoked all the time he was in the hospital.
One of the nurses was called Emission, and I remember Paul being adamant that Emission must have cigarettes.
He’d say, ‘I’m sure Emission has cigarettes. Let’s frisk her.’
‘She so does not have cigarettes, Paul! She’s a nurse!’
But he wouldn’t listen. It was like this big plan, and he was gonna get me in on it. He was all conspiratorial about it.
The whole time, ‘Let’s frisk Emission!’
It was very funny at first, but he became quite irate about it after a couple of days. He actually got a bit frisky on one occasion, when he suddenly leapt up out of his chair and slammed his little fist into the palm of his other hand, and demanded that he be given a cigarette RIGHT NOW!
My father was sitting there and very calmly but firmly told him, ‘Paul. Sit down!’, and – voops – he sat down.
‘Sorry about that, sir. Sorry. Sorry.’
He was a nightmare, but as long as he was on his meds, he was okay. He was actually quite funny. Trying to frisk the poor beleaguered nurses!
He also had this way of clapping and then eagerly rubbing his hands together, as if … I don’t know … strawberries and cream were coming!
As long as he was medicated we could cope. Even though he wouldn’t sleep or sit still, he was quite entertaining and came across as happy and friendly, but as soon as they began wearing off – well, that was another story altogether.
We knew when the pills started to wear off, because he would start getting distressed, the way he’d been in the hospital. He would begin saying those things over and over again.
‘Let’s go. Let’s go. Please help me!’
He’d look right at me, and even though I knew that he couldn’t see me, it seemed as if he really was looking at me, and he would plead with me to help him.
‘PLEASE! HELP ME!’
I’d feel so helpless, and I’d ask him, ‘What must I do? What can I do to help you, Paul?’ But there was nothing I could do, and I knew it.
It was dreadful, but then the minute he went back onto his meds he would be all happy again.
After he had been with us for about three or four days, we decided to stop the meds, because it was clear that they were simply suppressing and masking whatever was going on inside
him, not taking it away. We thought that the best way to do it would be to stop them one at a time rather than all at once. That would have been too much for Paul – and us, for that matter – to cope with.
So we kept him on the sedative and took him off the anti-depressant and then the anti-psychotic.
It was like opening a floodgate of emotion, and, if I may use the expression, that is when ‘the shit got real’.
The following two days were very upsetting for all concerned.
It was the first time that Paul was able to even begin to comprehend the full scope of what had happened. As much of a handful as he had been, and as chaotically active as his mind had been – as distressed and confused as he was in the hospital – he had never truly grasped reality. Of course he had been unable to remember much from one day to the next, so he had lacked the continuity of thought to understand what had happened to him. He had been largely living from moment to moment. Like a goldfish.
As a result, even though we must have explained it to him ten thousand times in the hospital, it only really sank in during those two days that he was off the medication, and he was overwhelmed. He understood that he had ODed and that he was blind as a result, and that Kate was gone, and … everything. It really sank in, and he was absolutely devastated. The futility of the situation finally sank in, and he became deeply disheartened. Sad. He was so sad.
For the first time he started wanting details about the night he’d ODed, but he was frustrated in this because there really wasn’t all that much we could tell him.
We told him that we didn’t know much – that Kate had come home from work at about 3 a.m. and found him. That she had called the ambulance and that he had been taken to hospital.
‘But what happened? What happened?’
‘I don’t know, Paul. No one knows. Only you can know what happened. No one else was there.’
He wanted to know, over and over. Our answers never satisfied him, and he still battled with his short-term memory.
The next question was, ‘Why can’t I see?’
‘I don’t know. The doctors don’t know if you will regain your sight.’