The Million-Rand Teaspoon

by Nikki Ridley

  We told him what we knew – that the doctors had originally told us that he should regain his sight once the brain swelling had gone down, because it was putting pressure on his optic nerve. We were told that it is quite common for people with brain injuries to lose their sight temporarily for this reason.

  We couldn’t tell him why he was still blind. His sight wasn’t coming back at all, but there was nothing wrong with his eyes or his optic nerves. At that stage we didn’t know anything about cortical blindness, and the doctors had told us nothing.

  He wasn’t totally blind. We realised that he could tell the difference between light and dark after he began commenting that someone had turned the light on when they had, but that was about it. He couldn’t distinguish shapes or follow movement.

  If we were out in very bright sunlight and I waved my arm, he could see the shadow, but that was the closest he could come to ‘seeing’ anything.

  Funny, though – I remember not being sure whether or not I should believe him when he said he couldn’t see anything. Despite the five years that had passed since the end of our relationship, I was still so used to him being cunning – so used to him having a hidden agenda for everything – that it actually crossed my mind that he was lying about being blind.

  I’d sit and think, well, why would he tell us if he could see? Then I’d think, why wouldn’t he tell us? Then I’d think, well, because if he can see, then he can get up in the middle of the night and go around looking for cigarettes.

  Paranoid thinking, perhaps, but that is how you begin to think about things after living with a drug addict who lies and manipulates constantly. It was quite incredible that my mistrust had not died after five years.

  Another thing that evidently had not died after five years was Paul’s hurt and anger with me for leaving him.

  During those two days that he was off his medication, he began to talk about it – but, interestingly, as if he was talking to someone else about me.

  He’d say, ‘You know that Savannah girl? She wasn’t very fair, you know.’ He would go on about me being a horrible person, and what had happened between us, and that he was very upset about it.

  ‘She really hurt me.’

  ‘Well, Paul,’ I said, ‘maybe you hurt her too.’

  ‘Ja, but she really hurt me!’

  He had so much to say about Savannah. It had all been locked away for so long because I had refused to speak to him after we broke up. I had refused to take his phone calls or reply to his letters, so he now took the opportunity to say everything he had wanted to say then and couldn’t.

  He said it all in the third person. As if I wasn’t there.

  Those two days were difficult, but necessary. He worked through a lot of stuff. It was the first time that he could really get a hold of his own mind.

  On the last night we took him off the sedative too, but then he was up the whole night – ‘Gotta go. Gotta go. GOT TO GO! Let’s go. Let’s go.’ All the time. It was a never-ending loop that he couldn’t seem to get out of, so we decided after that to put him back on the sedative. It didn’t keep him in bed all night, but it at least calmed him and he would sleep a little, as opposed to not at all.

  We didn’t put him back on the other stuff, though. It was time for him to start dealing with the real world again.

  As I’ve said, we went through nurses at a ridiculous rate. They couldn’t deal with him. Each of us, my mom, my dad and I, had also taken a turn to spend a night watching him, so when a friend of mine, David, offered to look after him one night, we had a bit of a laugh. We were nurseless by this stage. Each of the night nurses had left after only one night on the job, and the agency wouldn’t send us any more.

  We tried to discourage David, but he insisted. He had no idea, of course. We tried to tell him …

  In the end we let David do it, because none of us were volunteering, and of course it was the same as always. Gotta go. Gotta go. Let’s go. The whole night. No sleep for the weary – and this with both a sedative and a sleeping tablet.

  There was clearly no way that we could continue to take care of Paul indefinitely, and so after he had been with us for about ten days or so, my parents contacted his parents in Ballito and told them that Paul would have to go into some form of care. They needed to find a place for him to live.

  My parents offered to drive him down to Natal, which they did. We had done all we could.

  The morning he left, I remember sitting at the table drinking tea with him. I had this huge pink tea cup, and Paul started staring intently right at it – as if he could see it. I asked him if he could see the cup and he said, yes, he could. I asked him what colour it was.

  He said, ‘Oh. It’s brown. It’s brown because it’s Royco Tea!’

  A Hard Decision

  Val

  THERE ARE THINGS THAT COME TO MIND FIRST WHEN I look back on the months after Paul came home. Things that make time disappear, bring tears unbidden and make it impossible to talk for a few seconds.

  Not coping with him. Not being able to cope with him, and having to send him away. That wasn’t a hard thing to face. It was no surprise, and we had to be pragmatic. It’s the things that came after that fact that still pinch.

  Having to turn away after we signed him in to a state psychiatric hospital, even after he begged us not to leave him, even after he promised he would be good if we took him home.

  Walking in on one of our weekly visits to see him fishing with his hands in his plate, trying to get his food because the nurse who was supposed to be feeding him was chatting to someone else and not paying attention to him.

  Seeing him unable to bring his hands to his mouth, as hungry as he was, and knowing that I wasn’t there to help when this happened.

  Hearing the other patients egging him on to run, because he was forever making a dash for the fence to escape even when he didn’t know where the fence was.

  Knowing how desperate to escape he must have been to keep doing that.

  ‘Run, Paul, run!’ they would call out, after pointing him in the right direction, because it was entertainment for them to see him run into the fence.

  They weren’t bad people, I told myself. Just lost, like Paul.

  ‘Run, Paul! Run!’

  Knowing that they were doing this when we weren’t there.

  Knowing how desperate he was to escape, because even when I walked with him in the gardens, he’d keep asking me how he could get out – telling me that all he wanted to do was get out.

  The cut on his cheek from when he’d bolted down a corridor in the building and run into a fire extinguisher.

  Pleading with me to take him home.

  ‘I’ll be good, Mom, I promise. Just please don’t leave me here. I promise I won’t be bad.’

  ‘You’re not bad, Paul. You’re not here because you are bad. You’re here because you have had problems. You have an illness, and this is a hospital, and we are trying to help you.’

  ‘Please, Mom. I PROMISE to be good. Please take me home!’ Crying.

  The day we had him committed. I think of that day and then the memory is replaced with a flood of emotion so intense that it chokes me, and I sit unable to speak, tears welling up in my eyes.

  It is at moments like these that everything … everything … ceases to be a series of events in the past and there are no more words to describe what has become a part of you.

  I had to leave my child, and this time there was no anger, no desperation, no conscious turning away for his own good. There was no exasperation, no disappointment, no thoughts of ‘if he dies, he dies’. That was all gone. That Paul was gone.

  The son I left behind at Townhill each time I visited was totally helpless and he wanted his mom, and I was never more his mother then, nor he ever more my child, than at those moments. After everything we had been through, after all the ‘be tough’, I’d cry every time we drove away.

  We had intended to try to look after him ourselves. We had known full wel
l that he would be in need of professional help, because of what Wendy and Buster had told us, but when they brought him to us, we had no clear idea of what we’d need to do.

  We realised very quickly, though, that he would need more than professional help. He would need professional care.

  We had taken him and done our best to get him settled down. The days were not too bad. They were full, but we managed. We’d sit in the sun. He loved the sun on his face. We had so many wonderful, supportive friends who would visit, and the attention would keep us all distracted. We’d take drives to the beach.

  It was the nights that rapidly took a toll.

  My husband and I took turns looking after him at night.

  There were two beds in his room, and we’d take it in shifts to lie on the bed opposite Paul’s to watch over him. We didn’t sleep much, because he would wake often and call for us. He was still very lost and confused, and when he woke, he would want to know where he was, and where we were.

  Then he’d sleep for a short while and wake again, as lost as before, again wanting to know where he was, wanting to get up, and so it would go on.

  I was particularly worried about the glass sliding doors in our house. I was terrified, day and night, that Paul would blunder into them. Day and night made no difference to him, he wouldn’t see them at all, and he was always moving about and wanting to go somewhere.

  After a month, we knew that we couldn’t handle it.

  A friend of ours had contacts at St Luke’s, a home for cerebral palsy children in Stanger, and we took Paul there to meet them. He was always very amenable to being led off somewhere, so getting him to St Luke’s was not difficult, but I realised as soon as we walked into the place that there would be a problem.

  The residents were very loving and friendly, and they were all over Paul the minute we arrived. They hugged him and touched him and hung on him. They seemed so pleased with him, but the tactile attention from all sides evidently alarmed him because, as collected as he seemed, I was holding his hand and I could feel the sweat break out. He didn’t panic, but in minutes his palms were absolutely wet. He didn’t really know what was going on, and he was afraid of these children, who only wanted to please.

  Still, Mark and I knew that we could no longer cope with caring for Paul on our own. A private nurse at our home was not an option, for both financial and practical reasons, so when the administrator at St Luke’s said that we should leave him with them, we decided to give it a try.

  It didn’t work out. After a very short time, the administrator called and said that they couldn’t cope either. There was a large staircase in the residence, and they said that Paul kept getting up at night and wandering around and they were afraid he would fall down the stairs. She added that the constant attention he received from the other residents, who were trying to help him, seemed to be distressing him, especially that of the little ones who seemed to be in his way all the time. They were just being nice, but it was ‘freaking him out’.

  No one could cope. We were at a loss. He needed to be in a psychiatric hospital where they’d have the experience and resources to deal with him. It seemed wrong, though. He wasn’t crazy or delusional. He wasn’t mentally ill. He was injured and bewildered.

  But he needed twenty-four-hour care, and we felt that we had no choice.

  The woman at St Luke’s told us about Townhill, but she explained that the only way we could get him in there would be to have him certified – in effect, declaring him mentally incapacitated and relinquishing him to state control. It was a hard decision to make, but it only took one day to do what had to be done. One incredibly unpleasant and difficult day. In one day, Paul became a ward of the state, and they took him from us. Until they gave him back, we would only be able to visit him. We couldn’t even take him to Pietermaritzburg in our car. We were expecting to, but after all the relevant documents had been signed and stamped, by us, the district surgeon and the police, we were gently informed that we might accompany him in the ambulance, but we could not take him to Townhill ourselves.

  Sending him to Townhill was no easy thing to do after we had seen what it was like for Paul in the psychiatric ward at the J.G. Strijdom.

  We’d given Paul some of the medication he’d been left with from the J.G. Strijdom to keep him calm, but he knew that something was happening, and, unable to grasp the situation in its totality, he’d become ever more confused over the course of the day.

  To my great relief, he fell asleep in the ambulance. We had to go back to Durban for the ambulance to drop off another patient at the hospital, and then on to Pietermaritzburg, so it was a long journey – about two and a half hours.

  Paul lay in the back, his head on my lap, and I prayed he’d sleep all the way.

  He did wake, but thankfully only when we were almost there.

  I remember the ambulance attendant becoming concerned when he showed signs of waking, and asking if he’d need to be restrained.

  ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘he’s harmless.’

  He was harmless. There was no violence in him, just this bewilderment and worry that hurt so much to see.

  ‘Where are we going, Mom?’ he kept asking, and I kept telling him that he had to go back to hospital, and that it would all be okay.

  It would all be okay. It was a stage he had to go through, that’s all.

  When we got there, they took him. More papers to sign, and then we had to go. Mark had brought the car and met us there.

  Paul was completely awake when we left, and while he might not have understood much, he could sense that this was something different from St Luke’s, and he understood that we were leaving him. He began to cry, and then to plead with us. ‘Don’t go! Don’t go! Don’t leave me here!’

  He thought we were abandoning him. The nurses were so kind, and they kept on reassuring him that we’d be back to visit, but he wasn’t hearing them.

  He was only hearing us say goodbye.

  Swimming

  Paul

  A HUGE SWIMMING POOL. A POOL THE SIZE OF AN OCEAN, the edges so far away on all sides that although I knew they were there, I couldn’t reach them. I could only keep swimming, the tide against me, fighting to keep my head above water. Fighting to stay alive.

  I couldn’t reach the side of the pool, but I couldn’t stop swimming, because if I did I would drown.

  I remember nothing of the overdose, and I never will, and the only clear recollection that I have from the time I lay in the hospital is what I’ve just told you. That and the rhythmic sound of the heart-lung machine that sounded like the sea to me, and fed my dream.

  Everything else is just a mass of confusion, and almost everything I know of that time has been told to me.

  I remember feeling disturbed by the things that were sticking into my body and by being strapped down – which I was because I was constantly trying to rip the strange things (the tubes, drip-line and various other things keeping me ‘connected’) out of and off me. Sounds came through in waves, and didn’t seem to make any sense. Voices were just voices. I was unaware of who they belonged to, and I never knew who was with me. Other tattered recollections seem out of sequence, so that what little I remember happening, as I heard it and felt it – because I couldn’t see anything – is difficult for me to place or associate with any one part of the weeks following my recovery from the coma. I’m not sure where to put things, so I have left that bit for others to tell. I was fairly solidly drugged up in any case, so it is no wonder that it is all a blur.

  When I stopped ‘swimming’, I remember walking in the gardens. Noo walked with me, but I only knew that after the fact, when I was told. I have no memory of her being there now, although I have also been told that she was one of the few people I could identify from day to day.

  I remember the gardens, because I loved to sing, and I could feel the sun shining on me.

  My memory begins to clear from the time I was sent to Townhill.

  Townhill is a state psychia
tric hospital near Pietermaritzburg, with three divisions allowing for accommodation of the full range of certified cases, from the criminally insane to the temporarily deranged.

  It was probably the shock factor that got my synapses going, because I remember being absolutely terrified! I was confused. I didn’t really know what was going on around me or what people were doing with me. I couldn’t see a thing or even feel my way around people and things properly, because I struggled to understand what I was touching or what was touching me. They initially put me in the lock-down ward for the most dangerous – or perhaps I should say ‘high-care’– patients, who were dangerous to themselves at the very least.

  I have been told that I was placed in a padded cell soon after arrival because I freaked out so badly. The doctors attributed it to all the medication I’d been on since the J.G. Strijdom. I don’t remember this episode, but it fits.

  I was very aware of the other inmates around me, even though they were all in their individual ‘cells’ and so couldn’t touch me. They still scared the wits out of me, because I could hear them. Hearing them was enough. It was a cacophony of sound. They were forever calling for stuff, and screaming and banging, banging, banging.

  I also felt absolutely abandoned, although I understand now why my parents had to put me there. I now know that they had had no choice, because neither they nor anyone else could cope with me, and with my prognosis for recovery to a state of ‘normality’ still looking extremely slim at that stage, it was then not outside the realms of possibility that I might have had to be institutionalised forever.

  So they’d had to do it. They couldn’t have kept me in private care indefinitely, and state care was the only other option open to them. I also know that they felt terrible about it.

  The only way to get me onto the government healthcare system was to have me ‘officially declared in need of psychiatric care’, i.e. certified. So I was – certified, sealed, stamped and delivered.

  I was traumatised, but the terror and the misery that I felt proved to be a catalyst for my recovery. It forced me to find within myself every last ounce of personal strength that I could, just to get through each waking moment, and once I’d found that strength, it slowly but surely began to hold me up.