Real Time Short Stories

The transition from medical marvel to sick man on a recovery ward takes a couple of sets of doors, half a corridor and a few seconds. Even the erstwhile wonder at the speed of my recovery is giving way to solicitation about the remaining breathing and immunological issues that are holding up the rate of my recovery. Time – all time – is flexible in here. The only minutes that are certain are those resembling a George Saunders dialogue, spacing apart the hours like lifebuoys.

Yes, a cup of tea please.
Yes, I will have breakfast. Coffee and bran flakes please.
Yes, I’ll have paracetamol.
Yes please. Cup of tea.
Yes I have. Yes they did open.

Much of this could have been predicted, once we’ve brushed past my failure to predict any of this. I’d never picked up before on the stockings, though. Ted stockings might sound like the support your feet and calves need to prepare you to sit through a long, smug presentation by an ideas-guy with a face mic, but they exemplify my institutionalisation. When I had barely returned to consciousness, I raged against the stockings, white knee-length, muscle-stranglers that made me resemble a Regency dandy, albeit one wearing robot feet. The feet snapped every few seconds, pushing my shins, ankles and toes in random directions. Later, when the (entirely necessary) tin leg-breakers had been removed, the stockings remained in place, a monumental, ever-present itch. Any offer I’d have to be relieved of them for a short while would be accepted gratefully. Some days they’d forget to put them back on and I’d fantasise about a consultant standing above me, telling me they’re ready for me to lose the stockings.

The other night, though, I noticed how puffy my bare feet were, and how cold they were in the bed, and I asked a nurse to put them back on. I think that might be a signal for a shift in how the blog’s going to progress because, in all fairness, that was a really boring story.

But I hope it’s fair to say it’s one I needed to tell.

I thought I’d use the previous post to give you a break from the gloopy pornography of my hospital stay, where my CT Scan from the other week is being passed around the surgical fraternity like a link to the John Merrick Flickr account. In all honesty, though, coma, intubation and paralysis do tend to promote solipsism. For all the moments of high drama, the propensity for massive danger or hope to arrive in a second; for all the emotional churn, the life resolutions, the love that’s been communicated not least via comments on this blog (for which my thanks are expressed briefly and generally but meant personally and fully); for all the scarification, hallucination and weird science,  these two weeks have been overwhelmingly about waiting.

Now I’m on the recovery ward – the last bed before a potential temporary discharge until I’m pre-opped again to fix the thing they reckon I’ve spent my life adapting to so well it both delayed and guaranteed the implosion a fortnight ago – the blur of momentary sleep and wakeful dreaming is no longer a factor. Nevertheless, each day continues to be a glacial pursuit of banal triumphs.
The poetry is in the banal. Sometimes I feel like Primo Levi; sometimes it’s more like being on a long-haul flight. I spend days fixating on how to get this tube removed or downgraded – when it happens, there’s a moment of relief then I start to be irritated by another attachment I’d accepted previously. I crave taste and flavour when I’m nil by mouth then a week of banal hospital cake helps food lose its emotional heft.

It’s because the pace of life is necessarily slow, the distance between a positive decision and the
liberating action stretches like pizza dough and when holes start to appear, it can be easy to fall through them. Endurance and tolerance, Solomon Northrup rather than Grundy, are absolutely necessary but there’s a risk of atrophy in that too.

And then something happens.

This afternoon, Sally removed my remaining drains. I can now walk without having to negotiate the help of a nurse to disentangle my tubes and carry my bottles. All I’m connected to, for the time being, is oxygen. The bureaucracy of this situation just lost a layer of paperwork.

I could give you the big handover notes, talk you through my medical history and we could get puzzled or outraged as to how I got to November 4th so sick that a slightly later 999 call would have been too late.

I could go with self-accusation: Billy Grahaming up to my bad self-destructive ways; put my 20-year-old self on trial; blame it on the hot knives, the cold flats, the revolutionary delusions and of course the boogie.

I could get all Erin Brocovitch about it and resolve to find the guilty of the medical profession who didn’t foresee this all happening at any point over the last 45 years.

But my concern isn’t ‘How the hell did I get so sick?’ but ‘Who the hell isn’t this sick?’ Because, you know, there were local factors in the case of my body, but the sickness of keeping on slogging away in desperation, in increasing depression, trudging up and down the same bastard roads for an occasional glimpse of a honey pot – yes, exactly like Cormac Mccarthy’s Winnie The Pooh – that’s where to find the class action.

But I’ll narrow it down again because the sun just rose over Wavertree, my first sight of the sky since last Tuesday. I have rich memories of the morning skyline in Gdansk 15 years ago, waking up eye to eye with church spires, and of sky-tall building work over Dhaka, 9 years ago, watching the immense blood orange sun from my hotel window. These trips were two of the great working experiences of my life and those moments, realising that I was here, seeing this, because I made the choice of being a writer, are among the most fulfilling I’ve known. And this moment – I’ve been sat out in a chair by the window; the Ozymandian towers in construction for the new Liverpool Royal Hospital are striping the view of Archbishop Blanch school,  Mount Vernon and the stretch from Edge Lane south to Runcorn; I have a coffee and a new Bolano – correlates quite precisely with those euphoric moments abroad. I am here because I’m a writer.

Here because I’m a writer: the life I’ve had to live to fight for the retention of that core truth; the logic I’ve neglected to follow because my sense of who I am and what I should be was bigger; the reward or revenge you get for making that call. Everything that put me in here. Everything it’s given me while I have been here. Everything my life was supposed to be about while my insides were fermenting like squalid moonshine, while I was maintaining the distance of one microsleep on the motorway away from being shovelled into one of the cement mixers outside instead of arriving via the ambulance bay into this world of brilliant humans and caring machines.

Tell me about your plans for the rest of the day.

It shouldn’t produce separation anxiety. It’s not like it’s meant to have been a holiday or an exchange trip or something huggable like that but there’s a bed being prepared for me in High Dependency and after the induced coma, period of intubation before the first hernia op, the two seizures on successive nights and getting back to communication with the outside world the last couple of days, my shift nurse Evangeline has just brought me a jelly but I’m struggling to find anything else to keep her busy. Looks like I’ll be out of the ICU tonight and,  in the absence of a way home, I’m not sure I want to leave this family.

The first lesson I absorbed was to let these incredible professionals get on with their jobs. Show trust and it’ll be given back. Smile and wave at everyone because each one is doing something that’s going to lower the wall you’re trying to climb. Like the housekeeping staff who noticed I’d been writing my conversation when intubated, so provided a little wipe-down board and marked pen. Like Jess who managed to get me to focus on my breathing during my seizure two nights ago when I was ready to declare myself unavailable for future struggle. Every wise eyebrow raised by young Max as he swings past in slow-mo.

And that’s without the relationship that builds over a shift with a dedicated, alert, compassionate nurse dealing the best scientific and human care. The ICU really belongs to these nurses and, for those times when I was conscious, I’ll not forget Lucy, making the weirdest feeling of my life feel normal and under control; lovely Big Dave, who felt like a trusted friend within about 10 seconds; Dave Beard who I know will wage war on my behalf and that, if I ever had another kid, I’ll have to name it Sambucha in his honour; exquisite Kieron, a mighty strength applied to a precise point; Chrissie, whose last shifts before her maternity leave had got me back to what I recognised as being alive, even though I slipped back before she clocked off; Efriz, whose dancer’s poise and gentle pride in his work were as inspirational to watch as Ian’s care to not miss a detail or Sara’s immediate capacity to spark good spirits; or Alfie, against whose rock-like strength I was never allowed to slump during the four nights he kept me going.

Evangeline has brought me some bangers and mash. I’m going to miss this place.

The bed-wetting reference of the previous post – while an entirely truthful piece of eye-catching amateur Christy Brown-ing, a little league Baubyism – wasn’t the story of last night. That was the piss that made its way into a bottle, held by Laura of the swinging hips, who snaffled the catch with the curly-haired aplomb of Graham Roope, dipping to his right to see an edge on a Geoff Arnold off-cutter find its way home.

Just a word of warning: you won’t need expert medical knowledge to follow this series of posts. You may, however, wish to research domestic and international cricket of the 1970s and 1980s to gain full technical appreciation.

Anyway, with no further catches getting spilled, I can see this being one route out of here: on my back but pissing in the right direction.

I’m still working out all the other ways. Last night and the night before, I’d watched my shift nurses prepare the discharge notes for my transfer to High Dependency, then watched that pristine care melt as my agonised, short breaths, the knuckles pawing for the floor and seizure sweats petrified around me in the claymatian shape of the inside of the ambulance, my last memory of life before the ICU.

Before Steph switched me back on, I was aware I’d been sedated – for how long that had been and how long I was conscious of it, I have no idea – and I worked out from voices I’d started to hear that I’d already come through something, that I was now going to be held in this place before the next something but that I seemed very strong and I have a lovely girlfriend. Remarkably, the first indication ICU nurses were able to give me of the strength I could draw on to get through this, came before they’d even woken me up.

The claymatian inside of the ambulance, of my head, of a muddy River Styx with thousands of naked Morph soldiers commando crawling across it, had until last night been features of the lit-up fantasies whenever I closed my eyes. The morphine was clearly at the root of that. It’s less easy to explain how much it separated my perceptions from reality in my ideas about the medical process taking place here: the casting of the staff and even other patients; the methods used to lull patients into the correct responses; the music playing under and against and sometimes within your pain; the backslang reminiscent at times of Poloni… It doesn’t require anywhere near that amount of puzzling to work out how clever science and skilled, meticulous, loving care are what have saved me on four big occasions so far and been life-affirming the rest of the time.

I’m doing this because what’s happening to me amongst these new friends in ICU feels like it needs more than a thank-you card. And, yes, it’s the journeyman writer’s hopeful step into the territory of the misery memoirist and if one way out of this is via a spot of promo on Woman’s Hour during a focus on Men’s Health and how we never act like we worry about our health until it’s no longer there, I’ll take that.

But if you want to support this blog,please keep reading, reposting, reacting, retweeting. This is raw pamphleteering and if you agree with it, please support the work of the ICU team at the Royal. Not so closely you get to write my sequel, mind you.

Last night I closed my eyes and saw the shadows of the ICU doors, windows and the corridors out. Nine days here and I’ve just arrived.