My Year Off (15 page)

And yet I found myself moved by Donne and strangely unmoved by Bauby. With Donne, we follow, because he is as we are: ordinary; when he writes of the ‘variable and therefore miserable condition of Man’ we know what he’s talking about, and we share his perplexity. With extraordinary Monsieur Bauby we spectate, dumbly, from a distance, awestruck and horrified, no doubt, but not touched in any way that can register on the Richter scale of everyday human feeling. I had expected to be dead; I had been there; it did not interest me to go back, especially in the company of one so coldly cerebral as Monsieur Bauby (although he had very little choice).

Gradually, I came to terms with the fact that, although I had indeed survived, my old life was well and truly dead and buried. As I realized why this should be so, I began to face up to the reality of my new life. This was distinctly different from the experience of my ‘new life’ as a stroke-patient in Queen Square. In retrospect, I was beginning to do that from day one of my time in rehab.

My transfer from the National Hospital in Queen Square to the Devonshire Hospital, adjoining Harley Street, went smoothly. I said goodbye, with end-of-term sadness and excitement, to Cheryl, Phil, ‘Phirrip’, Linda, Hanifa, Mamie and especially Julia, whose sweet good nature had won both my heart and Sarah’s. When I said goodbye to my physiotherapist John Marsden, he said in reply that he expected to see me back as an outpatient
before too long. I found this an almost unimaginable thought. Dr Lees looked in for a final check-over, and then the Great Ormond Street ambulance took Sarah and me on the short trip across London to Devonshire Street. The trip through the backways of Fitzrovia was one I’d thoughtlessly made countless times in my car in the old days on hurried rush-hour journeys to west London, but now it seemed symbolic, a new chapter in a journey whose outcome was still dark and uncertain, though just to be moving, to feel the wind in the street and to see the blue of the sky as the stretcher was loaded into the ambulance seemed to offer a breath of hope, a glimmer of light in the prevailing darkness.

My new room, 304, on the third floor, was much smaller than the one I’d left – the ceiling low, the wood dark – and the street outside seemed much noisier. I missed the Queen Square nurses and the routine of the Nuffield ward, and felt rather trapped. I lay on my new bed, taking in my surroundings, while various members of the hospital staff came to introduce themselves: two black nurses, Cora and Dorothy, then the nursing sister, and then a nurse called Mary, an Irish woman, who told me she would be looking after me for the next several weeks. Gradually I became aware of what it meant to be in a small private hospital (compared to a private ward in a National Health hospital): a level of personal comfort, and twenty-four-hour attention, generally unavailable in the NHS. Finally Davina Richardson, the physiotherapist I had been told at Queen Square would be in charge, poked her head round the door. She looked very attractive in her grey hospital culottes and stripy-cream blouse. I found myself brightening at the prospect of physiotherapy with someone who seemed at once so friendly and intelligent. After these visits, I was soon
very tired, and suddenly quite depressed. Sarah was wonderful: she settled me and my things into the room, and eventually I fell asleep. Fatigue was both a friend and an enemy in those early weeks.

During that first night at the Devonshire I dreamed very intensely, and found myself crying in my sleep. I cannot remember the dreams, but it was the first time I had dreamed so vividly since the stroke. I woke up with tears on my face.

When the nurse came in at eight o’clock next morning, and asked me how I was, I found myself saying to her, ‘I am still alive.’

‘Oh, I’ve never lost any of my patients!’ she replied cheerfully.

The Devonshire is one of Britain’s top rehabilitation hospitals, with superb physiotherapy facilities, a place favoured by injured sportspeople – and convalescent yuppie skiers. Its regular clientele, however, is made up of wealthy Arabs. During my stay, there were no sportsmen, and no skiers, just some sad paraplegic cases from Saudi Arabia, nearly incoherent victims of desert car crashes. The hospital itself, situated opposite Odins restaurant, a fashionable late-sixties hang-out, is a bit like a small private hotel, though at times the atmosphere on the shadowy, wood-panelled corridors was frankly Oriental, a claustrophobic mixture of bazaar and mosque. Confined to my room for most of each day, I gradually became aware of this when I was wheeled downstairs each morning for physiotherapy. The male nurse who usually took me down to physiotherapy was a wiry, gentle Arab called Mohammed – indeed, all the people who worked in the hospital seemed to be Arab, or Irish, or Greek. I soon guessed I was the only English person in residence. Sarah said she had seen an old colonel on
the next floor, but since his stroke had knocked out his speech, we decided that I was the sole in-house representative of the English language.

I had chosen to come to the Devonshire Hospital (known to its staff as ‘The Devvie’) for its specialization in physiotherapy. My priority, from the first, had been to get myself back on my feet. The physiotherapy gym – a row of adjustable exercise benches and a collection of brightly coloured inflatable balls – was in the basement.

The first time I came into the gym and saw my fellow patients (of all ages) stretched out on their exercise benches, I thought I was hearing things. Was it really the case that this attractive nurse was weirdly urging her patient with the exhortation ‘fuck, fuck, fuck’? What kind of advanced therapeutic procedure, I wondered, was happening? What was going on? I asked Davina, who explained, with much laughter, that the Arabic for ‘up’ was a word that sounded like ‘fuck’. The nurse was simply asking her charge to lift his foot.

Sarah would join me down in the physiotherapy gym most mornings, politely deflecting questions from other Arab visitors about the number of children she had. Several old Arab gentlemen, attending brain-damaged teenagers, did not disguise their dismay at my apparent failure to have yet produced an heir.

Thanks to this regime, and Davina’s expert attentions, my physical restrictions lessened, but with excruciating slowness. In hindsight, I see that she was concerned to get me standing and walking again. She was less concerned that my left arm remained lifelessly out of action (it was, in fact, almost a year after the stroke before I got the use of it back in a limited way). To me, however, the terrible frustration of trying to make a connection between my brain and my fingers, of imagining movement,
while staring hopelessly at an immobile hand, was unquestionably among the lowest moments of these weeks. For much of the time, indeed, my lifeless left arm remained strapped across my chest to prevent accidental damage. Plus, there was the fact that I could still barely stand upright.

For the first twelve weeks after my stroke, I had to move around in a wheelchair, pushed by Sarah or by one of the nurses. The prevailing sense of helplessness was very difficult to come to terms with. I had no control over my feelings, particularly when we were outside, and I would rage horribly against whoever was pushing me. Nobody would say when, exactly, I’d be well enough to walk again, and at moments like these I saw a life of infuriating confinement stretching out before me, a vista of utter helplessness. Sometimes I wondered how I could possibly cope and more than once thought that if this was to be the best that my life had to offer, I would be better dead.

Later, when I read
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
I came to feel ashamed of my mood at this time. Although I could understand and sympathize with what Bauby was describing, my afflictions, compared to his, were trivial. But never mind. At the time, like many stroke-survivors, I was shut away in my own sad little world, seemingly incarcerated at the centre of a miserable universe in which the phrase ‘better dead’ aptly summarized my feelings.

Fortunately, in the universe I could control – the tiny orbit of my hospital bed – I was not completely out of action. I could scribble in my Black ‘n’ Red diary, and write letters or postcards with my ‘good’ right hand; I could see friends and take an interest in the outside world, even though the world itself seemed terrifyingly
noisy and overpowering whenever I was in it. Once I was into the routine of daily physiotherapy at the Devonshire, I had to face up to the slow process of recovery.

I think that one of the problems with stroke is that, as a condition, it offers a moving target. Compared to, say, cancer, stroke is not a degenerative condition. If you survive the initial crisis you are – with luck – constantly and imperceptibly getting better. I had to learn to adjust, and also to wait. Even now, two years later, I think the lesson in patience I learned during these weeks is the one that I value most highly.

Most mornings, Sarah and I would take the wheelchair to the delightful seclusion of the Paddington Street Gardens two blocks from the hospital. The air was now much cooler, and autumn was on the way.

My own mood seesawed wildly – at times I felt almost euphoric with relief and at the satisfaction of being alive, at other times almost suicidally depressed. I had a lot of bizarre sexual fantasies, mixed in with the general mood of depression. On my first Sunday, at three o’clock, I had a visit from one of the physiotherapists, Alex, a New Zealander, who put my paralysed left arm in a sling. With Alex, the exercises became almost sexual. It was strange to feel her breasts pressing against my hand, and to catch the scent of her body, though she did not seem to notice my reaction. I had a fit of giggles as she pressed down on my torso. The seriousness of the physiotherapy soon returned (I don’t think Alex had any idea why I was smiling), but some of the positions she put me in were comically reminiscent of sexual foreplay, and I fantasized about asking her to have sex. The same afternoon, by chance, a nurse came in and gave me some Stroke Association literature, including a hilarious document entitled ‘Sex after Stroke Illness’, a comically old-fashioned leaflet – very sober and literal-minded, with definitions of orgasms and so forth.

That was also the day I tried to eat Sunday lunch at the Devonshire. Perhaps remembering the happy days of childhood, I chose roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. This was a mistake. With my left hand immobilized, I had difficulty managing the knife and fork and became terribly frustrated. Besides, I still had no proper sense of taste, and did not enjoy my food. I felt bored and tired and disaffected. I noted in my diary that, on a scale of ten, my mood was two.

It was a symptom of my mood at this time that I found myself at war with the nurses, and I complained bitterly about the cramped conditions of Room 304. I felt angry and helpless. To cap it all, when the catering manager, a friendly Greek, came in and asked how I was, he called me Mr Crumb. As I corrected him, endeavouring to keep my temper, I realized I’d reached a low point to be worrying about such matters of
politesse.