Authors: Robert McCrum
We had a case conference last night, a meeting where all the therapists sit around and talk about the patient. They’re all so dour. Dr Greenwood said Robert’s arm would never work again. Part of me wants to just prove him wrong. We were all sitting there waiting for Robert, and he came in with Davina, walking unsteadily, making a triumphal entrance that seemed to announce, ‘No matter what you say, look what I can do.’ My heart lifted so much, and we all had a good laugh about Robert’s shoes. He’s bubbly, now that he’s starting to be able to walk. Life suddenly looks good, and I feel as though I’m slowly thawing out and rejoining the world again.
Chris Cunningham was my Irish nurse during this phase of recovery, and I came to like her immensely. She was friendly, bright, and very encouraging. Each morning we now did what Chris called ‘a soft-shoe shuffle’ into the bathroom. ‘Don’t tell Davina,’ she’d say. It felt pleasantly illicit to take steps in the privacy of the room, and I had the constant fear of falling over, but I enjoyed having my little secret with Chris, and I looked forward to having the morning session with her. Dr Zhu, who now came three times a week, was always very calm and professional. He put his needles in my arm, leg, belly and, finally, head. The last one was always alarming, although I didn’t ever feel much more than
the mosquito-bite sensation. After bending over me for some minutes he would stand back and count, one–two–three, up to fifteen, then he would do a few more. Finally he’d be done, and I’d lie there, feeling drowsy. Dr Zhu wanted to know if I could feel the energy passing down my left leg. To encourage him I would say, ‘Yes’, though actually all I could feel was the continuing ache of the muscle and the bone. Nothing seemed to be happening, but the truth was that, since his first visit, I had been walking more confidently on my left leg, so perhaps this was a victory for acupuncture. Who knows? I used to tease Davina about Dr Zhu’s extraordinary skills, which became quite a byword in her department. (Dr Zhu treated me for about three months. Sarah and I became very fond of him; we learned that he had fled Shanghai to live in the West, and when we began to feel sorry for him, enduring the life of exile in Britain, were relieved to discover that he had a beautiful Welsh girl-friend to whom he was engaged to be married.)
The more I thought about my returning movement, the more I found that when I was watching TV I tended to focus on what people were doing with their arms and legs. I still look at athletes on television with a kind of wistful envy for their ease and mobility. As far as the outside world was concerned, I was still at death’s door. Occasionally I would get a letter from the outside which I didn’t understand. People would write and say, ‘I am praying for you.’ What on earth did this mean? Such people obviously believed in God, or said they did, but it made no sense to me. Alas. Prayer is not about answers, as I see it, but questions. We pray to resolve things that trouble us within. Not for the first time, I found myself comparing my room to a monastic cell. So, now: what size was this room? Ten by ten, perhaps. Is
that the size of a cell? My mood was now much better, calmer and more philosophical. The end, i.e. getting home, was in sight, even if I was going to have to learn to adopt a different pace.
You will never get it, if you don’t slow down.
Paul Auster,
Smoke
In preparation for the next stage of convalescence, at home, Davina arranged for me to be taken back to our house in St Peter’s Street to see how well I could negotiate the stairs and handle the complexities of domestic life as a ‘disabled person’. We went early one morning in the Devonshire Hospital car, taking the road to Islington, with Davina driving. I directed her along the familiar back route, enjoying the Dickensian twists and turns of the road; it was such a thrill, after so long indoors, to see the old sights again. In Danbury Street the rowan trees were full of fruit, and the mellow autumn sunlight reflected brilliantly off the Islington stucco. Sarah was waiting for us at No. 41. To my amazement, I found I was able, with Davina’s supporting help, to walk very slowly and unsteadily across the pavement to the house and up the steps to the front door. It seemed years ago that I had been carried out of there on a stretcher. Still upright, I made it into the ground-floor
living room and sat down. The atmosphere seemed cold and shadowy. It was odd, and upsetting, to be back in the room in which I had been lying for so much of that distant Saturday; it was hard to shake off the terrible memory of that experience.
We sat, with cups of freshly brewed coffee (an extraordinary luxury, to me) and explored the possibilities of my being at home. My own feeling was that I would be more confident being there. The worst of it would be dressing and bathing. Finally, after a tour of the house, with Davina measuring up for rails on the stairs, and a grab-rail by the bath, we went back to the Devonshire, where I suddenly felt profoundly tired.
I had been out of action for nine weeks. In the scale of things this was not so long. Soon, perhaps next weekend, I would be going home. Dr Greenwood was now proposing to start me on one aspirin (75 mg) a day, to thin my blood. Just a precaution, he said. I found that as the day of my departure drew closer I was in a worse mood about everything and obsessively anxious to leave the Devonshire. I realized that by the time I did get home I should have been in hospital for the length of an English school term, twelve weeks. I couldn’t wait to get out: each day seemed longer and more boring than the last, and, to make the time pass, I watched more and more TV. One of the after-effects of my stroke is that I’ve remained quite a telly-addict where previously I’d scorned watching TV.
Robert’s making really good, steady physical progress: he can walk on his own, if he knows he’ll be able to grab on to something, and when he wears the bandage [
on his ankle
] that mimics the brace, he can even walk up
and down stairs. He jerks his leg forward and has to think about where to put it down, and how to make it hold weight while he takes the next step. His knee and ankle are weak. He’s still very tired, and I keep worrying that he’ll always be tired. And nothing much happening in the arm; Catherine, the occupational therapist, gave me what looks like a junior vibrator with instructions on how to use it to stimulate Robert’s arm. You rub it back and forth in different sections thirty times in a row. It runs by battery, so no fear of electrocution. We’re getting ready to bring Robert home. He says it worries him, coming home and being able to do so much less than he did. But not really less, is what I think, when I’m being cheery about this. He won’t be able to open jars or carry the groceries or get dressed very easily, but he’ll be able to work, and to drive (we hope), and to read and write and talk and think and make love, and be just the same as ever. We went home yesterday for the day, and it was sheer bliss.
They’ve done a refit of our house, putting in new rails along the stairs and steps in the bathroom to help Robert haul himself around. £700, but it doesn’t look too alarmingly disabled-fitted; the banisters are nice wood and make a pass at fitting in with ours. Robert still very tired and, as the day of coming home approaches (next week, we think), getting more and more grumpy, in part because he’s reached the end of his tether at the hospital, and in part because of fears of coming home. I’ve seen him really lose his temper a few times, where he bangs his arm down and just explodes. It can be because I drop a glass of orange juice, or because he can’t do something, but it’s very upsetting. I know it’s because of his illness. But it makes me really scared, anyway.
I’m bad-tempered, too. But there are good moments, and good hours, and good days, and Robert in general being very sweet and very brave. I suspect that going home won’t be as bad as I dread. But I have more dreams of murder – last night that it was Mom who murdered someone, but somehow I was guilty, too. It’s the third time I’ve dreamed I was a murderer and nobody knew it. Robert is going to have to wear a brace in his shoe that’s made of plastic and goes all the way up to his knee. The point is to support his ankle, which is still very weak. He may have to use a cane, but actually that might make it more difficult, because it’s another thing to think about, and according to Davina, it throws your balance off and gets you into bad muscle habits. He can now make his way slowly, slowly across the room into the bathroom on his own – no more wheelchairs in the evenings.
People forget about the relatives of stroke-sufferers. Of course they have their moods, too, and their own convalescent cycle of readjustment.
For some reason it was much harder than I would have thought to adjust to his paralysed left arm, which doesn’t work at all. It’s as if everything has been distilled down to his arm, that it’s not working has come to symbolize everything awful about this experience. People say you go through a period of mourning for your lost powers. Perhaps I’ve been putting that off for myself, and now that he’s coming home finally have to face up to what’s happened. Poor Robert. I worry so much about him. Poor me, who’s not handling this part very well.
Sarah was right to identify my left arm as the source of anger and despair. Although it was lifeless, it was not without feeling: at times it could be excruciatingly painful. In addition it had developed a swelling (bursa) on the left elbow, which had become tender and very vulnerable. On those occasions when I banged my arm inadvertently, I would rage in a fury at the excruciating pain.
Eventually I was allowed to go home. At noon on the appointed day, 5 October, Greenwood’s office rang to say that I would have to wait for an extra two hours to see a doctor about my bursa. This meant that we had to wait till six o’clock, and arrange for the car to come at six thirty. Sure enough, by six thirty there was no sign of the doctor, and the car was waiting downstairs. The delay became profoundly frustrating; all I wanted to do was leave.
Finally the doctor, a Mr Huskisson, arrived at about a quarter to seven. He took one look at my arm, and said that it was fine to leave it alone, that it was a benign bursa, and not to worry. That was it. He was very cheery, competent and matter-of-fact. The thing that struck me was that, after so many weeks of the doctors’ not saying what was wrong with me, it was peculiar to have somebody who knew exactly what was wrong, and who could, if necessary, prescribe an exact cure. This is the contract of medicine, the contract between doctor and patient that had been missing for so many weeks.
So then I limped, with the greatest effort and difficulty to the third floor elevator, making my farewells to the nurses on duty as I went. Downstairs, I negotiated my way slowly to the car, which was being driven by an Iraqi who was himself recovering from major back surgery. It was exhilarating to be in a civilian vehicle again,
driving through the streets of London and seeing the signs of the rush-hour. Even the delay on the Maryle-bone Road seemed pleasant, and I enjoyed looking at the office workers hurrying through the darkness towards Euston Station. Then we were going up Pentonville Road, and turning into Upper Street, with Sarah in the front, chatting away to the driver about his recovery, following her natural instinct to interview anyone with a story. So then we were driving down Upper Street, and inching along the Essex Road, and turning right into St Peter’s Street, and suddenly I was home, and walking down the pavement slowly with the Iraqi driver carrying my bags into the house as if I’d just been away on a long trip.
We went into the living room together, sat down, and drank the champagne S. (a friend) had given me at the Devonshire, and toasted the future. I felt very perked up by everything, and immensely relieved to be out of the hospital at last, and with no sign of having to go back, either. Then we had supper, and finally we went upstairs to bed. And this was a new, almost undreamed-of luxury, to lie on our double bed, to stretch out, and to feel less cramped than I had for so many weeks.
Lying in bed on my back, looking at the ceiling, I remembered again the day it all happened, and reflected on the nature of time. In some ways this whole experience had been like a punctuation mark in the middle of my life. For years I had lived freely, and at will. I had been independent, able to do what I liked whenever I liked, and had travelled widely around the world. Now I needed help with everything, including getting dressed and bathed, and the idea of leaving the house was unthinkable – almost frightening, really.
It is, perhaps, not possible to overestimate the significance of a serious stroke in the life of the average person.
It is an event that goes to the core of who and what you are, the You-ness of you. First of all, the event happens in your brain which is, without becoming unduly philosophical, the command centre of the self. Your brain is you: your moods, your skills, your character, your intelligence, your emotions, your self-expression, your self. When all that fails, you are left with the question: what was the cause? The doctors can answer questions about blood and veins and arteries and cholesterol, but that, as a friend of mine put it so aptly, is ‘just the plumbing’. You – the you that’s survived this upheaval within – are still left with the question: why? Before you can begin to get to why? you have to ask yourself: what? What was it that I went through? What is its significance? What does it mean? These are questions which bring us inexorably back to Why?
In my case, since the doctors had failed to find a reliable explanation for my stroke, I came to the conclusion that it happened as the outcome of a profound internal dissatisfaction with my way of life, my goals and ambitions, my achievements such as they were. Before the stroke happened, I’d reached a point in my professional life when I could almost literally not see my way forward. So it came as a physical punctuation mark, a reminder from my body to pause and to take stock. What I needed was a season of vulnerability. In the language of psychobabble, I needed to get in touch with myself again, and perhaps – who knows? – only a catastrophic physical breakdown could achieve that.