My Year Off (24 page)

Aside from these investigations, for the first time since I returned to work, I began, as the spring of 1996 unfolded, to think seriously about leaving my workplace
of twenty years. What I’d suspected in the National was true: I was no longer able to acquit myself as editor-in-chief of Faber and Faber in the way to which I’d become accustomed in the past. Stroke-sufferers, generally, have to face up to the issue of their interrupted careers. In the end, despite the support of my company, I was no exception. There was, I should emphasize, nothing remarkable about this. Almost all those who suffer stroke and survive the ‘insult’ end up making a change of direction, and I believe my case was typical. Partly, this is because however much you recover, you are likely, physically speaking, to be impaired from functioning as you did before. So stroke-sufferers often find themselves working in charities, or for the health services, or for the disabled. It’s as though, having been granted a window on to the world of the physically disadvantaged, we are unable to remain indifferent to the plight of such people, and insist on taking up a kind of dual citizenship. As ticket-of-leave citizens from the land of the unwell, we have been so profoundly affected by the experience it’s almost the only thing we can think of. And then there’s the confidence question: it’s probably the only thing we think we’re good for.

I realized, as I got better, that I was wanting to say goodbye to a person who had, in a sense, died nine months before, and I had to say goodbye to his life as well. I came to believe that just as a part of my brain was now irretrievably dead, so a part of my former activity and lifestyle was defunct, too.

The more I returned to my old life, I was struck by the fact that my life had become divided in two, before and after. The life ‘after’ was my life with Sarah, and it was mine to define as I chose. I felt like an adult now, and I could apply my intelligence to making it how I
wanted, to suit my capacity. There would, I told myself, be no compromises and no connection with my ‘old’ life. That was in the past, for better or worse. In some ways, it was like a second chance. This turned out to be hopelessly optimistic. You can no more shed your past, this side of the grave, than you can change your personality. Elsewhere, I wrote myself a question: What are the themes of life now? and answered:

Thoughts such as these were still on my mind when, in the course of that spring, I arranged to have lunch with my friend Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the
Guardian.
I remember thinking, as I waited for Alan to arrive, that just six months earlier in the depths of my hospitalization such an encounter would have seemed not merely surprising but quite unthinkable. I was even more surprised when Alan asked me, almost casually, if I would like to become literary editor of the
Observer
, Britain’s oldest Sunday newspaper. I was so astonished by this suggestion that I could not for a moment think of an answer.

In the event I said, ‘Yes’, to this wonderful offer. I was sad to leave the world of Faber & Faber, in which I’d been so happy and fulfilled, and where I’d found so many friends, over many years. After all I’d gone through, I was apprehensive about joining the
Observer
,
but my anxieties proved groundless. I quickly discovered the exhilarating speed and freedom of working on a newspaper, mixed with the delightfully stimulating camaraderie of the newsroom. I had for so long dreamed of making a career change, and now, it seemed, my cherished dream was coming true.

The dream of leaving has always been such a powerful fantasy for the busy professional. How often, during my years at Faber, did I hear friends and colleagues express the desire to take time out from their overcrowded schedules and make the time to recharge their personal batteries? The dream of renewal, like the dream of leaving, remains the pipe-dream of the disgruntled professional. ‘I just need time,’ people will say, ‘time to get my head together.’ But of course, generally speaking, we carry on, because that’s the way we’re made, and
because the commitments and responsibilities of life demand it.

When, however, you suffer a stroke, or an equivalent catastrophic physical breakdown, you experience the dream of leaving as a nightmare. But perhaps only such a crisis can precipitate change.

My shift of focus, from literary publishing to literary journalism, had been prefigured in my journalistic forays to places like Cambodia and East Timor. I was more than ready for the transition and, besides, there was a sense that the publishing world in which I’d grown up was changing. I no longer felt at home in a new literary environment dominated by the bottom line and the restrictive scrutiny of accountants and financial directors.

Everyone wanted to know if I’d changed. When I answered that, essentially, I thought I had not, I was aware that my old self had been left behind somewhere on the staircase of 41 St Peter’s Street. Sometimes, in my more sentimental moments, I felt I was like Tom, the sweep’s apprentice in Charles Kingsley’s Victorian classic,
The Water Babies.
Perhaps I had left my sooty clothes on the riverbank and become purged and renewed by the waters of ill-health; perhaps - who knows? - my stroke had been a blessing in disguise.

The first year after illness struck was dominated by the struggle to become physically better. The second year - once I was back to an everyday existence - would be all about psychological well-being and the battle with the demons of despair and depression. But now, at least, I could begin to mix hope and optimism with sadness and gloom. In many ways, it was this mixture that would characterize the tone of much of the second year after my stroke.

Donal O’Kelly tells a nice story of the time he saw the great blues guitarist B.B. King at a live performance. B.B. King, the master of blues desolation, appeared on stage in an electric blue suit, with his hair coiffed in perfect ringlets, the effervescent picture of the successful star. He was, says Donal, obviously conscious that his audience would be not unaware of the contrast between his melancholy blues lyrics and his ebullient demeanour. Approaching the microphone, he addressed the front row of the stalls with a winning smile. ‘To play the blues,’ he said, ‘you gotta know the bad times, but you gotta know the good times, too.’

So, of course, it wasn’t just a year off. It could not, could never, be any such thing: the idea that, after a twelve-month break, one could seamlessly resume the life one had left behind was ridiculous. To illustrate this, I should enumerate the small but significant ways in which there can be no return.

First, and most obviously, I am typing this with the variously available fingers of my right hand; my left is intermittently useful to hold down the shift key, but it lacks the sprightly dexterity of old. Another thing: in the past, I used to enjoy holding a pen in my right hand. Now that pleasure has diminished, and (though my right side was not affected by the stroke) my handwriting is more difficult to read than ever.

Next, the left side of my face is still mildly frozen. To the untrained eye, I appear normal, but an expert can detect the slight paralysis of my left-side features. In the same category, my speech sounds normal to outsiders, but to me it is vulnerable to stuttering and slurring, and I now have regular speech therapy to correct the deficit. I still prefer to speak sitting down, where the weakness on my left side is less exposed, and find it difficult to
stand upright and hold a sustained conversation. Interestingly, it was my speech therapists, whose skill lies in the art of communication, who were consistently the most helpful to me at every stage of recovery. It was they, for instance, who spoke most frankly about my ‘deficits’ and encouraged me none the less to believe in myself. What else?

I can walk for an hour or so, at a slow pace, with rests, but I cannot walk briskly, and the idea of running out to the shops for a pint of milk, or the newspaper, is unthinkable.

At the end of the day I can still feel profoundly fatigued, and in need of a rest.

My appetite for alcohol, formerly substantial and generally associated with much conversational late-night drinking, has dwindled almost to nothing. After about six months, my tastebuds returned to normal.

My interest in alternative therapies, and in the complementarity of Eastern and Western medical traditions, has become a significant part of my reading. In the absence of clear answers from conventional medicine, I am quite ready to take spin on the wheel of holistic treatment.

I still find that, although to outward appearances cured, I lack the sharpness and edge I believe I used to have. My confidence in many areas has not fully returned. I feel weaker, less competent, less commanding and more vulnerable. All of the above can equal the word that begins with D - depression. At times, I plunge into an abyss of depression, finding it difficult to emerge and then only with the greatest effort of will. For some months I experimented with Prozac and Zoloft. I also explored the potential benefits of several American drugs: Luvox, Xanax, Paxil, Navane, Valium, BuSpar, and Wellbutrin but found that I disliked the side-effects,
and eventually switched to that gentle alternative, the herbal remedy, St John’s wort (
hypericum
).

I no longer complain, as I had in the past, of the threat of boredom. Now, everything in the world seems precious, special and fascinating.

Outwardly, then, I am fine. I can meet people who do not know me, and pass for an unafflicted forty-four-year old. Inwardly, I still have something missing. I believe, in time, that this inner sense of deficiency will fade. When I try to characterize it to people who ask about it, I say that sometimes I feel like the pilot of an aeroplane who on looking over his shoulder in the cockpit sees his tail-plane and the end of his fuselage suddenly blown away, but who finds, amazingly, that although his plane has gone into a ‘graveyard spin’, somehow it has not crashed. Today, I feel like a pilot who is nursing his crippled craft to a safe landing somewhere unfamiliar, but close at hand.

I take virtually no medication. My doctor tells me that a daily aspirin and a regular glass of red wine is probably the best kind of long-term treatment.

Like many forty-somethings, I wrestle with broken resolutions about taking exercise. In my case, the excuse I have is that swimming is the only activity in which I can achieve something like a normal exercise routine. So I swim. Not as often as I should, but perhaps at least once a week. Swimming has certainly helped to strengthen the muscles in my disabled left side.

I began the story of my stroke with a question, Who am I?, which I have attempted to answer, in my own way, through the stories that make up this narrative. As I have shown, a stroke will open up an almost unending vista of questions about yourself, and your significance. If your stroke was serious and you manage to survive, as
I did, you become, as I’ve explained, shaken free of the concerns of everyday life. And yet the question Why? continues to hover over almost every day of your life, though before you can begin to get to Why? you have to ask yourself What? What was it that I went through? What exactly is its significance? What does it mean? These are questions, alas, which bring us inexorably back to Why?

In my case, since the doctors have failed to find a reliable explanation for my stroke, I like to think that I was profoundly lucky. If there is a God, he is remote, detached and impressively hands-off. I am inclined to say that at first I did not think there was anyone out there for me, and then that I had been cruelly punished without reason, and yet, finally, that there was an odd kind of purpose to everything that happened.

Even now, completing this chapter as the second anniversary of my stroke approaches, I can see that, much as I might hope to relegate this personal catastrophe to a file labelled 1995-96, in truth its effects will be with me for much longer. Two months after I came home I found myself wishing that I could somehow sustain the state of convalescence. I would read over my diary - noting how much progress I’d made - and feel almost nostalgic for the vulnerability and alertness of the first few weeks. When I was no longer a dramatically ill person and had become just a forty-four-year-old, nearly middle-aged man with a limp and a mild speech impediment I somehow wanted more. I wanted to retain my singularity. It was time to recognize that I was back in the world, but even here there were stages of rehabilitation.

At first I was glad to be home; then I felt imprisoned; then I became depressed; then I found myself reliving
my first day again and again. I could not walk up the stairs without seeing my naked body curled foetally on the mezzanine. I could not lie in bed and escape retracing my confused journeys across the map of the ceiling that long ago Saturday. Whenever I stood on the front step, I saw my helpless body being stretchered out by the paramedics in the summer evening light. I watched TV a lot; I read familiar books; I sat in my armchair and entertained kind visitors. Otherwise, I did what I could to lead an ordinary life.

I have come to believe that by stressing normality and activity the stroke-sufferer has a better chance of recovery. The brain and its workings remain a mystery to doctors, but I am certain that adopting a vigorous and positive attitude to recovery actually assists the process of renewal. I cannot prove this; it’s what I believe to have been true in my own case. Of course, there are countless sad examples of people who do not recover their faculties, but, as a youngish man, I’m inclined to believe that the more I use my brain in everyday life, the less likely I am to lose it. Sue, my physiotherapist, had a phrase for this. ‘Use it, don’t lose it!’ she liked to say, cheerfully whacking my left leg with the flat of her hand. Gradually, I came to compile a personal list of Dos and Don’ts for the convalescent stroke-sufferer.