“So, how do I start?”

This is an excerpt of conversation I’ve been having with myself for the past few weeks, sat in front of my computer attempting to siphon off some memory and lay it down into text.

“I don’t know man, they always tell you to start the beginning.”

“But which beginning? the beginning beginning, one of the other ones?”

“As much as I’m sure I could write an entertaining account of my own birth, I don’t think that’s what the people have come here to see, and I don’t particularly want to attempt that thought experiment either.”

Then something comes to me,

“Start at the beginning of the end, and the end of the beginning.” 

That being easily the coolest sounding thing I’d thought of in some time, I decided to stick with it; and here it is.

Y’know, there’s an awful lot different types, shapes, sizes and lengths of tube on God’s green Earth, and I had had the good grace to have become intimately acquainted with what seemed to be almost all of them. A plethora, a cornucopia, a treasure trove of plastic coming out of my neck and face, as if it had been novelty night at the local darts club; “No darts lads, just this assorted medical equipment. Oh and the target is that boy’s head.”

I couldn’t actually feel most of the invasive medical paraphernalia my body, partly because of the spinal injury but also because I was coming off a 10 day stint in medically-induced-coma-land and the street value of the drugs in my system could probably pay off my student loans; it’s no surprise that my memory of this time is not the most clear. I do remember thinking the beds on the ward were attached to rails- as if I had found myself inside the psychotic lovechild of a theme park and a hospital. I would be intermittently treated with the entertainment of a faraway bed zooming past at breakneck speed, patient safety be damned, onward and upward and around a glass domed pyramid that I was in the centre of. It would only be a long time later that I realised it was the curtains between patients, being impatiently ripped along, that I had been transfixed by.

All of this clarity crystallised in one of the first things that I said once I had woken up,

“Thank God I’m not in ITU.” While being many days deep into a very long stint in ITU.

I figure it’s good to get the laughs in early, because the rest of this part isn’t the most happy; it’s probably the most desolate time of my life. 

Once I had woken up there was some chaos and some clarity. I couldn’t move anything below my shoulders; I could just shrug and flap my elbows a little bit like some sort of critical condition chicken. I had a tracheostomy which in turn was hooked up to a ventilator- essentially a big plastic tube in my neck attached to a machine that was breathing for me. Crucially this meant I couldn’t talk, I could only make weak hissing sounds intermittently. I had a tube up my nose to feed me. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t drink, I couldn’t sit up, I couldn’t take a deep breath. I couldn’t influence my environment in any way. I had an intimate knowledge of the ceiling, and not much else. I couldn’t feel anything below my collarbones. I couldn’t feel much of anything. I couldn’t remember the previous three explanations I’d had from the doctors looking after me, I couldn’t remember the tearful conversations I had had with my girlfriend in the previous couple of days: me deeply distressed, desperately trying to communicate my wild, feral, wide-eyed fear, her unable to understand me, only able to understand my writhing, mounting, all-encompassing madness. I didn’t know if I had been operated on, I couldn’t remember the coma and the crippling pneumonia of the week before. I couldn’t see or feel the huge weight loss and weakness ravaging my body. I would only learn about these things in the darkness of the days, weeks and months afterward.

I could remember the accident. I knew I had a spinal-cord injury; I mean, hell, I knew that lying in the road 10 days earlier. I had a good idea of what that meant the rest of my life, I was under very few illusions regarding how bad things were; they were only tempered by the hope that grows in the narrow spaces, the “we’ll have to wait and see,” spaces, the “some recovery is possible,” spaces. The little cracks in reality you try and squirrel away into. 

What I do remember from that time is a cold, deathly feeling of unreality. I wasn’t angry, or frustrated. You have to be encumbered to be frustrated; something has to be slowing you down. I hadn’t been slowed down; I had been struck down, robbed. I couldn’t even move my hands to check my metaphorical pockets, but I didn’t need to; I knew they would be empty. Death had come for me, taken the wallet, taken the watch and left me with the ignominy of still being alive. Every day for many days I would wish for him to return. I had questions for him. Why? I was a good man. I had worked for a good life.

I was visited by my surgeon for many days after my injury. To this day I still don’t know why she kept coming to see me. She would come and stand by my bed, looking down with kind eyes, asking me how I was. I would tell her she should never have operated on me, that she should have let me die on the table, should have shown me the kindness of death and spared me from this. I think back now and can’t see anything but the deep sorrow in her face, as if my mouthed words were cutting her open, but at the time I don’t think I could see anything beyond my own despair. I was as numb inside as I was outside. 

I’m hoping to write in the next few days and weeks not just about what has happened, the before and the after, but also exploring who I am and who I was: where my mind has been and where it’s going.

I suppose you could say life is like a tube, a tube that you travel along, some people’s tubes longer than others, some empty, some full. Some used inappropriately by the local darts club. All I know is that the powers that be have used my tube for something unsavoury and didn’t clean it out very well, and I’m now encountering the result. Better yet, I’m taking you along for the ride.

Sorry it’s been so long since my last post, but I’m writing more and more. Hopefully it’s keeping you entertained. It’s definitely helping me. I’ve also added a subscribe button on the main page so you can receive email updates whenever I post anything new. As always comments are always appreciated.

Ed