The World I Fell Out Of. Andrew Marr

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      Of all the people I least expected to discuss my plight with, it was Peggy Ollerenshaw. (© Getty Images/United News/Popperfoto/Contributor)

      ‘Your article moved me so much I had to phone you and speak to you. You’re very brave and I send you lots of love,’ she said.

      ‘That’s really sweet of you,’ I said lamely.

      ‘I’m rooting for you.’

      ‘Thank you.’

      I still don’t know if it really happened or not.

      At night, I experiment with the only bit of my body that still answers me, that has a glimmer of feeling. My right hand, weak and floppy and fast becoming numb, fumbles down past layers of exhausting obstacles, past sheets and tubes and swaddling gowns to reach the bare skin of my hip. Exploring in the dark. The one-way sensation of touching my own warm skin, and feeling nothing back, is most peculiar, as if it is an alien I am attached to. My fingers are not giving me trustworthy signals, because their nerve connections are damaged too, and retreating further into shock. What’s so devastating is that the skin I touch feels fleecy, beautiful, devastating; all these things at the same time. Because it belongs to me but it doesn’t belong to me. It’s someone else’s; it’s like reaching down and touching your lover’s body in the night. How peculiar. Four-fifths of my body has divorced me, but it’s still attached to me. I’m two people – me and the rest of me. I am eerily still … but inside I’m screaming and waving. I’m helpless as a beetle on its back, except my legs don’t even wave to express it. My name, it would seem, is still Melanie and I am a doubly-incontinent tetraplegic. Where do I go from here, seeing I have already blurted out something about Switzerland and Dr Purcell didn’t respond?

      The movie Trainspotting was really accurate, you know. The stuff about coming off morphine, when your body is a seething rats’ nest and nothing will calm it. Although I didn’t realise what was happening at the time, because I didn’t even know I had been on morphine. All I knew was that it felt worse than anything I’d ever experienced. Even though my body was paralysed and insensate, I felt that it was jangling all over, itching, shivering – compelling me to cry out for relief, for death, for anything to make it stop. Inside my brain, restless leg syndrome multiplied a million times, ants crawled inside my skin, devouring me from within. One vivid day I became convinced my bedding was soaked. The mattress and bottom sheet were sloshing in icy water: I was certain I was freezing alive, shivering, nagging for more blankets.

      ‘I can’t give you any more blankets,’ said the nurse. ‘You’re not cold.’

      ‘Please, I’m freezing,’ I wheedled. ‘Please. Be kind.’

      ‘Kind?’ she said. ‘Heart like a swinging brick, me.’

      She wasn’t joking. She was on duty one weekend morning when they were desperately short-staffed – they often were at weekends – and running very late, taking hours it seemed to me to attend to each of us high-dependency patients in turn, log-rolling us to wash us. The morphine withdrawal must have been at its peak, for I started crying out from the sensations in my head. Outwardly motionless on the bed, I was inwardly consumed by chemical distress and bewilderment. I could see them log-rolling someone else in the distance; although I must have been imagining it, because the curtains were always closed when they were washing someone. The room kept changing in shape. I shouted again but still no one came. Of all I had experienced after my accident, in its totality, that was my most desperate lonely moment, the point when I couldn’t go on. Like someone near death, my instinct was to shout for my mother. But she was dead, I knew that, so I shouted for my sister. She lived in France and I had not yet seen her, but I had regressed to childhood; my big sister would make it better. Lindsay would make them help me.

      ‘What d’you want?’

      It was Swinging Brick and she was pissed off.

      ‘I feel awful,’ I said. ‘Please …’

      ‘We’re busy with other patients. We’ll get to you when we can.’

      I never cried out again.

      Lots of other patients vocalised their distress; I listened jealously to them screaming and yelling, calling out repeatedly. I was too repressed, too polite. Posh girl in bedlam. It’s only funny now, much later. How I used to envy them their release, these unseen uninhibited souls who raged aloud, who set loose their pain upon the world at large. I wished I too could wail and curse. The way I’d been brought up, you suffered in silence, you were never rude, never made a fuss. There was one voice I often heard shouting at night – a young argumentative male who roared with anger and rage, despair coming from the deepest, darkest torture chamber. ‘Why?’ he used to shout. ‘Why can’t I fucking move? Just tell me why.’

      I asked Christine about him.

      She sighed. ‘Oh, that’s Snafu. He’s one of mine too.’

      ‘Is he OK?’

      ‘He’s finding it hard.’ She sounded sad. She didn’t say any more. I would find out later for myself.

      In general the cursing was epic. Legendary. When West of Scotland working man meets catastrophe all he needs is a victim to let rip upon. The spinal unit had a resident psychologist, a gentle New Zealander, a bit of a waffler who must have helped some people lost in the shock of paralysis, but I found him irritating. Everything he said seemed anodyne. But then who wouldn’t seem ineffectual, with the unenviable job of counselling people in the rawest of grief? We existed in a world beyond platitudes, beyond consolation. On the ward, I still couldn’t raise my head СКАЧАТЬ