As we passed through a grove of Moreton Bay Fig trees on the way to Carrington Road, sometimes I’d think with all the longing that can only be summoned up by a New Zealand raised child, that I was really missing out on summer this year.
The squared-off kiwiana of the Point Chev shops below warm, blue, December skies simply intensified my sense of loss.
It was an odd time because everything was in transition. The blood in the left parietal lobe of my brain was dissipating and, as it did, I was recovering abilities I thought had gone forever. I began to be able to clench my right fist, and then move my right arm. Eventually, even my dead right leg showed signs of movement. I could curl my toes.
There were rehab classes in the morning. There was speech. There was physio. There was the weekly doctor’s routine with a doctor who always spoke slightly more loudly, slightly more slowly, and much more clearly than normal as he explained things to me. I had lessons in the operation my mobile phone. I was taught how to use an electric wheelchair, my finger on its joystick. I was tentatively being prepared for a lifetime as a cripple.
Along with everything else, I hadn’t had an erection since my stroke. I wasn’t even waking up with one, something most males can usually rely upon. There were no spontaneous arousals. I wasn’t sure if my sexual life, such as it was, was completely over.
The list of ‘couldn’t dos’ was getting really long. At the top was walking and wanking.
Wanking eventually happened. Around six weeks into things I felt some sort of half-arousal. It was like the first hint of rainclouds after a long drought. I felt like a four-year-old noticing his erection for the first time and wanting to show and tell. The hard part was wanking with my left hand. It didn’t feel right.
Eventually, after a couple of days of promise, somehow my weird, left-handed grip began to fit and in my narrow hospital bed, surrounded by the regular breathing of sleeping ward-mates, I managed to ejaculate, with a huge mental sigh of relief. As a male, to some degree, my self-image had been restored. I was still a sexual being.
Personal mobility, however, was definitely a harder ask. The purring of electric wheelchairs hovered over my days like the soundtrack to a Japanese horror film.
“Just stand up and walk!” American revival preachers were repeating in my brain. It wasn’t quite that easy. From the first moments of my stroke, trying to sit upright on a bed and falling, I had rediscovered a number of fundamental forces that I once thought had long been overcome – like gravity, like leverage, like weight.
It was like starting from the very beginning. I’d made it out of nappies, so walking was the next thing on the traditional schedule, I figured.
I just had to figure out how to do it.
Part 5: Walking and Talking – Simultaneously!
In the modern medical environment, you find that no one ever wants to commit themselves to anything, in information terms.
The contemporary fear of legal cases means that facts that were freely given to a patient in the 1950s are not available to you, their Twenty-first Century counterpart.
You are in the dark. No one will give you any details on the progress of your recovery if those details could be used in terms of hope. It’s all mealy-mouthed skirting around the subject. There is no ‘likelihood’ of anything. Probability is seldom discussed.
It’s a real don’t-ask/don’t-tell situation. And if you do ask, no one is going to answer you in any sort of meaningful, human way.
You can’t plan. You can’t bet. You just don’t know.
My thoughts were definitely becoming less smeary. Logic and deduction weren’t just something that happened somewhere else. I could read – though at the beginning it was more out of a wish to read than from any actual evidence that I could.
I still get tears in my eyes when I contemplate a friend’s gift in the first week of my stroke – ‘Oscar’s Books’, a newly released study of the books in Oscar Wilde’s life – which presupposed my ability not only to read, but to read intelligently.
Those simple presumptions were worth a million to me. There I was, practically unable to talk, and so it really meant something to my self-esteem to be given a book that was wry, dense and arcane, and which required a detailed recall, wide cultural frame of reference and some ability to judge nuance.
Initially, ‘Oscar’s Books’ was a teddy bear rather than anything else. It was something I carried around, or which got lost in my bed-sheets. It offered comfort simply because it was there, and gave hope for the future.
At first, I could barely remember the beginning of a sentence by the time I reached its end, but it got better. Soon I became able to read a few paragraphs, building up to a page or so at a time.
I now had a window-bed in the four-person ward. I looked out onto an institutional garden with roses, an idiotic gazebo, and a tree. I’d started interacting with people again – mainly the staff and my visitors. The other patients were more of a mystery. There was a sense of great reserve about interactions between us. I found it a very polite place. You were given room. You were given space. No one stared. Everyone was in the same boat.
There was Vaughan in the bed opposite me, whose son at tech eventually printed him a t-shirt with ‘Vaghn’ and ‘Vauhn’ and all the other misspellings of his name that he’d experienced in hospital care. There was Arthur, who was sixteen and who’d had a stroke in his school gym. There was Bill, who’d had six or seven strokes all in a row and who was going to a residential home with 24 hour care. There was Mrs Wong, who had an unfailing courtesy and charm.
It had been incredibly easy to give up smoking under these circumstances. Nicotine addiction was so far down my personal list that it didn’t figure at all. By the time I’d even registered it, the withdrawal was over. There wasn’t even habit left. There was a sentimental attachment to the idea of smoking, but no real desire. It had lost its magic and it was simply nostalgia now.
I was also gradually recovering some use of my right side. At first, there was this strange ‘doubling’ period, where it seemed each side of my body had its own desires and needs. I can remember my hands fighting each other for control of a biscuit, each of them unable to let go, until it broke.
If both of my hands reached for a cup of tea or coffee, there was always a problem until I could command one or other of them to let go, and one or other of them would eventually obey. Sometimes this took a minute or two.
I was learning to write with a pen again, and there was that one psychologically disturbing time when I discovered that my right hand knew how to spell, but my left didn’t. Soon after, I could actually sit back and watch my right hand write in apparently complete independence of my consciousness. I simply had to set it in motion, like a clockwork mouse.
I was experiencing the left-hand/right-hand dichotomy of the human condition at its very roots. My right considered things, was obedient and neat. My left was instinctive, untrained, messy and demanding.
In the gym, up one of the endless ward corridors, I’d do exercise sessions calculated to improve things if things could be improved. There were stretches, upper body work and unending transfer practice, moving from a wheelchair to a bed, or bench, and vice-versa.
It was nearly two months before I got to go home again. I’d left it in one ambulance… and another brought me back, for three days. I arrived on Christmas morning. The cat seemed to recognise me, but only just. I found out which of the household doorways wasn’t wide enough for a wheelchair. I’d forgotten food could taste so good, even if I couldn’t get into the kitchen to watch it being prepared.
I also managed to relearn at least some of the principles of computing.
I’d worked on large IBM mainframes in the early 1970s, so computing was somewhere in the structure of my nervous system. I was an early adopter. To list historical models of personal computers was to assemble the story of my life. And going online, post-stroke, was actually much easier than using my mobile phone.
I checked my emails again, and I have to admit I was surprised at the effectiveness of spam-catchers. I expected to be drowned in spam after two months of not attending to my email accounts, but it wasn’t so.
I kept thinking about those millions and millions of spam messages shuttling around the globe like ghost ships, always turned away now, never finding ports, and it made me think of my own state. To be honest, a hospital ward was now my home – more familiar, more comforting, less strange than my real one.
I liked home, but I wanted to get back to hospital where they ‘understood’.
There wasn’t a ‘eureka moment’ when everything changed. There wasn’t an instant where I could yell, “I can walk again,” because it wasn’t like that.
To begin, I walked by holding on to parallel bars, lifting one leg and then swinging the dumb other one behind. Then it was just holding on to the bars with one hand. It was strange standing. I had no faith about my balance and inevitably leaned towards my left, the leg on which I could depend.
I had learned so much about things that I had once taken for granted.
You learn how constant the fight against gravity and inertia really is. Then when something destroys your innate sense of balance and movement, you find out directly how hard they actually are to redevelop. The same went for practically everything else in life. The second time round was just too conscious an effort, and consciousness isn’t good for many physical things.
I had also re-experienced less tangible things. I had relearned the structure of language, from the bottom-up. I’d mostly grasped the mechanics of speech. I knew more about time, space and physics, in an experiential way, than ever before. I also knew about despair, grief and simple human kindness. I discovered again that as a society our valuations of things are hopelessly wrong.
It was on another trip home that I actually walked properly and unsupported for the first time. John was in the kitchen cooking. This was always a time in the day that I liked. I’d stand there drinking a beer while he prepared dinner. We’d talk. Delicious smells would be coming from the stove. I’d be dipping a finger into things and going “mmmm”.
But now my wheelchair would not make it into the kitchen because of the width of the doorway.
I put up with this situation for two minutes. Then I just stood up and walked the three or four paces there, through the doorway, leaving the wheelchair behind.
It took another month before I was discharged.
I sat on my familiar bed in my ward that final day with my bed-table cleared of its piles of books. The sink to my left still dripped, but my iPod and phone chargers weren’t in the wall socket anymore. The dresser didn’t have its familiar mess of orthopaedic appliances, notebooks, bathroom kit and folded towels. Everything had been stripped bare.