I had to press that button a lot.
Each morning, a nurse would bring me a tiny plastic cup containing the cocktail Doctor Karp concocted for me like a master mixologist. The pills changed from time to time as he fought to stop the blood coursing through my blood vessels with such dangerous pressure. Nevertheless, there were two constants in the cocktail. There was always a diuretic to encourage my body to get rid of any excess salt that might elevate my blood pressure, and a big, red gel cap that looked like an oversized, translucent jelly bean. In my confusion, it looked like the taste of strawberry fondant, and its soft, yielding wall encouraged me to pop it with my teeth.
It did not taste of strawberry fondant.
The gel cap was a laxative, and although the taste of the thick scarlet substance that oozed over my lips was noxious, its effect was quite glorious. I would press the big red button and be loaded into the big, solid-state hospital issue wheelchair, so as to be wheeled across the vast expanse of the ward, dotted with its unexpected hazards. Before long, when I was out of my gown and allowed to wear pyjama bottoms, I was taught how to most safely and efficiently pull these and any underwear down, using a procedure that involved bracing my legs against the clothing to keep it within easy reach for retrieval. When my modesty was restored – or if I experienced any difficulties – I was to pull the thin red cord hanging by the wall to the side of the toilet so as to be escorted back to bed.
Between deposit and pick up, I would sit on the elevated seat of the toilet, and my insides would fall into the bowl below. I was entirely evacuated. It wasn’t as unpleasant as it sounds. I would emerge lighter, and with a sense of accomplishment. In fact, I came to look forward to my little visits. I wonder now what Freud would have made of Alfonso and I, and our odd toilet habits: he, holding on to his little rocks of poo even though they tormented his insides; me, relishing the next opportunity for relief. The rebellious little Calvin, who required everything be ordered to his satisfaction, and the messy Scot, who wanted to share things with his peers but could be inconsiderate of the feelings of others. Who needed to learn about controlling his behaviours and urges.
In fact, my expulsions felt less Freudian than Zen. A letting go, a moving on. I was filled with an empty space, leaving room for the next moment.
Months later, when my bladder was under control, I could walk into a bathroom ready to urinate like a regular guy. No panic, no drama. Then, as soon as I clapped eyes on the toilet in the corner, the desperate urge would rise, like a swelling river threatening its banks, or a thundering waterfall or the crest of a crashing tsunami. The internal numbness must still have been present at that point, though I wouldn’t have known.
A year after the banks of that blood vessel in my brain broke, I went to a movie at a local cinema. As befitted a successful art house theatre, the cinephiles could buy their tickets in a breezy atrium from young enthusiasts sitting behind an open desk, and accessible toilets were readily available. So much so that I found myself in one when I was simply looking for a regular gents’ lavatory. Once, this room would have conveyed a certain dolour, with its extra space for the walker or chair, and the grab bars lining the walls. Now, standing in front of the toilet, I saw that thin red emergency cord and a different feeling washed over me. I was comforted. It was the red string of Rachel, the favourite wife of the biblical Jacob, a protective segula. I was reminded of the kindness of my nurses, doctors and therapists. I thought of the words of the rabbi who wrote that the red string recalls the merits of consideration, compassion and selflessness, and that it is a reflection upon this, and the inspiration to good deeds, more than the string itself, that might protect me from harm.
As I reflected upon the alarm cord, I saw that life was good and that I was surrounded by kindness. My left leg was still gimpy, but I had let my former life go, without judgement or regret.
7
Hot Shower Action
Beth’s favourite motivational Post-it note read, ‘Sean Connery is the poor man’s you.’ Thirteen days after the power came back on at HJD, I wheeled out my impression of James Bond and Goldfinger for the first time in two months for the entertainment of one of my nurses. Sally had figured out that the best way to compel my cooperation was to appeal to the conscious, deliberate cheer I was beginning to cultivate. A small, young, Asian-American woman, she usually took the early morning shift. She would walk into the quiet ward after Alfonso and I had finished our breakfasts, and a booming, twenty-stone Scotsman would emerge from deep within her tiny frame.
‘Urr ye rready furr yerr injection, Misturr Brroowwn?’
She had studied in Edinburgh, so her talent for Celtic mimicry put my ten-year-old daughter and my girlfriend of almost three years to shame. Elizabeth’s attempts would veer into Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins territory, and Beth’s apery would take a stroll underneath the arches into the East End of London. More ‘Gor blimey, Myeree Poppins,’ than Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins. By now, she refused to even tackle a burr, sticking to a well-practiced Billy Bragg imitation.
I had talking like a Scotsman down like a pro, though. Caught in this bed, in this strange place, as a long, thin, blood-thinning needle was prepared to puncture my abdomen just like it was every morning, I was James Bond, strapped to a cutting table as an industrial laser approached my most delicate parts. I smiled insouciantly.
‘Sho, Goldfinger. Do you eckshpect me to talk?’ Then I skipped into sinister, gold-smuggler mode as Sally giggled. ‘No, Mister Bond. I expect you to die.’
I told Beth about this later in the day, terribly proud of myself. From somewhere in the dark corridors of my long-term memory, where the emergency generators hummed on while my short-term memory was sunk under Gowanus waters, I had been concerned about something called foreign accent syndrome. It’s a rare medical condition that the newspapers love to report on. It arises most often after stroke, and it describes a patient appearing to develop a foreign accent. They don’t. The appearance is simply the result of distorted articulatory planning and coordination processes.
Of course, that’s not as funny, is it?
‘Do you remember that Goldfinger bit I used to do at Boland’s when I was trying to make you laugh? I did it for one of the nurses this morning. I was relieved it didn’t sound like Roger Moore and Christopher Walken.’
Beth turned round to our friend Joe, who had accompanied her that morning. ‘Oh my god! Can you imagine if he’d woken up with an English accent? He’d be in hell!’
Despite my best attempts to speak more slowly, and trying to enunciate more clearly, Americans from Texas to Pennsylvania had failed to understand me over the past decade and a half, even if New Yorkers, living in one of the gooiest, fondue-iest part of the melting pot, hadn’t had the same problem. When I had first moved to Austin, Texas to study, I had experienced particular difficulties ordering pizza by phone. My elongated vowels were a different shape to those of the South, and since this made it almost impossible to pronounce my own surname comprehensibly for a drawling Texan, my attempts to provide the deliveryman with some kind of guiding context had led to pizzas being delivered for James Brown. I would yelp with soul at the door so they wouldn’t take the pie away.
When I later moved to Pennsylvania, clinging to the possibly apocryphal claim that Invernessians speak the clearest and most melodious English anywhere in the world, and noting that Edinburgh is considerably closer to Inverness than Philadelphia, I would get quite upset about the natives’ inability to understand me. I concluded that the average American would hear a foreign accent and simply switch off. For some time, in protest at this laziness and enforcement of cultural imperialism, I gave up trying.
Eventually, though my accent remained stubbornly Scots, my vocabulary migrated west. Rubbish bins became trash cans. Elastoplasts, Bandaids. Trousers were pants and pants were underwear. Eventually, my ‘t’s ceased to be glottal stops, then mutated into ‘d’s. I lost track of where my accent had landed. Somewhere in the middle of the Atlan
tic, though definitely more Rockall than Nova Scotia. It had ceased to be important.
Though blunted, my Scottishness wasn’t unimportant. Meeting the particular person who becomes the love of one’s life is statistically unlikely. We could meet another love of our life, another person who brings out that something within us. But that specific person? What were the odds that the vision in the tweedy blazer at Boland’s bar who had just wanted to be left alone would want to take up with me? Remote, I would have thought, except . . .
Beth was born on Burns’ Night, the birthday of Scotland’s favourite son, the Ploughman Poet. Her first boyfriend was a Scot with the name of a member of New Order – and when you’re from Rhode Island, Macclesfield’s close enough, right? Her parents’ longest-standing friends were the Scottish parents of that boyfriend. Her ex-husband was actually named Robert Burns.
Not that she was looking for a life of shortbread tins and skirling pipes, which was just as well. When I was first attempting to broaden my horizons, I had applied for a scholarship from the St Andrew’s Society in Edinburgh. I got through the first round before finding myself sitting in a dark, stony room in the basement of Edinburgh’s Old College, before a panel of four dark, stony men.
‘What does Scotland mean to you?’ the third, impassive, slate suit asked.
I feigned reflection for a moment before delivering the answer that I thought would mark me out from the other serious young men and women.
‘Social justice and hardcore techno,’ I replied
That marked me out, all right. Dead air echoed through the room. The formerly impassive countenances of the firing squad arrayed on the other side of the long, dark, wooden table collapsed into the ashen, apoplectic faces of pirates presented with the Black Spot of the law school’s alumnus, Robert Louis Stevenson. I would have to find a more congenial benefactor to finance my move to the States.
What Beth found in her Scotsman, strangely enough, was an affirmation of the best parts of being American. When I lapsed too far into Hobbesian paternalism during our balcony chats, she would propound a Jeffersonian individualism. She championed forthrightness and an embracing of emotion that would have shaken the high hedges of the Edinburgh neighbourhood where I was raised. The petrifying stoicism of the city of my childhood that had enclosed me like dragonhide slowly began to erode.
Not long after my mother had passed away, Beth was out of town, and I went to The Rock Shop on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. I had a ticket to see another Edinburgher, Edwyn Collins. My life had become a disastrously unsustainable misbalancing of work, regrets, love and grief.
I was only peripherally aware of Edwyn’s health concerns, so it was a shock to see Grace, his wife and manager, lead him across the stage to his position behind the mic. Then his band powered into an inspired mix of post-punk and northern soul, and the long, thin venue collapsed into an even more claustrophobic corridor of smiling, dancing fans. The physicality of the music in the tiny hall compelled me to join the politely flailing mass of limbs, and before I knew it I was dancing like a maniac and sobbing uncontrollably.
This articulate, extravagantly-quiffed man, forever young due to his founding of the Glaswegian band Orange Juice and the legendary Postcard Records, had been ravaged by stroke. My tears weren’t sad, though. I was delighted to witness his Scottish two fingers to his situation, rocking and painting and fighting back with sheer willpower and the help of his family. Even his reliance on a silver-topped cane was an act of defiance; the dandyism of Baudelaire, close to spirituality and stoicism.
This strength came from the love he shared with his family: Grace and their son, William. When he suffered aphasia in the wake of his cerebral haemorrhage, the singer with the dark chocolate baritone was able to repeat only four phrases: ‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘The possibilities are endless’, and Grace Maxwell’s name. Resonating with my parents’ background in Glasgow and Paisley, and my time growing up in Edinburgh, it was a beautiful and inspiring night. I was reminded that with humour and joy and love and popular music and pride, the possibilities were, indeed, endless. I was able to grieve for my mother at last, and found myself re-invigorated to fight for a better future. Edwyn would have been able to tell me that the time for tears, and the exaggerated changes in mood of the stroke survivor, had not even yet arrived.
The time for tears still hadn’t arrived when I was in HJD. I wanted to cry whenever I dwelt on the frightening new world in which I now lived. Then each morning, I was confronted by Beth’s Post-it note: ‘There’s no crying in rehab.’ I had a job to do, and strength was required.
That job started early each morning, shortly after six o’clock. The day at HJD was organised to keep the afflicted as busy as could reasonably be expected, and designed to keep the patients’ withered but motivating pride alive. An early morning shower was the perfect start to the day.
Each morning at 6a.m., the nurse who was my regular shower administrator rolled into the ward behind a hospital-issue bath chair. An Asian man of indeterminate age, his language was as blunt and severe as his haircut. He never told me his name, but in my mind I christened him ‘Tenko’, after the early eighties BBC drama. Tenko portrayed the experiences of a group of women in a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War. The women were separated from their husbands and lived in brutal conditions, facing disease, violence and death. My hot shower action was not that bad, obviously, but it didn’t resemble Sean Connery being soaped up and shaved by a coven of beautiful Japanese women in You Only Live Twice either.
The morning after I told Beth and Joe about my Goldfinger impression, the appointed hour was approaching. I heard Tenko in the corridor, airily dismissing another nurse’s plea that patient number 16 be provided with some sort of walking aid.
I imagined him hissing to his colleague behind the desk, ‘He will complete his march without a chair!’
Then Tenko wandered into the ward, wheeling that bath chair. I was messed up enough to merit one, it seemed. The bath chair was not what I would have pictured: a wheeled wicker sedan for transporting a dissolute, be-dressing-gowned and syphilis-riddled member of the aristocracy. Tenko had me wrap my arm around his shoulders and eased my now skinny and saggy frame into a lightweight contraption comprised of a moulded white plastic seat attached to thin white metal legs perched on small castors. It could almost have been one of my old school’s desk chairs, except for the large round hole in the middle of the seat that my newly-bony bum hung through.
Tenko had the thankless task of getting an endless roster of confused, tired and incontinent patients cleaned up first thing in the morning, and he did it with a ferocious, hilarious efficiency. In the inches between the bed and the bath chair, he inadvertently got in a fly punch to the eye and a wedgie, before he comprehensively rolled me down the hallway to the shower room.
The shower room was a large cube, the floor and walls of which were all bedecked in identical tiling. There was no boundary to indicate where the shower ended and the room began. Tenko ratcheted on the water. The running shower and the hole in which I was sitting and the diuretic pills that I was being fed each morning finally switched on that frantic feeling in my bladder. I told my commandant that I needed to urinate. He cheerily indicated I should go on the floor, and headed back into the corridor, presumably to find a heavy object that won’t leave a mark when wrapped in a towel. I feared the hole in the bath chair was to allow for the Casino Royale-style carpet beating he was going to give my bollocks.
Yet, Tenko’s morning visits became a favourite part of my day. For all my jokes about him, and his occasionally standing on my feet, he administered one hell of a shower. The only snag was, after being roused at six, I was ready for a nap when it was time for my rehabilitation classes to start around nine. Fatigue is a characteristic effect of stroke, and it’s just as common after a haemorrhagic stroke like mine as it is after an ischemic stroke. Yet after I’d gratefully surrendered to Morpheus and his escape by daydream a couple of times during th
e day, sleep wouldn’t come when the lights went off at 10p.m. I gazed at the ceiling as I lay in the prison of my broken mind, all perseveration and fear, within the darkened gaol of this strange institution.
I just wanted to go home. I tried to picture the apartment Beth and I shared, but the image wouldn’t materialise. I tried to start in the bathroom, hoping I could rebuild our home from there. There must be a toilet, I thought, a sink, a bath . . . ? I could conjure nothing. Just a simulacrum of the landings on which I had delivered mail in Edinburgh during a winter twenty years earlier. Tellingly, all were anonymous, and wouldn’t grant me access to the warm abodes beyond.
I was proud of the little home Beth and I had made for ourselves. The thought of getting back to it and the life we shared was what kept me upbeat. Now I realised I wasn’t even sure what that goal looked like. It was a depressing thought.
On the phone that Beth had recently returned to me, I turned on some Scottish pop music to distract me from the ghostly corridors of Edinburgh tenements, and the unknown fears that stalked the hallways of HJD. Edwyn Collins’s warm baritone poured into my ears again and filled my aching soul as he sang about sleeplessness and insecurity and depression.
It felt like I would never sleep again. Like I was trapped in damp rooms with no doors. Just endless, mildewed tile.
Still, I could imagine love taking me by the hand, and leading me to a bed. Our bed.
Edwyn sang about belief and renewal and getting back to the important things from the life before his haemorrhage.
As I drifted off, I thought I could feel the reassuring firmness of Beth’s body materialise under my hand. Firm. Concrete. The realest thing in the world.
8
Zumba’s Biggest Losers
I entered my second month of institutionalisation. I had been able to listen to music of my own choosing because Beth had begun to think that my stroke-addled brain could benefit from some gentle stimulation, and that I was just about sufficiently compos mentis to be trusted with my phone. At least within my limited and discrete personal area, I could try to remember to keep it nearby whenever I wasn’t using it, under my pillow usually. Nevertheless, the first thing I would usually do whenever she arrived for a visit was ask her if she could help me find it.
Stroke Page 7
