Centaur

by Declan Murphy

  But it was a risk, and for a man who has never gambled in his life, to gamble with his life was a biggie. The magnitude of this wasn’t lost on me. Because, of course, I was flipping a coin and there were only two outcomes. If I didn’t get it right, I’d get it wrong.

  This was what the doctors feared, what they had hinted at in shades of grey during almost every conversation they had had with me since I woke from my coma. This is the stuff that they don’t ever tell you directly, instead they imply it with their carefully chosen words, their unknowingly patronizing body language. But read between the lines, and there it is – tucked within the innocuous-sounding medical parlance – a not-so-subtle, not-so-innocuous message. When Professor John Miles sat perched on the edge of my bed and spoke to me about the potential ramifications of the trauma to my brain, I had no reaction. None whatsoever. And this is what scared him because it reeked of one of those ‘conditions’ that medical people seem so inclined to slot you into – the ones with uncertain outcomes that invariably end in the word ‘syndrome’ or ‘disorder’. What they feared I had was called Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and my failure to react fit its medical definition like a glove.

  Within a few days of my first conversation with Professor Miles, I was handed a Patient Information Leaflet (PIL) to ‘read and understand’. There, on the rectangular, glossy two-pager, scattered between the helplines and support emails and messages of reassurance, was a definition that I have to admit took me by surprise. This is what it said: ‘Post-traumatic Stress Disorder is an anxiety disorder characterized by an absence of emotion, an avoidance of thoughts and feelings from the discussions of trauma, until one day one becomes so flooded by emotion that one cannot shut it off.’ It was remarkable, the coincidence, because, on the surface, my asymptomatic behaviour was precisely symptomatic of the disorder.

  And so this is what the best minds of the departments of Neurology and Neurosurgery at The Walton Centre were convinced I had; based on documented information, I was more or less a textbook example of it. The danger, of course, according to them, lay in what would eventually – but inevitably – happen to me; that it was just a matter of time before reality would set in, and then, I would snap. It wasn’t disclosed to me until much later, but in the days following my surgery, and to a fairly high degree of probability, I was considered a legitimate suicide risk. This also explained the growing collection of bottles that I found accumulating in a neat little cluster on my bedside table. Drugs, it appeared, were the only antidote to taking my own life.

  They thought they had me pegged. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

  The fact is that nobody fully understands the inner workings of the brain – how it reacts, why it reacts the way it does, why this is so different from person to person. We can at best generalize, but beyond that, we can only guess. We haven’t advanced that far medically – the brain is too complicated. Our cognitive abilities, even as a single species, are too varied. So they didn’t know, they couldn’t know, how my brain was wired. They didn’t know what it felt like to be me, what it felt like to wake up every morning when the life that you thought you lived is not the life that you are living any more. So I didn’t want to commit suicide, I wanted to live! And I didn’t just want to live, I wanted to do everything and more than I had done before my accident. The fact is – and I probably wouldn’t have dared to say this to Professor John Miles – that medical professionals, in as much as they are qualified to know these things, they don’t know, they can never fully know, because the brain is one of evolution’s proudest creations. It is marvellous, it is mysterious. And it is a complete minefield.

  Then there was that little matter of odds. Everybody wanted to know my odds. Everybody wanted me to know my odds. I had little interest in the odds. I belonged to a sport that was defined by odds. The very lifeblood of horse racing rests in the odds. So I knew, more than anyone, just how misleading they could be. Odds are useful because they are objective indicators that determine the likelihood of something that has not yet happened. We rely on them because they cut through the noise and attempt to quantify an unknowable future outcome with a simple numerical expression that most of us can grasp. But, where they fail – and this can make the difference between life and death – is that they don’t take into account the alchemy of what makes each one of us unique. They don’t take into account human variability.

  It is exactly the same with medical odds. Despite their best intentions, they can camouflage the truth. When Professor John Miles was talking to me, he was giving me his best advice based on his own past experiences. But he hadn’t experienced me before. So, as qualified as he was, when it came to me, none of what he said qualified.

  He was basing his words on medical odds.

  And medical odds deal with standard expected behaviour.

  I wasn’t standard expected behaviour.

  I didn’t fit the bell curve. I was hanging off it.

  Within a week I had weaned myself off medication.

  The third step was getting sensation back in my limbs. This one was a toughie. I’d swear again now, at this point, but I don’t swear unless completely necessary, so ‘toughie’ seems appropriately euphemistic. It was a toughie. But it was a bloody toughie. I didn’t know where to start, what actions to take. How does one will oneself to feel? It seemed the stuff of fairies and faith, and it frustrated me.

  So I would spend hours trying to force sensation into my hands. I would bounce a golf ball and try to catch it between thumb and each finger in turn. It was excruciatingly slow but I had all the time in the world. At the same time, I started walking barefoot to try to force the feeling into my feet. This was necessary. The lack of feeling, the numbness, filled me with emptiness, a lack of hope, and that frightened me. Because it was hope that kept me alive.

  I could walk now, by myself, albeit heavily supported by my sticks. I loved the independence of it – to do this simple task by myself, for myself, whenever I felt like it. So I’d kick off my slippers and I’d go for walks as often as I could. Joanna and I had moved by now to our own home, Oaktree House on Duchess Drive. Rather bizarrely, I had put in the offer on the house a few days before my accident. The owner had been gracious enough to hold everything in place until such time that I was able to proceed with the formalities – I will always remember her for her kindness.

  It was here, on Duchess Drive, that I would go on my many walks, using my sticks – my constant companions – for balance. One such time, I was walking down the road from the house, alone, barefoot. I was expecting a couple of friends from London to visit me later that day and I wanted to get my walk in, quickly, before they arrived.

  As I was walking, I noticed a car coming down the road, slowing as it saw me. What I didn’t know was that my friends were in it – they had lost their way on Duchess Drive and were hoping to flag down someone to ask for directions. They’d seen a man walking and, given the way I looked at the time, it was hardly surprising that they hadn’t recognized me from a distance. It was only when they came up close that they realized it was me. My friend Colin rolled down the passenger-side window to shake my hand, then suddenly he drew back with a jerk, retracting the handshake, that same hand going to his mouth involuntarily to cover the audible gasp he had just let out.

  My feet were covered in blood.

  I hadn’t even realized my feet were bleeding.

  Apparently I had walked on broken glass.

  I hadn’t even realized I had walked on broken glass.

  Toughie. Bloody toughie. Bloody literally.

  It took me five months from my accident to get sensation back in my limbs. Most of the sensation came in the form of pain. But I was glad for it. If there was pain, I knew there was feeling and if there was feeling – something, anything, even pain – there was possibility. And possibility is all I had.

  You’ve heard this before, but it’s so true it deserves to be said again – our experiences shape us. As human beings, this is our
truth. Our attitudes, our expectations, our ambitions, our hopes, our desires are all the product of our life experiences and our responses to them. This is what makes us. This is what creates the spirit within us.

  My childhood shaped me; it made me strong. We led unassuming lives, but the unconditional love of my parents, the support of my siblings, the security of belonging within that simple existence, was rock solid. It moulded me into a person who could take on anything. And despite being picked up and hurled the way I had been, from the very top of the world to the very bottom of the abyss, all within a matter of seconds – my spirit remained intact.

  Within a month of getting sensation back in my legs, I was walking without my sticks.

  Within a couple of months of that, my brothers got reports of me running around Newmarket Heath.

  Within a couple of months of that, I sat on a horse for the first time – just sat on it – felt it underneath me, felt its breath on my hands, its muscles on my legs.

  And when I did that, I knew I was going to do everything I’d ever done.

  Nobody becomes somebody until the fight within them has begun. I didn’t have a fight within me; I had a war.

  Big Boys Don’t Cry

  You’re a fish, swimming along happily in the ocean with your friends. Suddenly, you find yourself caught in a fisherman’s net. He pulls you out as you gasp for air. You wriggle and you writhe and you think you’re going to die.

  Then, the fisherman takes a closer look at you. He laughs. ‘This one’s just a tiddler,’ he says. And he throws you back to sea.

  But the ocean looks different now. Everything is strange. You try to find your friends, but they’ve swum far away. You try to catch up to them but you struggle, your body is too weak. You’ve come out of the net. But you’re still on your own. It’s a lonely place to be.

  People said that one minute I couldn’t get up from a chair unsupported, and the next minute I was running around Newmarket Heath like a madman.

  But you don’t go from not being able to stand unsupported to running around the heath in a minute.

  It doesn’t take a minute.

  It takes many millions of minutes. Of pain and burn and despair.

  It takes every last ounce of resolve.

  It takes losing hope and then – somehow – finding it again.

  It takes blood and sweat and tears.

  It takes being prepared to crawl through a tunnel on your hands and knees through darkness and danger without the promise of a way out on the other side.

  It takes being willing to lose everything, to gain that one something.

  That’s how I did it.

  But there was one thing they said that couldn’t have been more true. They said I was a madman. I was a madman. I had to become a madman. Because only in my madness lay my escape.

  When I had just left the hospital and returned home in those early days, when I was trying to walk with Joanna and my two sticks, when the car came over the ramp and I collapsed – my brain had stopped me, and my body went into shock. Slowly, my brain recovered. I got past that point. My brain didn’t stop me any more. My body stopped me. It was an ordeal of a different kind.

  Whether eventually getting sensation back in my limbs was from my effort or the will of the universe, I will never know, but I never stopped trying. For weeks, I had been forcing sensation into my feet by walking barefoot. Simultaneously, I had been working the golf ball, finger by finger in each hand, to regain the coordination in my hands. It was a slow game, but the rewards were high. Before I had started, I couldn’t move my fingers on demand – for example, if I had wanted to snap my fingers I wouldn’t have been able to do it. If I had wanted to raise two fingers – or one or three or four – and keep the others down, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I didn’t have the coordination. If you had dipped my finger into boiling water, I wouldn’t have felt it. I didn’t have the sensation. If you had poked a pin – or a jackhammer – into my feet, I wouldn’t have reacted; I had no feeling. I had to work hard, toil for every iota of movement, for every tiny atom of sensation, to win back my fingers, to win back my feet. And slowly – excruciatingly slowly, excruciatingly patiently – I did.

  It was the first of many trials.

  Walking properly – like normal people – was another manoeuvre that not only tested my physical ability but also demanded a level of mental focus that I could never have anticipated before my accident. Within six months of coming out of the hospital, I was walking everywhere, all the time, like a man on a mission. Sometimes I would walk for five, maybe six hours. I would leave the house in the morning and come back in the afternoon. Just walking the whole time.

  When I think back to those early weeks in Newmarket, I feel immense gratitude towards Jim Hogan, who would routinely come all the way down from Wellingborough just to walk with me. Being a former athlete, he used to advise me, train me on posture and technique. I relied on him more than I realized at the time – just having him there made me feel secure at a time when I was at my most insecure. Because even though I was walking, I wasn’t walking normally. When normal people walk, their entire body participates in the movement. It is mechanical, automatic, not something you consciously think about. And why would you?

  But if you do, if you break down the anatomy of a walk, you will realize how complex it really is; how so many different parts of the body have to move in tandem to keep balance, to propel motion.

  For example, the body’s centre of gravity lies at the hips – this is the seat of balance. So when the right leg moves forward, the right hip is rotated forward as well. This motion is then transmitted, seamlessly, to the shoulders through the spine. The movement of the shoulders mirrors that of the hip to keep the system in balance. So left shoulder moves with right leg, and right shoulder moves with left leg – they move in sync, rising and falling in harmony.

  So really, walking is a highly coordinated effort in which the feet and hips and spine and shoulders all participate to enable the body to move. And all of this, of course, is controlled by that most powerful organ in the body, the almighty brain.

  Which, in my case, had been tampered with by hooves and scalpels.

  So, my body wasn’t moving like that. My feet were being thrust forward – right leg, left leg, right leg – but from the waist up, I was as stiff as a statue. As if the two halves of my body had been placed together hurriedly, without so much as a thought for how they would work as a whole.

  I had to teach myself. I had to train my brain. Can you think of such madness?

  I’d like to offer a thought. Or two thoughts, actually:

  Ever wondered what it’s like to wake up to a new body? To go from 10.5 stone of lean muscle to under 6 stone of skin and bone? I can tell you. It’s torture.

  Ever wondered what it’s like to try to regain your old body? To go from under 6 stone of skin and bone back to 10.5 stone of lean muscle? I can tell you. It’s greater torture.

  I started going to the gym: my baptism of fire. I needed to try to coordinate my body, to strengthen my limbs. The doctors had recommended steering clear of the gym for a year post-surgery. I was there in under six months. As soon as I could walk, I was in the gym. I got there walking. But of course.

  The first time I sat on a rowing machine and pulled the handlebar, the full extent of my frailty stood starkly revealed. Within three strokes, I was out of breath. There was a middle-aged man on the machine next to me, rowing effortlessly, breathing effortlessly. And there I was, a former competitive sportsperson, gasping for air, fighting with myself, fighting every urge to give up, to stop. It was humbling. It was heart-breaking. It was unforgiving. I was a grown man and I wanted to cry.

  But I didn’t cry. I didn’t stop. It never happened.

  I started using the cross trainer, only I had 3-kilogram weights in each hand that I used as a proxy for the bars. I was huffing and puffing, my legs on fire, my eyes shut, my face distorted with pain. People stared at me and shook their
heads, half in wonder, half in disapproval.

  I was operating on reserve fuel to begin with and, even from that precious little, I kept going until I had sucked out every last drop. I was struggling to breathe, struggling to hold the weights in my hands, struggling to take another step forward.

  People noticed. I didn’t know which was worse, those sideways glances of incredulity or the other ones, the ones of pity. Once, I overheard two men whispering between themselves. ‘That man should be in a wheelchair,’ one man told the other, covertly looking in my direction as he faced the mirror, pumping iron. But I couldn’t blame him. I couldn’t blame any of them, really. They were right. I was a weak, frail, feeble man, attempting to do something I obviously couldn’t.

  I pretended they didn’t exist. I didn’t stop. It never happened.

  I became obsessive about my weight. Paul Eddery, former top flat jockey and my good friend, had these precise scales that measured weight down to the last gram. I borrowed them so I could keep an exact account of the progress I was making. Every day I would try to measure my strength in muscle, analyse the improvement. There wasn’t any for weeks and weeks. Nothing. Not a single upward tick in that arrow. The disillusionment tore at my heart.

  But if that arrow was stubborn, I was more stubborn. I kept going. I found I couldn’t sit still any more. I had a constant urge, a tic, a longing to move. I was desperate to move. No sooner was I walking than I made myself jog. No sooner was I jogging than I made myself run.

  I used to be a good runner as a kid. I wanted that back. I craved the things that made me feel like myself, that made me feel normal. The curious thing is that normal people, who do normal things, do not consider ‘normal’ as sufficient. But at the point that I was in my life, ‘normal’ was a huge achievement.

  But even that, even an attempt at being normal, was a battle.

  One time, I was running up the equitrack at Warren Hill in Newmarket. It’s only a short uphill path, about half a mile long, something an averagely fit person could manage with ease. I had been running for a few weeks now – in my head, I had conquered it.