* * *
I don’t remember the journey to the hospital. My dad had had Jack over the weekend, and when he dropped him off Sunday evening my mum told him I’d not come out of the garage for two days. After checking on me to make sure I was alright; it was him who then drove me to the doctors. Apparently I didn’t even make it as far as the waiting room before the receptionist redirected us to A&E.
The first thing I recall is waking up in a hospital bed in the brightest of white rooms.
“How are you feeling?” the nurse asked, kneeling down next to the bed.
An oscillating fan swept back and forth, cooling me. Looking down I realised I had no shirt on and the bed covers were drawn at my waist. I reached to pull the covers up and felt something tight grab my hand. It had a needle in it, connected to a clear tube. I traced it back to behind me, where it went into a bag of clear fluid hanging on the wall.
“Don’t move,” she said. “Just tell me how you’re feeling.”
“Thirsty,” I managed to croak out through the driest of throats.
I tried to swallow and the pain made my eyes water. The nurse handed me a small plastic cup of water, I took a sip and instantly heaved. Plenty of experience in this job meant she knew it was coming before I even did. She held a bowl made from recycled cardboard below my chin and I tried in vain to fill it from a stomach that hadn’t seen food or water for three days. Looking around the room properly for the first time, I noticed my parents stood at the other end of the bed. Neither of them said anything.
“Oh good, I see you are awake now Luke,” A little Asian doctor said as hurried into the room. “You are in the ENT department of Canchester hospital. We need to take you next door so we can find out what is wrong with you. Do you think you can walk?”
I tried to sit up in the bed, the nurse putting her hand behind my back to help me when she saw me struggling. Once up straight I let my legs swing off the side of the bed; they tingled with vague pins and needles from lying in one position for too long. The nurse carefully unhooked the drip from behind me and put it onto a kind of wheeled hatstand without a hat. She rolled it round next to me and I used my right hand which didn’t have a tube in it, to try to lower myself down from the bed. Again the nurse’s experience saved me as she grabbed me before I had a chance to fall.
“Just stay there, we’ll get you a wheelchair,” she said, as she lifted me back onto the bed, helped by the doctor. Luckily I didn’t weigh anything by this point in my life.
Fuck. I needed a wheelchair. I didn’t want my parents to see me being put into a wheelchair. Not from something I’d done to myself.
The nurse pushed me while the doctor opened the doors in the corridor on the way. I was wheeled into a small examination room with a plastic sheeted bed in the corner, next to a television screen on a trolley.
“I’m going to need to use a special camera to look at the back of your throat now Luke, is that OK?” the doctor asked.
“Yeah, fine.”
“The image will come up on this screen. If you like I can tilt it away from you so you can’t see it.”
“If you could.”
“Just one more thing,” he added. “The camera has to go up your nose.”
I reluctantly nodded.
He slid the thin camera tube up my nostril. It was cold and made me gag. Again I was grateful there was nothing in my stomach, the NHS having resorted to pumping water straight into my veins. I couldn’t see what was on the screen. My dad moved his chair so he could watch, my mum didn’t, I don’t think she could bear to see it.
The doctor let out a sigh, “It looks like you have an infection in the back of your throat. Most likely tonsillitis based on those white pustules. But also is there anything else you should be telling me?”
I sat up straight on the bed, honest looking straight, and locked the doctor square in the eyes. It isn’t easy to look serious with a tube up one’s nose.
“Nothing,” I said. “I must just be ill.”
He gave me a look of disappointment then gently removed the camera from my nose. Then he said, “I’m just going to go outside so I can speak to your parents.”
I sat in silence with the nurse while the three of them left, closing the door behind them. My blood felt as though it was poisoned.
Several minutes later they came back.
My mum went first, “If there’s something you’re not telling the doctor maybe you should stop trying to hide it and just tell him, he’s not going to be able to help you if you’re not honest with him.”
“Nothing,” I said, my gaze sweeping them all.
My dad shuffled on his chair, ready to take his turn. It felt strange the pair of them teaming up against me, it was the first time I’d seen them sit next to each other in six months.
“It’s just tonsillitis,” I pre-empted him.
“I don’t think that’s all it is Lu, the doctor doesn’t think that’s all it is either.”
The room seemed to close in on me. I felt as though I would have a panic attack, if only I had the energy. I looked to the nurse beside me, my only ally. She was looking away. Though even that was preferable to the stares from the other three, waiting for a guilty answer. The magnitude of the situation hit me; trapped in a hospital, too sick to leave, yet not quite sick enough to be spared interrogation. The doctor knew I’d been taking drugs, because of him my parents knew I’d been taking drugs. For all I knew they’d done a blood test on me while I was asleep, so already had the hard evidence they needed and were torturing me for fun. I went dizzy from the ordeal.
“He looks to have worsened,” the nurse said. “He’s going to need to go back to the ward.”
Luckily for me I had worsened.
She put me to bed where I slept through a prolonged session of feverish nightmares that lasted well into the night.
The next day was lost to sickness. But on my third day in hospital I was actually beginning to feel a little better. I was still having a saline drip but I was also intermittently getting an antibiotic drip, which was strange because I could somehow taste that one when it went into my body. I was even managing to drink water from a cup, although it still brought on a searing pain in the back of my throat.
They moved me from the ENT department onto a normal ward and I made small talk with some of the people sharing the room with me. Opposite was a lad around my age with a promising football career ahead of him. He’d done something unimaginably horrible to his knee on the pitch and had been airlifted in. One day a specialist doctor came in to give him a proper diagnosis of what had happened. They drew the curtain around his bed to create some privacy. I remember it sounding like something that happens to people in a warzone. I also remember hearing him cry when he asked if he’d ever play football again and the doctor replied bluntly, “You’ll struggle to walk.”
Over in the corner by the door was an old boy who had grazed his leg on a pallet in the warehouse he worked in. All the way from his ankle to his knee had become infected with some awful tissue destroying bacteria, and a nurse came in daily to dress the wound. There was no skin left, just pus and bare flesh. I had several conversations with him. He was remarkably jovial.
At my mum’s permission, James and Al were allowed to visit on the fourth day, after Dean and Jack had been to see me.
“Alright duuuude. How’s it hanging?” James asked, as he walked in carrying a bag of grapes.
“How you feeling Lu?” Al asked.
“I’m alright. Loads better than I was,” I replied. “Why have you got me fucking fruit?”
“That’s what you get people when they’re sick ain’t it?” Al said.
“Yeah you schmuck.”
“I don’t want fruit, I want a fag.”
“Come on then, let’s go for one, I’ve got some,” Al said. I stood up and immediately felt the intravenous drip in the back of my hand snag me. “What the fuck? You can’t go anywhere with that in you.”
I laughed, “Check t
his out Al.” I took the bag of saline and unhooked it from the wall, moving it onto the hatstand on wheels thing.
“Sweet!” Al said. “We can take that down in the lift.”
“They ain’t gonna let you go outside for a fag with that mate, not in a million years,” James said.
Shit. He was probably right. I was dying for a cigarette though.
There was a balcony on the ward I was on, the door had been left open and a long flowing white curtain danced in the breeze.
“Let’s go out on the balcony,” I said.
The view outside stretched for miles, the greens and blues of the summer making a welcome change from the stark white I had become used to. In the distance you could see the tops of two of Canchester’s most famous landmarks; the town hall and the giant Victorian water tower.
Al pulled out a gold box of Benson and Hedges and shared them around. The wind was strong outside. I enjoyed it, it was the first time I had felt truly cool in days. My hospital gown flapped around my knees. As we stood in silence I concentrated on not letting my eyes well up from the pain of the smoke on the back of my throat. James and Al took in the view; Al leaning over the balcony to see as far into the distance as he could. I didn’t go near the edge, instead just holding tightly to the hatstand and drip combo I had with me.
We’d closed the door behind us when we’d gone outside, to stop the smoke drifting in and upsetting the other patients. As we left the balcony it became all too apparent that hadn’t worked. The ward absolutely stank of smoke. The windows were open too and we hadn’t realised, allowing the smoke to waft in uninhibited. Unsurprisingly we got some dirty looks when we came back into what had now become a giant ashtray.
The three of us sat down on my bed.
“Mad about Kyle ain’t it?” Al said.
“What about him?” I asked.
“You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“About him crashing the Maestro?”
“Fucking hell, when did that happen? Is he alright?”
“Yeah he’s fine. He did it driving home from that flat in Wanton, off his nut on all that speed.”
Thank fuck he’s alright. If I hadn’t run off he wouldn’t have had to drive home on his own.
“Did he hit something? How bad was the car?”
“Nah he went down a ditch, he reckons it was his epilepsy. All the drugs more like. The car weren’t actually that bad but once the police got there they seized it because he didn’t have a license or insurance. They said he could have it back if he turns up with all the documents but I think that would cost more than the car’s worth.”
“Are they prosecuting him?”
“Yeah he’s got to go to court, reckons he’ll get a ban and a fine, the ban doesn’t make a lot of difference though, seeing as he hasn’t got a license. His mum and step-dad have gone ballistic, they won’t let him out the house except to go to work, and even then they’re dropping him off and picking him up. I only found out because he rang me.”
“I still can’t believe it, I should have been in the car with him. He might not have crashed if I had been. I guess that makes two casualties from that night,” I joked. “At least he’s alright.”
“So how much longer you gonna be in here for?” Al asked.
“Two more days and they’re going to review me apparently, whatever that means.”
“Do you mind if I have a few of these grapes?” James asked.
“No, course not mate, I’m living on soup and ice cream at the moment,” I replied. “So what have you two been up to?”
The pair of them looked at each other and smiled.
“You tell him,” Al said, getting up and pulling the curtain around the bed.
“We went to Club Z on Saturday. We were gonna invite you along but your mum said you were still hung-over from Friday. Coming down more like.”
They both laughed.
“Oh yeah, any good?”
“Not really, hardly anyone in there to be honest. So about one in the morning we’re both sitting there buzzing in the foyer when this bird comes over with eyes like saucers and asks if we want to go to a party in Wanton,” James said, popping another get well soon grape into his mouth and bursting it between his teeth.
“Obviously we went,” Al added.
“We weren’t exactly gonna go home were we? I’d only dropped again about ten minutes before.” James put his hand in front of his mouth so we couldn’t see the chewed up grape in there.
“I’d have gone if that had been me,” I said. “So, any good?”
“Was alright. Only about ten people there altogether, but then there’d only been about ten people in Club Z,” James said, before pointing at the grapes again. I nodded.
“Tell him about later on,” Al said.
“About four in the morning we’re starting to come down and we’ve got one pill left. Well I haven’t got any but Al’s got one.”
“Right.”
“So we decide sod it, we’ll snort it between us, and we go off downstairs to the toilet,” James said. “Once we’re in there we realise there’s nothing flat to cut it up on, but genius Al takes the mirror off the wall for us to use.”
“Nice,” I said. Al smiled at me.
“So Al gets the pill out and starts cutting it up into two fat lines for us. Only it’s not a normal pill, it’s a green alien. You know those green triangle ones?” James said.
“You two snorted a green alien pill?”
“Not quite,” Al said.
“So Al snorts his line first because it’s his pill, and as soon as he does his eyes start streaming.”
“It fucking hurt,” Al said.
“Then we hear this dripping noise. We both look down and there’s all this tomato ketchup shit all over the mirror. I look up at Al and there’s this really thick blood coming out of his nose. I looked down at the mirror again and in the reflection I could see his face but upside down. It was trippy as fuck watching the blood like floating up out of his face.”
Al started laughing as if it was a normal thing to happen.
“That’s not even the funny bit,” James said. “This schmuck gets his bank card and quickly cuts all of my line that’s got his blood in it out the way, and hands the mirror to me. As if I’m gonna snort any of it after what it did to him.”
“Yeah it was alright for me to do it though,” Al laughed.
“I was going to do it Al. It was only when half your face fell out of your nose that I decided against it.”
“So what did you do then?” I asked.
“I just scraped my bit up and put it in a cigarette paper and swallowed it.”
“No I mean what did you do about Al?”
“Oh, right. It didn’t bleed for long did it Al? Like two minutes tops. We had to clean the mirror in the shower but apart from that it was alright. I mean Al weren’t, he was proper mangled; I don’t even think he knew his name after the rush hit him.”
“I don’t really remember it,” Al said. “You know when you rush so hard that every second your brain forgets what’s going on, and you constantly have to try and work out where you are. It was one of them, you know, too fucked to even realise you’re fucked.”
“Shit I’ve gotta get out of here, I’m working in an hour,” James said, staring at his watch. “There’s a fag for you Lu if you need one later.” He handed it to me and I put it on the little table next to my bed.
Al opened the curtain and the pair of them went to leave.
“Laters Lu,” James said.
“Yeah laters you spaz, get better soon or hurry up and die,” Al added, as they walked out the door.
“Laters,” I replied. “Cheers for coming.”
Shit, I thought. I haven’t got a lighter. From my bed I took a look around the ward in the hope that someone might have cigarettes on show; if not I’d have to ask. Everyone else was either asleep or blatantly facing the other way. Unusual for that time of the afternoon. Then it
dawned on me- James’s story had been a little vivid; no wonder they were all trying to avoid me. If that was the case then the rest of the time I was in here was going to be pretty awkward. I looked down at the bed and things got even worse. James had only gone and eaten all the fucking grapes.
It took a Minute for My Eyes to Adjust Again to the Dark Outside
September 2002.
I tried. I honestly did. Six days I was in that hospital, running over my life in my head. They let me out on the Saturday and I was so pleased to be free again that I spent the day and night in the house with my mum and brothers, eating food and talking like families do. I went back to work on the Monday, still on antibiotics but with a fresh sense of optimism and a mind wide open to the world around me. When the following Friday came I was ready for a night down the pub, a night like everyone else, drinking until midnight then staggering home with my best friend, stuffing our faces with crisps and peanuts purchased from behind the bar.
By Saturday I was miserable. Longing for the intense sensations that come with a chemical high. There was nothing I wanted to do except party from one eight o’clock to the other. But I remembered my time in hospital, and I knew I had to do everything I could to make sure I never ended up in there again. I wouldn’t, no; I couldn’t, let that happen. If not for me then for the people around me.
Snorting all those drugs had put me in there. For the people I loved I would never snort drugs again.
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