Make the scary man go away

I suppose it might be worth alerting you to the fact that if you were used to all too frequent updating from my previous blogging incarnation, you’re likely to be disappointed by this site. In writing this pointless entry here, I am trying to fill up white space. I am trying to convince myself that what I write here doesn’t have to be special. Doesn’t have to arrive perfectly formed. Doesn’t have to mean. Mean anything. Mean something.

Plus, I have a drunken American intercepting me on Google Talk. It’s approximately four o’clock in the morning for them, local time, they have drunk far too much gin (Bombay Sapphire apparently, so at least they have good taste) and are now babbling away in my virtual left ear, spouting personal conspiracy theories aplenty. As usual, I am far too polite to come up with even a barely credible excuse as to why I have to disappear offline. I think I will leave them talking into the whiteness until their head slumps forward onto the keyboard. Maybe I’ll minimize the window too, if I can be that cruel.

No, I can’t be that cruel.

One of the best things about being back at home - and, let’s be honest, not yet being able to fully re-enter the world of work - is resuming my own personal timetable. Which is and always has been … chaos. I don’t sleep when other people do. I am awake when you shouldn’t be. Sensible advice comes my way about resting, getting enough sleep each night, and all of it is well-intentioned, well-meant. But this is my natural habitat (including talking to strange people on the other side of the world in the middle of the night). I can sleep when I’m dead. Or when I’m tired, at least.

I haven’t confessed to something since my return from hospital, just over two weeks ago. It has, though, been seething away inside me, and it exploded at approximately five o’clock this morning. Communal deep breath, please.

I am angry. Furious. It doesn’t show externally. It’s wrapped in tight, asphyxiating knots round my mind and my soul. It’s a pointless, directionless anger. It has nowhere to go, so it just writhes and curses and seethes and then explodes inside me. On the outside, though, I’m smiling. Tired but smiling.

What am I angry about? I’m angry that I was in hospital for five months and five days when, by my reckoning, it could (and should) have been four months. I’m angry that I spent at least thirty-one days (if not longer) just sitting there and vegetating when I was, to all intents and purposes, better. Cured. Diabetes under control? Check. Leg still missing? Er, yeah, check. Strength of left leg still improving through physiotherapy? Check. Right then, thanks very much for all your treatment - and this isn’t a criticism of the nurses I got to know during my many months on the same ward, who were, without exception, all wonderful, dedicated and friendly - but if you don’t mind, it’s now mid-October and I’ll be off back to my own flat, to continue my rehabilitation. It’s been real, cheers.

But it didn’t work out like that. To me, it felt like I spent my last month in hospital fighting the combined forces of the National Health Service - personified by my immediate medical team, which seemed to comprise an astonishing number of people when all brought together in one room to “discuss my case”, as happened on two occasions - to be allowed to go home. They didn’t want to give me a smaller wheelchair. They didn’t think I could cope in my own flat. They thought I’d be depressed being trapped indoors with nothing but music, the internet, a stack of books, an immensely comfortable bed, decent home-cooked food and visiting friends for company. No, they wanted me to go to a gloomy and soul-destroying residential home, where I would undoubtedly have sunk further into misery and depression, or rent a supposedly (but significantly, not completely) wheelchair-accessible flat a long way from anyone I knew, at an exorbitant extra cost to me and the British taxpayer.

In short, they were hugely negative and pessimistic about my progress. They were negative, and they didn’t understand me.

One thing I never quite worked up the courage to do during those tedious case meetings, which in glorious hindsight I wish I had, was to fix my senior doctor with a steely glare and tell him:

“Look. About me going home and being trapped indoors until I’m ready to go for prosthetic limb rehabilitation. I appreciate all the risks. I appreciate it’s not the best possible solution. But it’s the right one for me. I have my mother mere minutes away. I have friends who will visit - and will more gladly visit me at home where they can see me happy and content than in hospital where they have to watch me getting progressively more miserable because of the length of time I’ve been in here. I have music, which I can play obscenely loudly and without headphones. I have so many books to catch up on that I could probably read constantly until the Christmas after next and still not reach the bottom of the pile. I have the internet - and I’m one of those strange 21st century people for whom most of my life, my social circle and my communication is out there in cyberspace. Oh, and there’s also the small point that I won’t, as you so delicately put it, get “profoundly depressed being alone in [my] condition”. (My condition? My condition?! I’m fine, sans half a leg!) Because, you see, Mr M*******e, I like being on my own. I’m not Mr Smiley Sociable all the time. I like seeing people, but I also treasure my privacy, my independence, the chance to just sit and think and be. Now, where’s that bloody ambulance?”

Instead, they all sighed and looked at me as if I was being unreasonable. I had, after all, long had a reputation for being a “difficult patient”. They put me on anti-depressants - yes, it was only 10mg of Citalopram, and I didn’t entertain them with my secret thought that, considering my long and chequered history of anti-depressants, I laugh in the face of 10mg - but they didn’t seem to accept that the reason I was getting depressed, not eating for days, feeling exhausted and, most importantly, finding that the all-important energy levels which would keep me exercising, doing physiotherapy and getting stronger day by day were deserting me was not because I was “finally coming to terms with losing [my] leg”. No, I had done that - much to the surprise of everyone - a few hours after waking up from a week in intensive care. “Oh, will you look at that? Leg. Gone. Right. Let’s get on with it. Anyone know any bad taste jokes about one-legged people?” Amongst the hordes of medical professionals I saw come and go, there were just a few lone voices of sanity who realised that the only reason I needed to be prescribed anti-depressants was to cope with having been in hospital for so many months, to cope with the fact that I didn’t need to be there any longer and was having to fight the massed ranks of the NHS to get out. To those people, I say thank you for listening. Thank you for understanding.

That, I think, was a purge. And like all good purges, it eventually peters out into nothing and you end up not knowing what else to say. I don’t want to be angry - especially now that it’s all over. Too much looking back. I want to be calm and serene, or as calm and serene as someone of my fragile temperament is ever going to get.

I might be able to sleep now. I already have been sleeping, to be honest, but I’ve been most horrendously tired. I thought it would take me about a week to get over five months in chokey, but it seems to have taken more like two and a half. Or maybe I just love my bed too much. Maybe I just love my weird sleep patterns too much as well.

Are you still here?