Emails from the Edge (17 page)
Read Emails from the Edge Online
Authors: Ken Haley
I hurried into the empty hallway and bounded up the stairs to the fourth floor. There's a last time for everything. I didn't know whose room it was, if anyone's. The room was identical to mine, the furnishings as bare. The windowsill could have been the same, too, but the treetops were now below eye level.
I lay on this more anonymous bed, willing myself into unconsciousness with just one programmed command, a mantra I repeated until everything else was driven out of my distracted mind:
Walk to the sill. Fall off, fall away. Fall off, fall away
.
The still-life remained unchanged at 11 pm as it did, I suppose, three hours later.
It must be 2 am, 4 March, but that doesn't matter to me. What's the time when the time has come? The stars, the trees, the warmth of autumn, fall. Fall off, fall away
.
In silence no longer dread but serene, I arose from the bed and reclined on the ledge, nudging myself a little further out with my right hand cupped around the underside of the window jutting out above me.
Now I was right on the edge, willing the perfect moment to come. Rocking in and out of the building, side on, I tried to work up enough momentum to tip myself over, opening my cupped hand until I clung by just a middle finger to the window that hovered over me like a guillotine blade.
What will be or not will be or not. Don't care what
. I slid my finger down to the edge of the window frame and let go. I cannot tell what happened next. I fell off. All thought fell away.
I lay on this more anonymous bed, willing myself into unconsciousness with just one programmed command, a mantra I repeated until everything else was driven out of my distracted mind:
Walk to the sill. Fall off, fall away. Fall off, fall away
.
The still-life remained unchanged at 11 pm as it did, I suppose, three hours later.
It must be 2 am, 4 March, but that doesn't matter to me. What's the time when the time has come? The stars, the trees, the warmth of autumn, fall. Fall off, fall away
.
In silence no longer dread but serene, I arose from the bed and reclined on the ledge, nudging myself a little further out with my right hand cupped around the underside of the window jutting out above me.
Now I was right on the edge, willing the perfect moment to come. Rocking in and out of the building, side on, I tried to work up enough momentum to tip myself over, opening my cupped hand until I clung by just a middle finger to the window that hovered over me like a guillotine blade.
What will be or not will be or not. Don't care what
. I slid my finger down to the edge of the window frame and let go. I cannot tell what happened next. I fell off. All thought fell away.
The drop was 15 metres.
Down to Earth.
Heels first, striking pitiless gravel.
The Earth broke my fall.
The bones of my feet smashed into a thousand slivers.
Both legs fractured in several places.
My pelvis cracked.
Spine snapped.
Neck was dislocated.
The Earth is 13 000 kilometres thick.
It emerged unscathed.
Down to Earth.
Heels first, striking pitiless gravel.
The Earth broke my fall.
The bones of my feet smashed into a thousand slivers.
Both legs fractured in several places.
My pelvis cracked.
Spine snapped.
Neck was dislocated.
The Earth is 13 000 kilometres thick.
It emerged unscathed.
Chapter 14
REJECTED FOR HEAVEN
H
AMLET
MARCH-JUNE 1991
Imagine a million miniature arrows tipped with molten tar piercing each atom of your being with piston-like rapidity, and even then you can have only the most indistinct picture of the Hell that was going through me. I was not in Hell; Hell had taken me over, until there was no I, nothing but wild screaming endless terror. No sense that I had a body, no awareness of time, no past or future or even present in the ordinary sense of the word. The whole universe, all reality, filled up with metaphysical torment. Boundless suffering, disembodied pain.
By a stroke of luck to which I owe my life, Stephanie had arrived home not long before I jumped and, hearing the thud, rushed into the backyard, where she found my broken body sprawled in the gravel of the flowerbed. After phoning an ambulance, she had found my brother's number in personal papers among my belongings, and phoned him next. Bruce, of course, phoned my parents.
The ambulance sped me to St Vincent's Hospital, barely a kilometre away, where medics quickly realised my injuries were life-threatening. However, for one overriding reason, they ordered my immediate transfer. The Austin Hospital, where I went straight to Emergency around sunrise, was and remains one of the world's leading centres for the treatment of spinal injury. After taking my life out of my own hands, I had no responsibility for the fact that it passed into far more capable ones.
For two days, I am told, a quivering mass of agony that used to be me lay in the intensive-care unit, hovering this side of the fate it had tempted, the line it had dared to cross. In the next few weeks I would become unavoidably aware of how thin that line can be, of how easily it can be slipped across. One day, white curtains were drawn in haste around the bed next to mine, and a covey of masked doctors swarmed into that space in a desperate bid to revive the patient, a Japanese tourist grievously injured in a motorcycle accident on Victoria's Great Ocean Road. By then I could turn my head and, doing so, closed my eyes against the sight, evenâI recallâpraying for the life of this human being unknown to me but for now my neighbour. That night new sheets were laid out, and next morning a new patient occupied his space. Only upon persistent questioning did one of the nurses confirm that the man from Japan had died in this foreign land without regaining consciousness.
That could have been me
is an obvious thought in such circumstances. But in the first few days, when it so nearly was my end too, no thoughts entered my mass of sensations, a state known to psychologists as anoesis. Later I would learn that the first sign I was winning the battle for life was, paradoxically enough, an action that could have hastened death: when I felt such extreme pain that, out of pure instinct, I ripped the intravenous tubes out of my arm. Of this I have no recollection.
Thanks to the extraordinary skills and expertise developed at the Austin over many years, the prospects of survival are many times greater than they were a few decades ago. In the 1950s a snapped spine was a (lingering) death sentence. But, even in these comparatively benign days, Death drives a hard bargain for each and every one of us.
It may have been the second day after my admission, or the third, when a primal awareness penetrated this mass of agony, awareness of an outside force trying to reach me in my suffering. Somehow divining that I was going to be operated on, I cried out for spiritual help. Even now it is hard to explain why the efforts to save my battered body spurred me to call for someone who could perform no such office. My action was not taken out of a belief in God but from a driving sense of terror that something beyond my body, something immaterial and so of transcendent importance, would be lost if the surgery failed.
I sought consolation ahead of that next obstacle on my road. The hospital sent me a Churches of Christ chaplain, George Warren, who spoke softly and reassuringly, while realistically preparing me as best he could to accept whichever of the two directions awaited me at the fork in the road ahead.
Pethidine was administered. I recall being wheeled into the operating theatre, even the conversational murmur of the surgeons, and wondering if my senses kept picking up such chit-chat how I could know whether I was alive or dead. Then, nothing â¦
My vital signs were wildly unstable, I later learnt, for days after the surgery, which consisted of putting metal rods in my spine and temporary ones in my legs. (The rods in my back are still there today, and on the day of my death I expect to be worth a fortune on the scrap-metal market.) It was essential for the reconfiguration of my physical frame that the legs, indeed as much of the body as possible, be kept immobile for the next few weeks.
The most important, and paralysing, consequence of my self-willed fall was the âincomplete' fracture of my spine at L1, the first vertebra in the lumbar region of the lower back. The âincomplete' nature of this break, or what the medical profession calls a lesion, enabled signals from the brainâin those days almost all of them signals of painâto register sensations from the south of the body to the north. This wholeness is a blessing: many spinal-injury sufferers feel nothing in their lower limbs so that routines the rest of the population take for granted put them in great peril. For example, while taking a shower they could scald themselves without any warning to the brain that the water is too hot.
Before any attempt was made to apprise me of the new terms on which my life would be lived, the doctors and nurses had to wait for the shock I had given my body to subside. For days I was âfed' intravenously, and for weeks after that it was a lottery whether any food spooned into my mouth would be vomited up again, with the added risk of choking. My head had to be immobilised too. For the first twelve weeks in hospital I was staring at the ceiling because the fall had dislocated two vertebrae in my neck, and they took all that time to heal. Only when fed, and struggling to avoid the choking just described, would I incline my head to one side.
On the fifth dayâagain I must go on what others have told meâI returned to the world of the living. The first memory of my second life was that time had begun again. This was an odd sensation, precisely deposited in my memory bank by the sight of a clock on the right-hand wall just after my vision returned: 10.10, it read. Minutes more passed before the light streaming through the window at my right led me to another profound revelation:
It's morning
.
The pain was intense, my fright and disorientation were extreme. But I knew I was in a hospital, even though there were times in the next few weeks when I wondered whether this was the delirium of thought continuing beyond physical death. Reality soon intruded upon such philosophical rambles and reveries in the form of my parents, who visited me, driving daily for three hoursâthe round trip from Western Port Bay, more than 100 kilometres south-east of Melbourne, all the way across town to the northern suburbs.
Their devotion was constant, but that wasn't what struck me dumb and brought tears to my eyes. It was the recognition, looking them full in the face, of the grief I had brought into their lives. Yet there was no accusation mixed in with those looks, merely an inexpressible chagrin at my loss and gratitude that something of greater value had been saved from my personal wreckage.
But had life been saved? What sort of life was open to me now? Strange though it sounds in my ears now, the question that dominated my thoughts, and that I uttered to pastor Warren on his next visit, was: âHow can I do any good, or be any good, from now on?' To live for a purpose, or to live and find a purpose, is still what makes our lives more valuable than that of an amoeba. I could conceive of no purpose likely to be fulfilled by someone reduced to this lamentable condition.
The doctors told my parents early on, quietly and sombrely in a room set aside for just such a purpose, that they must expect this son of theirs would never walk again. Just as quietly, Dad told me the same. By then it wasn't entirely unexpected, but I couldn't focus my mind on what that would mean.
Probably as a result of perceiving how grief-stricken my mother and father were, my own thoughts turned on the hopelessness of my situation, and many a time I wishedâfor their sake now, rather than mineâthat this personal tragedy would pass into the realm of eternal forgetfulness.
I recall secretively hoarding the heparin tablets that overworked nurses, following written orders, left on my bedside table. Those tablets, I knew, were to prevent the blood from coagulating due to shock. In my newfound depression and will to cross that line at a second attempt I thought,
If they don't see me take these tablets, but think I have, then my blood will clot, a clot will go to the heart or develop into thrombosis, and death will come swiftly and sharply, before I feel it. Yes, that would be for the best
.
The first unfamiliar routines in my life as a supine object centred on basic functions. There is no way of knowing which routine was administered first, after my transfer from ICU to the happily numbered Ward 13, home to spinally injured patients deemed no longer in danger of dying. Likely as not, it was a visit by one of the urological nurses to empty the bladderâin my case by the application of an indwelling catheter to be replaced in time by an intermittent one, which I would insert whenever I felt the need.
In those early days, when my system was still in shock, involuntary urination was one sign that, in this new life, I had reverted to infancy when it came to matters of personal care.
The second routine only confirmed this utter dependence and indignity. Every few hoursâwhenever their busy schedules permittedâa team of âlifters' arrived to perform two services. The first was to clear my body of its putrid wastes (and I cannot have been the only one to find this humiliating). Then would come the second part of the process: turning me on one sideâthis after the leg bones had reset and the pins came outâso as to minimise the risk of bedsores from lying too long in the one spot.
To re-learn toilet functions at age 36 is no picnic, but the urologists one and all were models of perseverance. The first time a catheter was forced up my urethra, the pain was phenomenal and I nearly passed out. (Today I perform the function perhaps four times a day as if it were second nature.)
Another routine was the morning medical round. In my helplessness, it disturbed me to be an object of curiosity to these strange men in white coats, each armed with a clipboard. They seemed agreed on the importance of building up my calcium levels (which is indeed a priority for spinal-injury patients, since the flesh directly around the damaged part of the backbone typically atrophies). But even in my weakened state I would argue the point with those distinguished visitors, saying that the urologist had warned against too much milk intake, because an excess of calcium built up bladder stones and similar obstructions (apparently, that's right too). Such hostility was essentially my way of telling them all to go away. Only when I came to accept my ânew body' on its own terms would I be ready to hear the wisdom they had to pass on about how to look after it.
Heading the team was Dr Gerald Ungar, an Austrian Jewish refugee whose compassion and patience soon won me over. Another of Australia's leading experts in the field of spinal injury was also on the team. A Singaporean-trained medic, his surname surprised, and brought a much-needed smile to the faces of people who had just lost the use of their legs: Dr Terry Lim.
They; another eminent specialist Doug Brown; and some of the nurses tried their best to brighten up my day, but estrangement from the stricken and disfigured frame stretched out along the bedâthis body not meâprevented any sharing of confidences.
Thinking of my parents, but mourning the loss of my physical self, tears started to flow, sobs that would gush unbidden at any hour of the day or night. The sight must have been familiar to nurses on this ward, as they tended paraplegics and quadriplegics whose lives had been savagely interrupted by personal disasters ranging from car accidents and necks broken by mistimed dives into shallow water to unlikelier causes such as belly flops into mosh pits and being pinned under overturned tractors.
But my âcause of admission' was different. Written without any ambiguity on the medical records kept at the ward registryââattempted suicide'âthe judgment of society (so it seemed to me) was no secret to Ward 13 staff.
One morning in my first fortnight on the ward, my favourite nurse (a dark-complexioned Croatian woman who closely resembled the photo of Mum on her wedding day, a likeness that struck me as extraordinary) bent over my bed and whispered in words clearly intended to comfort my now guilt-ridden mind, âLook at it this way. You've been rejected for Heaven.'
As soon as they felt I was well enough to explain myself, the doctors allowed medical students to bring their clipboards closer, plying me with insolent questionnaires. I treated them as a sick joke, since at this stage with the small store of heparin safely stowed under my pillow I knew all this quizzing was pointless. It was only a matter of time.
As they grilled me on why I had tried to kill myself, there were two points I was adamant on: âNo, I didn't want to die, I just couldn't go on living.' I hoped they could see the difference, but wondered whether it sounded too theatrical. And, whenever these psychiatric students would suggest that I must have been suffering depression to do such a thing, I let my anger show. No, I hadn't been depressed: my dominant emotion was extreme anxiety, terror, dread. âI wasn't depressed before but I am now.'
Of course they then wanted to know if I regretted not âsucceeding'. The mortification on my parents' faces, the knowledge that this desperate deed had clouded the lives of loved ones with sorrow, meant that the true answer was yes. But, having interviewed a few people in my time, I could tell that a frank statement of my feelings now would be semaphored up the chain and either they would transfer me to Ward 15, the psychiatric wardâwhich I devoutly wished to be sparedâor place me under round-the-clock surveillance. âWell,' I told my callow inquisitors, stalling until the right words came, âif I had succeeded you wouldn't be asking me that.' This bit of cheek usually did the trick. They went away.
REJECTED FOR HEAVEN
To be or not to be, that is the question
.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
H
AMLET
MARCH-JUNE 1991
Imagine a million miniature arrows tipped with molten tar piercing each atom of your being with piston-like rapidity, and even then you can have only the most indistinct picture of the Hell that was going through me. I was not in Hell; Hell had taken me over, until there was no I, nothing but wild screaming endless terror. No sense that I had a body, no awareness of time, no past or future or even present in the ordinary sense of the word. The whole universe, all reality, filled up with metaphysical torment. Boundless suffering, disembodied pain.
By a stroke of luck to which I owe my life, Stephanie had arrived home not long before I jumped and, hearing the thud, rushed into the backyard, where she found my broken body sprawled in the gravel of the flowerbed. After phoning an ambulance, she had found my brother's number in personal papers among my belongings, and phoned him next. Bruce, of course, phoned my parents.
The ambulance sped me to St Vincent's Hospital, barely a kilometre away, where medics quickly realised my injuries were life-threatening. However, for one overriding reason, they ordered my immediate transfer. The Austin Hospital, where I went straight to Emergency around sunrise, was and remains one of the world's leading centres for the treatment of spinal injury. After taking my life out of my own hands, I had no responsibility for the fact that it passed into far more capable ones.
For two days, I am told, a quivering mass of agony that used to be me lay in the intensive-care unit, hovering this side of the fate it had tempted, the line it had dared to cross. In the next few weeks I would become unavoidably aware of how thin that line can be, of how easily it can be slipped across. One day, white curtains were drawn in haste around the bed next to mine, and a covey of masked doctors swarmed into that space in a desperate bid to revive the patient, a Japanese tourist grievously injured in a motorcycle accident on Victoria's Great Ocean Road. By then I could turn my head and, doing so, closed my eyes against the sight, evenâI recallâpraying for the life of this human being unknown to me but for now my neighbour. That night new sheets were laid out, and next morning a new patient occupied his space. Only upon persistent questioning did one of the nurses confirm that the man from Japan had died in this foreign land without regaining consciousness.
That could have been me
is an obvious thought in such circumstances. But in the first few days, when it so nearly was my end too, no thoughts entered my mass of sensations, a state known to psychologists as anoesis. Later I would learn that the first sign I was winning the battle for life was, paradoxically enough, an action that could have hastened death: when I felt such extreme pain that, out of pure instinct, I ripped the intravenous tubes out of my arm. Of this I have no recollection.
Thanks to the extraordinary skills and expertise developed at the Austin over many years, the prospects of survival are many times greater than they were a few decades ago. In the 1950s a snapped spine was a (lingering) death sentence. But, even in these comparatively benign days, Death drives a hard bargain for each and every one of us.
It may have been the second day after my admission, or the third, when a primal awareness penetrated this mass of agony, awareness of an outside force trying to reach me in my suffering. Somehow divining that I was going to be operated on, I cried out for spiritual help. Even now it is hard to explain why the efforts to save my battered body spurred me to call for someone who could perform no such office. My action was not taken out of a belief in God but from a driving sense of terror that something beyond my body, something immaterial and so of transcendent importance, would be lost if the surgery failed.
I sought consolation ahead of that next obstacle on my road. The hospital sent me a Churches of Christ chaplain, George Warren, who spoke softly and reassuringly, while realistically preparing me as best he could to accept whichever of the two directions awaited me at the fork in the road ahead.
Pethidine was administered. I recall being wheeled into the operating theatre, even the conversational murmur of the surgeons, and wondering if my senses kept picking up such chit-chat how I could know whether I was alive or dead. Then, nothing â¦
My vital signs were wildly unstable, I later learnt, for days after the surgery, which consisted of putting metal rods in my spine and temporary ones in my legs. (The rods in my back are still there today, and on the day of my death I expect to be worth a fortune on the scrap-metal market.) It was essential for the reconfiguration of my physical frame that the legs, indeed as much of the body as possible, be kept immobile for the next few weeks.
The most important, and paralysing, consequence of my self-willed fall was the âincomplete' fracture of my spine at L1, the first vertebra in the lumbar region of the lower back. The âincomplete' nature of this break, or what the medical profession calls a lesion, enabled signals from the brainâin those days almost all of them signals of painâto register sensations from the south of the body to the north. This wholeness is a blessing: many spinal-injury sufferers feel nothing in their lower limbs so that routines the rest of the population take for granted put them in great peril. For example, while taking a shower they could scald themselves without any warning to the brain that the water is too hot.
Before any attempt was made to apprise me of the new terms on which my life would be lived, the doctors and nurses had to wait for the shock I had given my body to subside. For days I was âfed' intravenously, and for weeks after that it was a lottery whether any food spooned into my mouth would be vomited up again, with the added risk of choking. My head had to be immobilised too. For the first twelve weeks in hospital I was staring at the ceiling because the fall had dislocated two vertebrae in my neck, and they took all that time to heal. Only when fed, and struggling to avoid the choking just described, would I incline my head to one side.
On the fifth dayâagain I must go on what others have told meâI returned to the world of the living. The first memory of my second life was that time had begun again. This was an odd sensation, precisely deposited in my memory bank by the sight of a clock on the right-hand wall just after my vision returned: 10.10, it read. Minutes more passed before the light streaming through the window at my right led me to another profound revelation:
It's morning
.
The pain was intense, my fright and disorientation were extreme. But I knew I was in a hospital, even though there were times in the next few weeks when I wondered whether this was the delirium of thought continuing beyond physical death. Reality soon intruded upon such philosophical rambles and reveries in the form of my parents, who visited me, driving daily for three hoursâthe round trip from Western Port Bay, more than 100 kilometres south-east of Melbourne, all the way across town to the northern suburbs.
Their devotion was constant, but that wasn't what struck me dumb and brought tears to my eyes. It was the recognition, looking them full in the face, of the grief I had brought into their lives. Yet there was no accusation mixed in with those looks, merely an inexpressible chagrin at my loss and gratitude that something of greater value had been saved from my personal wreckage.
But had life been saved? What sort of life was open to me now? Strange though it sounds in my ears now, the question that dominated my thoughts, and that I uttered to pastor Warren on his next visit, was: âHow can I do any good, or be any good, from now on?' To live for a purpose, or to live and find a purpose, is still what makes our lives more valuable than that of an amoeba. I could conceive of no purpose likely to be fulfilled by someone reduced to this lamentable condition.
The doctors told my parents early on, quietly and sombrely in a room set aside for just such a purpose, that they must expect this son of theirs would never walk again. Just as quietly, Dad told me the same. By then it wasn't entirely unexpected, but I couldn't focus my mind on what that would mean.
Probably as a result of perceiving how grief-stricken my mother and father were, my own thoughts turned on the hopelessness of my situation, and many a time I wishedâfor their sake now, rather than mineâthat this personal tragedy would pass into the realm of eternal forgetfulness.
I recall secretively hoarding the heparin tablets that overworked nurses, following written orders, left on my bedside table. Those tablets, I knew, were to prevent the blood from coagulating due to shock. In my newfound depression and will to cross that line at a second attempt I thought,
If they don't see me take these tablets, but think I have, then my blood will clot, a clot will go to the heart or develop into thrombosis, and death will come swiftly and sharply, before I feel it. Yes, that would be for the best
.
The first unfamiliar routines in my life as a supine object centred on basic functions. There is no way of knowing which routine was administered first, after my transfer from ICU to the happily numbered Ward 13, home to spinally injured patients deemed no longer in danger of dying. Likely as not, it was a visit by one of the urological nurses to empty the bladderâin my case by the application of an indwelling catheter to be replaced in time by an intermittent one, which I would insert whenever I felt the need.
In those early days, when my system was still in shock, involuntary urination was one sign that, in this new life, I had reverted to infancy when it came to matters of personal care.
The second routine only confirmed this utter dependence and indignity. Every few hoursâwhenever their busy schedules permittedâa team of âlifters' arrived to perform two services. The first was to clear my body of its putrid wastes (and I cannot have been the only one to find this humiliating). Then would come the second part of the process: turning me on one sideâthis after the leg bones had reset and the pins came outâso as to minimise the risk of bedsores from lying too long in the one spot.
To re-learn toilet functions at age 36 is no picnic, but the urologists one and all were models of perseverance. The first time a catheter was forced up my urethra, the pain was phenomenal and I nearly passed out. (Today I perform the function perhaps four times a day as if it were second nature.)
Another routine was the morning medical round. In my helplessness, it disturbed me to be an object of curiosity to these strange men in white coats, each armed with a clipboard. They seemed agreed on the importance of building up my calcium levels (which is indeed a priority for spinal-injury patients, since the flesh directly around the damaged part of the backbone typically atrophies). But even in my weakened state I would argue the point with those distinguished visitors, saying that the urologist had warned against too much milk intake, because an excess of calcium built up bladder stones and similar obstructions (apparently, that's right too). Such hostility was essentially my way of telling them all to go away. Only when I came to accept my ânew body' on its own terms would I be ready to hear the wisdom they had to pass on about how to look after it.
Heading the team was Dr Gerald Ungar, an Austrian Jewish refugee whose compassion and patience soon won me over. Another of Australia's leading experts in the field of spinal injury was also on the team. A Singaporean-trained medic, his surname surprised, and brought a much-needed smile to the faces of people who had just lost the use of their legs: Dr Terry Lim.
They; another eminent specialist Doug Brown; and some of the nurses tried their best to brighten up my day, but estrangement from the stricken and disfigured frame stretched out along the bedâthis body not meâprevented any sharing of confidences.
Thinking of my parents, but mourning the loss of my physical self, tears started to flow, sobs that would gush unbidden at any hour of the day or night. The sight must have been familiar to nurses on this ward, as they tended paraplegics and quadriplegics whose lives had been savagely interrupted by personal disasters ranging from car accidents and necks broken by mistimed dives into shallow water to unlikelier causes such as belly flops into mosh pits and being pinned under overturned tractors.
But my âcause of admission' was different. Written without any ambiguity on the medical records kept at the ward registryââattempted suicide'âthe judgment of society (so it seemed to me) was no secret to Ward 13 staff.
One morning in my first fortnight on the ward, my favourite nurse (a dark-complexioned Croatian woman who closely resembled the photo of Mum on her wedding day, a likeness that struck me as extraordinary) bent over my bed and whispered in words clearly intended to comfort my now guilt-ridden mind, âLook at it this way. You've been rejected for Heaven.'
As soon as they felt I was well enough to explain myself, the doctors allowed medical students to bring their clipboards closer, plying me with insolent questionnaires. I treated them as a sick joke, since at this stage with the small store of heparin safely stowed under my pillow I knew all this quizzing was pointless. It was only a matter of time.
As they grilled me on why I had tried to kill myself, there were two points I was adamant on: âNo, I didn't want to die, I just couldn't go on living.' I hoped they could see the difference, but wondered whether it sounded too theatrical. And, whenever these psychiatric students would suggest that I must have been suffering depression to do such a thing, I let my anger show. No, I hadn't been depressed: my dominant emotion was extreme anxiety, terror, dread. âI wasn't depressed before but I am now.'
Of course they then wanted to know if I regretted not âsucceeding'. The mortification on my parents' faces, the knowledge that this desperate deed had clouded the lives of loved ones with sorrow, meant that the true answer was yes. But, having interviewed a few people in my time, I could tell that a frank statement of my feelings now would be semaphored up the chain and either they would transfer me to Ward 15, the psychiatric wardâwhich I devoutly wished to be sparedâor place me under round-the-clock surveillance. âWell,' I told my callow inquisitors, stalling until the right words came, âif I had succeeded you wouldn't be asking me that.' This bit of cheek usually did the trick. They went away.
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