My Year Off (20 page)

In contrast with the hospital, being at home was wonderful: I could look out of the window and see trees, and leaves, and blue sky, and the movement of people. I could, with some effort, be either downstairs or upstairs. For some reason the idea of walking down to the kitchen
seemed one level too far, but I could struggle laboriously upstairs to my sunlit study, and sit at my desk, write things down, and feel able to express myself again, which was exhilarating. In my curiosity about the outside world I became obsessed by the people living in the houses that backed on to our little garden. I developed what I thought of as a ‘Rear Window’ fixation about their daily movements and routines. It was not until, some months later, when I was coming and going more easily, that I lost the urge to stare fixedly across the gap between the houses and spy on the lives displayed before me.

How did this stage of my convalescence proceed? At first, it was a massive relief to be home again, a milestone in my slow return to the world I’d lost, but then depression began to set in. I became more and more obsessed with my disabilities, and more and more frustrated. And yet, if I could look at it objectively, there was much to be thankful for. In the first months of my convalescence I found I was doing a number of things that in August I had imagined I might never do again. I made a call from a pay phone. I took a train. I flew in an aeroplane. I went swimming. I ordered a meal in a restaurant. I made love to my wife. In subsequent months I continued to repossess my experience of the world. I went to the opera (
Don Giovanni
). I walked alone to post a letter. I got my driving licence back. I made – and kept – an appointment to get my hair cut. I took a (to me) perfectly hair-raising journey on the London Underground. I went to the dentist. Slowly, I recovered pieces of my old way of life, bit by bit, as if reconstructing a scattered jigsaw. But ‘slow’ was the operative word.

Six months before, I had been able to slip across the street to post a letter in the time it now takes to type this
sentence. When I got home, after my time in the Devonshire, to cross the street and achieve the same result I would have to raise myself up from my chair, find my cane, limp to the front door (say, three minutes), negotiate the steps to the street and make my way to the corner (roughly, five minutes), then hobble back and collapse exhausted on a sofa in my living room, as though I had just run a marathon. Every day I was acutely reminded that there was a world out there, a world I could not be part of in quite the same way. In my new mood of self-examination I was inclined to say, So what? One tangible effect of my illness has been a more Zen-like response to the pressures and anxieties of the world.

The truth is that in my ‘old’ life as a fit person I had become a monster of irresponsibility. For years I had lived for my freedom. I would look up and see the jets circling over London and say to myself, ‘There is no reason why I should not be on a plane to anywhere in the world, at an hour’s notice.’ I revelled in ways of escape. Psychologically speaking, I carried a passport and a wallet full of international credit cards. Before my stroke, I’d been dissatisfied with my lot; in hospital I’d come to recognize that I’d been ambushed by the ‘adventure’ I’d been looking for, and was travelling into a new and strange interior: my heart. Now, my passport was in a drawer and I had not made even a domestic credit-card transaction in four months.

In my new and vulnerable condition, I became dependent on my wife and together we discovered an intimacy that, if things had been different, might have taken years to establish. Sarah, who had married me, she says, in part because I seemed ‘strong and vigorous’, was now seeing me at my weakest and most exposed. It was
hard for both of us, and it demanded constant readjustment. Once I left the hospital and came home, I needed Sarah for so many humble everyday routines: to help me in and out of the bath in the morning; to make our bed; to get me ready for the day. Strictly speaking, I could dress myself, but in practice, I could not do without her: I could not tie a tie, or button a cuff. When, finally, I put on my shoes it was Sarah who would ease my feet first into my socks, then, with the AFO ‘splint’ that supported my ankle and foot, into my shoes, and knot the laces. If the morning post brought medical bills to pay it was Sarah who tore the cheques off at the stub, sealed and stamped the envelope. What else? It was Sarah who had to put the breakfast on the table and who brought home the food for our evening meal. Additionally, I had to learn that everything takes time.

I became friends with slowness, both as a concept and as a way of life. In the past I had been noted for the impressionistic speed with which I could accomplish things. At first, the contrast with my present way of life was a source of great frustration. At times I felt an anger inside me, a rage that could come out in sudden and terrible ways. I had to learn to be patient. In English, of course, the adjectival and nominal meaning of ‘patient’ comes from the Latin for ‘suffering’ –
patientia.
A patient is by definition ‘long-suffering’. It was then that I realized what Dr Greenwood had meant when he had warned me about this post-crisis stage of recovery. ‘You are,’ he’d said, on one of his evening visits to my bedside, in a phrase that both Sarah and I found extraordinarily apt for our situations, ‘about to go through the rapids.’

In her study of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes,
The Silent Woman
, Janet Malcolm quotes from Hughes’s poem, ‘Sheep’ (about a lamb that dies inexplicably soon after birth):

Janet Malcolm goes on: ‘Life, of course never gets anyone’s entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. As sleep is necessary to our physiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy. In some secret way, Thanatos nourishes Eros as well as opposes it.’

Depression is as old as the Greeks. In the fourth century
BC
it was Hippocrates who coined the terms
melancholia
and
mania
, and there were days when it seemed as if both had been invented to describe my state of mind. According to Andrew Solomon, an expert in the condition, between 6 and 10 per cent of all Americans now living are battling some form of this illness. Anyway, Dr Greenwood had been absolutely right. After the Devonshire, a new depression rose up and engulfed me like a wave. The fragile vessel of my personality was swamped and buffeted from all sides, and the months after I began to understand that I’d never be quite the same again were to be among the worst of my life, beset with frustration, irritation and the fear of failure. At times, even while I knew that the facts of recovery were on my side, I found myself thinking: My life is over. At the age of forty-two, I appeared to be reduced to the condition of an old man with a cane, watching the world go by, musing sadly on the past. I had been dumped unceremoniously in the land of the unwell (to me, it is no ‘kingdom’) but it was not until I came to this new place that I realized what a charmed life I’d led. For forty years I had hardly seen a doctor or a hospital. Suddenly, my physical condition was top of the agenda every day of my life. What’s more, I was not going to wake up one morning and find myself magically restored to health. The changes in my condition were infinitesimal, obvious only to those who, like Sarah, observed me
from day to day. The frustration of this, I decided, was a bit like losing your wallet.

And it was like losing your wallet
every day.
Your wallet
and
your Filofax. The same sense of ‘Goddammit!’ and that sense of ‘Oh, no!’ – all those telephone numbers to call, all those connections to remake. All those little short-cuts that make everyday life bearable. Occasionally, when I lay in bed – the bed in which I awoke on that summer morning so long ago – I would think, Perhaps I am dreaming. Sometimes I would say it out loud: Am I dreaming?

Sleep was now my friend, but if I dreamed then I do not recall my dreams. In my depression I was drugged by sleep, drugged and oppressed and anaesthetized and stupefied by its powers. I spent hours and hours asleep. I could sleep late into the morning. Or I could sleep before lunch, and in the early afternoon. I could sleep as the day faded, and again before nightfall. I could sleep early or late, regardless of whether I had spent even twenty of the previous day’s twenty-four hours unconscious. The sleep monster had me in his jaws, and I was happy to be under the covers with him. When I worried about becoming narcoleptic, I repeated to myself what the doctors had told me in the National Hospital: that sleep was the brain’s way of recuperating from the ‘insult’.

Perhaps (I would think on coming to), perhaps I shall wake up and find that the effects of the stroke will have gone away. Yes, perhaps it could be like the ending of the corniest short story: ‘And then I woke up, and it was all a dream.’ Some aspects of these months became muddled and confused. Time lost focus; events telescoped. Did that really happen? Was this really the case? But no, I was not dreaming, I was changed for ever.

Now that I write this I know that what happened during the night of 28/29 July was an irrevocable moment in my personal history. Sometimes it is difficult for me to acknowledge the importance of what has happened. I come from a tight-lipped culture in which the standard response to misfortune is to assert that one is ‘fine’, or that one is ‘perfectly okay’. It is, of course, massive denial to claim that one is coping when plainly one is not. For me to admit that I was often scared and lonely during these long winter months was as difficult as it was to admit that I could, sometimes, feel a profound anger towards the world that had done this to me.

When, shortly after coming home, I was able to discard my wheelchair, and began to think about going back to work, it seemed for the first time in months that I might make a reasonably full recovery. With my cane, I could sustain a very short, leisurely stroll. I was once more getting out and about in the world, the world I thought I had lost, and which, with Sarah, now seemed to me more precious than ever.

Meanwhile, we both continued to write our fragmentary diaries. Depression hovered over Sarah, too, she who is normally the cheeriest of souls.

My own diary at this time contained pages of unprintable fury, interspersed with an obsessive account of my
physical weakness. I had spent my weeks at the Devonshire learning to stand and walk again, but while my left leg had responded to treatment, my left arm was still lifeless and inert. In this condition, my left wrist was vulnerable to spraining and my left shoulder, bearing the full weight of the left arm, could still seem incredibly painful, especially at night. My depression deepened further, and Sarah took the full force of it.

Sarah continued to search for ways of improving the situation, using all her journalistic skills to check out new treatments.

Looking back, it was Sarah’s determination that was so vital during these difficult weeks. Like many stroke-sufferers, I was so exhausted by every tiny detail of everyday life – even the energy required to get up and cross the room to answer the front door or the telephone – that the stress of ordinary life seemed overwhelmingly daunting, and the idea of addressing a self-generated programme of rehabilitation almost impossible. The more I sank into inky black inertia, the more Sarah battled on.