Never Say Die

One of the shorter (and unchosen) girls glared up at me. ‘You were always going to get in, Bowen,’ she hissed. She nodded towards Juli, who’d also been picked. ‘You and her. Any lanky bitch was bound to. And you know something else? You’re going to look a right prat.’

Prat or not, I was delighted. No amount of bitching or barracking or bile could take the shine off the thrill of that day.

Next up, of course, we were to be ‘styled and sized’, both novel concepts in themselves. Not that I was a stranger to fashion and make-up. Though my wardrobe consisted mostly of T-shirts and jeans (I grudgingly owned two skirts only because they were a part of my school uniform), I loved make-up just as much as any other fifteen-year-old, and considered my unruly mop of curls to be a blank canvas on which to experiment with all the cheap hair-colouring products of the day. I’d been dark, I’d been fair, I’d been every shade of red, and was currently posing as a sultry chestnut brunette. Perhaps highlights? I knew I would have to consult Juli. She might have tired of her current strawberry blonde locks, and it was important that the two of us didn’t clash.

Dorothy Perkins being one of the trendier names on the high street, we didn’t harbour too many worries about what they’d be kitting us out in. Despite their constant edict that it was the clothes and not our excitable selves we’d be exhibiting, we knew better. It was us in the clothes that would make all the difference, so every one of us embraced the role of self-regarding prima donna with the sort of commitment almost never seen in class.

The night of the show itself was unforgettable; I would like to have added ‘for all the obvious reasons’, but it rapidly became clear that modelling, though not quite rocket science, did require a degree of poise and expertise. So it was that the most memorable aspects of the show involved strangulation by feather boa (it was said for months afterwards that the poor girl’s eyes bulged so much that the whites of them could be seen from the back of the hall); near disaster by necklace (stray beads were still being found in corners of the school hall for months afterwards, and on the night the only solace was that she didn’t take out the headmistress with a flying tackle); and finally, near choking by baby-doll nightdress, my own contribution to the evening.

This last was also an early lesson in the idiom that less can be more. In my element, clothed in a red satin baby-doll nightdress and skimpy knickers, I swept down the catwalk amid some gratifying whistling, and, avoiding the eyes of my parents (they were both purple), I paused for my twirl at the end of the runway as I’d been instructed during rehearsals. It was at exactly that moment when a man in the front row took a bite from a bar of chocolate and it seemed that the proximity of my thinly veiled derrière brought on a violent bout of choking. He eventually received assistance from a fellow audience member and the panic in the hall quietened down.

I don’t know to this day if the two were connected, but at the time I was quite sure they were. ‘Fancy that,’ I remember thinking as I shimmied back up the catwalk. ‘My bum nearly killed someone. Fame at last!’

But my fame was to be as short-lived as it was glorious. The intervening three months might as well have been a lifetime. Mum fixed the photo to my locker, as she’d suggested, and it wasn’t long before it was spotted by one of the nurses. She pointed at the picture. ‘Was that you?’ she asked. It was all I could do not to contravene my own rule and break down at the import of her words. Not ‘is’ me, but ‘was’ me. A person no longer here. Not the biggest distinction, but one that cruelly, however unintentionally spoken, addressed the stark reality of what I’d become. I was still me, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I?

The routine at Rookwood would soon become familiar, but for the first few anguished days I felt adrift and alone. From the moment my parents first arrived on the ward to join me, I was aware that all too soon they would have to leave me again, that they were no longer fifteen minutes but a whole hour away, and that I would have to get used to being without them every night, and instead, in the company of strangers.

And not just any strangers. The staff at Rookwood were different; to my ear, they ‘talked funny’. With my lack of years and travel I’d never heard a Cardiff accent before.

After Liz left to go back to Neath, two auxiliary nurses arrived to carry out their usual routine. It might be doing them a disservice, given my traumatised state, but to this day I don’t recall them introducing themselves to me, much less engaging me in conversation about what they had to do. I felt like an outsider—a new kid at school; only, generally, at school, all the new kids start together, so you have, at least, comrades with whom to share your disorientation. As for Mum and Dad, they were all at sea as well. They’d both lived through the horror of a world war, yet Rookwood still managed to terrify them.

Ward Six—my ward—held little in the way of hopeful allegiances. There was no one close to my age in the female section when I arrived, and none in the male section either. I imagined this must be a little like prison, though in prison at least the convicts got to move around a bit. I was imprisoned by my body and without control over any single aspect of my life. It felt less that I was spending further time in another hospital and more that I had actually started what was to be the rest of a life spent in captivity. I couldn’t seem to get past the notion that even when I’d finally made it out of bed, I’d still be confined to this urine-stinking hell-hole; the only difference was that I’d now be in a wheelchair and could haunt the place much as that woman I’d seen staring, unseeing, at a brick wall when I’d arrived. I knew I would have to learn to cope with things minute my minute, but didn’t have the first idea how.

The minutes passed, even so, and within the first twenty-four hours it became obvious that meals at Rookwood weren’t going to be a highlight. There was choice, certainly, but that choice never seemed to vary. It was invariably Spam (or a Spam-lookalike) accompanied by limp salad, or one of two varieties of stew. The latter was either brown with unidentifiable lumps or white with unidentifiable lumps; not remotely haute-cuisine, not even meals-on-wheels; the inmates, appropriately, as I soon came to learn, labelled it ‘muck on a truck’.

But the food did at least have one thing going for it. It was so vile, I found it hard to eat. This was a circumstance that was to bring me a small but definite crumb of comfort. A week or so into my relocation, I received a visit from John, the guy I’d secretly carried a torch for, the guy who’d made it clear he felt the same. I had mixed feelings about seeing him again. On the one hand seeing anyone was a welcome relief. I’d refused to see Aldo at Neath General, and I felt ambivalent about agreeing to see John now. All attempts made at physical normality at Neath (the hairdressing sessions, the carefully applied make-up) seemed almost nonsensical in this desolate place.

My body didn’t feel like my own any more, in either a physical or emotional sense. Though it was so much more than simply a reaction to the unwittingly ill-judged comment of one nurse, the idea took hold and wouldn’t go away. She’d been right; the ‘me’ to whom she’d referred no longer existed. The ‘me’ who lay inert on a bed in Ward Six was a different animal entirely. The young girl who had had to have her clothes cut off her body for surgery had now become someone who needed her clothes cut up to put on her, to make the dressing process easier. A small thing—an eminently practical thing, obviously—but one that seemed a metaphor for everything I’d lost.

And also gained. I didn’t get many opportunities to see myself as I now was, but the business of dressing and undressing afforded depressing glimpses of how much things had changed. I’d always had as many self-esteem issues as the next girl—maybe more—but one thing about which I’d always been proud was my svelte stomach, which was concave. Less than a month after the accident and it was no more. Looking down, lying down, it had been replaced by a hillock. A hillock that made me look several months pregnant, the legacy of a body that no longer moved and muscles that were no longer toned. It was this aspect to which John (understandably stuck for small talk) alluded as soon as he arrived. As memorable comments go, his was a gem—one I knew even as he spoke that I’d never forget.

‘Where,’ he asked, ‘has your flat stomach gone?’

It was an inauspicious start to an inauspicious visit. Our conversation limped on, increasingly pointless and depressing, and he never came to visit again.

If my few visitors (and they were indeed few; travelling by public transport from Port Talbot to Llandaff was complex and expensive) were a welcome respite from the relentless tedium that made up the days, the nights were anything but. I’d never been to one, but I felt sure that if Ward Six at night time were in need of description then the tag ‘fish-market’ would suit it very well. And that wasn’t just because of the all-pervasive odour. The noise and activity simply never seemed to stop; it was cacophony central every night.

Much of this was only to be expected. Unable to move ourselves, we had to be turned and attended to regularly, but unlike Neath, where I was seen to quietly, calmly and with consideration for sleeping patients, it seemed that in here noise simply didn’t matter. Although the nursing station was well away at the far end of the male section of the ward, I could still hear everything they did. And if, by some miracle, the noise generated by loud conversations, doors banging and what sounded like a banquet’s-worth of clattering crockery failed to keep me awake, there was also the continual problem of us. As spinal patients, none of us—ridiculously—were able to reach our call buttons (day or night) because they were positioned out of reach on the wall behind our beds. We had no choice, therefore, but to shout for attention. And then, of course, at each other, for having been woken up.

Such sleep as I did get in the early days at Rookwood was visited by dreams, good and bad. Then, as is still the case now, I often dreamed I was walking. Better still, I sometimes dreamed I was flying: over green fields, blue rivers and lakes and mountains in bright sunshine, swooping up and down on the currents of air. I’d feel so free I would hate waking up. But then, also as now, most of my dreams were nightmares; the anxious awareness of footsteps behind me, a malevolent presence I could never identify, and the fear of being unable to run away. The worst nightmare of all, though, was waking every morning, seeing the ward and having to face my situation again.

But however the machinations of my unconscious mind might have helped or hindered the process of coming to terms, nothing was to have as much impact in those early days as what I was soon to start seeing around me.

Up until now, I’d been cocooned in my own little bubble of perfect, unique misery, but Rookwood was soon to remind me that I wasn’t the only one to whom fate had been cruel, that there were people who were worse off than me. About six weeks after my own admission, another road traffic victim was admitted. She was nineteen and had also been knocked off a motorbike, sustaining head and neck injuries. Consequently, she couldn’t speak, and though she could move her arms and legs, those movements were spastic and uncontrolled.

Like me, Bridget had a ‘before’ picture on her locker, one of a staggeringly beautiful young woman, with long black curls that fell almost to her waist. Much as the contrast in my own situation hurt me, it was as nothing to hers. Her face was now horribly contorted and dribbling, and the glossy curls had all been cropped. What was worse, to my mind, was that her mother had a mirror and seemed constantly to feel the need to show her the state of her appearance—to this day I have no idea why.

It wasn’t just looks that mattered either. One of my most enduring memories of that time was the boy across the ward who had lost the use of both his arms and his legs, so didn’t even have the luxury of two functioning limbs.

One day, he asked my mother if she would scratch his nose for him and this upset her so much that, once she’d done so, she had to leave the ward in a hurry so that he wouldn’t see her tears. The memory today still brings a lump to her throat.

Slowly, then, I began to take stock and take heart. There was really so much that I could do for myself; my situation could be so much worse. In comparison with these people I was lucky. Me? Lucky? How could I possibly feel that? I didn’t know, I didn’t care, I was simply grateful that I did.

I just hoped the feeling wouldn’t go away.

chapter 6 (#ulink_ca61d8c0-1f85-58ec-865b-bdf57204973f)

While it was clear that my walking days were definitely over, it was still important that my back had the best chance of healing straight and strong. This mattered not only for posture but also for balance; I had a whole body to lug through life with me but only half the usual amount of sensation. The first six weeks of my time in Rookwood, therefore, were spent lying flat in my bed while the bones in my back healed in the correct alignment, supported by the operative rods.

During this time, as had been the case since the day of the crash, I had a catheter. This was not, however, considered ideal. The plan was that during the last two weeks of this stage the catheter would be removed and ‘bladder training’ would be undertaken, in preparation for what would be the next stage of my rehabilitation: getting myself up into a wheelchair.

How this training was to be achieved was a mystery. How did you train something you couldn’t feel? The theory, as explained to me, was simple. A proportion of spinally injured people, apparently, had ‘reflex’ bladders; it was hoped that once the catheter was removed, mine—whether I could feel it or not—would somehow re-learn what to do. That, given time and training, it would hang on to its contents until I prompted it to do otherwise. The regime, based on this, was simple. I was to drink at least three litres of fluid a day, trust in the miracle of autonomic physiology, and then, on the hour, to ‘express’ it.

The idea made me feel like a heifer. I must drink, drink and drink—three litres is a LOT—and then, once a bed pan had been shoved underneath me, I must make contact with my bladder by means of rhythmically tapping my lower tummy below my belly button, on the hour, to kickstart the process of emptying.

This wasn’t the load of mystical hogwash it seemed (no crazy chanting or joss sticks were required) but something that apparently had its roots in proper science. The theory was that the physical stimulation that the tapping produced would, more often than not, be successful. Tap it, it seemed, and you could turn on the tap, and your expressing would be a success.

There are lots of things that make the average adolescent want to curl up and die. But for most teenage girls, already beset by insecurities about looks, hairstyles, choice of clothes, numbers of friends and so forth, any angst that came under the umbrella ‘bodily functions’ was perhaps the richest seam of trauma a girl could ever mine. Bodily functions were personal. Private. Going to the toilet, particularly the nonwee variety, just wasn’t, as I suspect was and is the case for most women, something one generally shared. Something no human would ever want to share. Indeed, much of my and my friends’ time was spent in convincing each other, particularly boys, that we didn’t have bodily functions at all. If—horror—we had to use a loo in a public place for ‘number 2s’ we would stuff half a roll of loo paper down first so no one could hear what we were doing. Not something most people bring up in conversation but something many of us did, and, I don’t doubt, many women still do today.

For me—no different from anyone else in most regards—this represented a stress of monumental proportions from the moment the reality sank in back in Neath. And sunk in, it had. By now, though I doubted I’d ever actually get used to the idea, I had at least become to some extent inured to the humiliation that dealing with my waste products involved. Both my bladder and bowels needed evacuating, clearly, and I had learned to switch off that part of my brain that, if left to consider my plight for too long, would leave me both desolate and scared. It was almost too much to take in the fact that while I could put stuff into my body, someone else, for the whole of the rest of my life, would have to deal with what came out of the other end.

There seemed no way of sugaring that particular pill but at least, should this ‘training’ prove successful, I would be able to wrest a modicum of control from the wee situation, and with it, a measure of dignity.

Dignity, understandably, was in pretty short supply on Ward Six. If the muck-on-a-truck cart could lower our spirits, the ‘crap cart’ (again, imaginatively named by the inmates) was a thing of rare grossness. Didn’t matter if there were visitors on the ward. It was always business as usual with the crap cart.

It was almost impossible to ignore. Its clanking and clattering soon became a familiar sound, which heralded two hours of purgatory.

Literal purgatory, every other day. Beginning at the far end of the male ward, curtains would begin to swish and suppositories would be administered. All this would happen to the accompaniment of the slap of rubber gloves, squirts of KY jelly, and a running commentary on who was going to be next. The plan was for the suppository to be left for about half an hour before the nurse in charge would return to check for a result.

If you had a visitor, this was always an extremely tense time. All you could pray was that things wouldn’t get moving until the cart came back to you again. That nothing would happen while your visitors were at your bedside, not even your nearest and dearest, and certainly not your friends.

Not my friends, definitely. Didn’t matter how much I loved them, or they me. They were fifteen-year-olds. Which meant, I didn’t doubt, that they were not averse to recounting the gory details to all and sundry in the schoolyard at break-time. At times like this, I felt there was no way I could ever face anyone in Port Talbot again.

And then the evacuations started. To this day, I’m not sure which odour was worse: that of the results of the business of evacuation (which grew in sickening intensity with every new patient ‘done’), or the cloying scent of the air fresheners so copiously sprayed to—ineffectually—try to mask the first. Indeed, the two, in a fine example of Pavlovian conditioning, have become so inextricably intermingled in my brain that I still have major trouble finding air-freshening sprays that don’t take me, queasily, straight back to Ward Six.

But at least we could do something about my bladder. In theory, at any rate. Except it turned out that, however many fine qualities my bladder possessed, being ‘reflex’ didn’t seem to be among them. Which meant that the two-week training programme that commenced at the end of my fourth week at Rookwood (in preparation for my being transferred to a wheelchair in week six) turned into three and then four and then five…In the end it was to mark the start of a five-month-long period in which urine loomed fearfully large in my life. And this after a period when it hadn’t loomed at all. Going to the loo had become an artefact from my old life, something I simply didn’t do any more. My wee was excreted into a small plastic bag that hung from a hook at the side of my bed, and I played no active part in it getting there.

All that, however, was to change. Once training commenced a whole new routine established itself. Sadly, it wasn’t the one planned. What should have been a drink-tap-express situation was, in fact, something entirely different. I drank, I wet myself, my nightwear and sheets were changed, I drank again, I wet myself again, the whole lot was changed again. I now existed, it seemed, in a urinescented miasma. Though I obviously couldn’t feel that I was mostly lying in a puddle, I could smell it, and I well knew that visitors could too.

‘Please,’ I begged, ‘can’t I just have my catheter back?’

‘No,’ came the answer. It was out of the question. Catheters, I was told, were only for the sick. And unfortunate souls locked in comas. They, it was pointed out, obviously couldn’t help it.

But I couldn’t help it. The process wasn’t working. And to make matters worse, it was positively harmful. Lying endlessly in wee does no one any good. Apart from the obvious stress and humiliation, I began to succumb to an endless round of infections—something that never stopped in all my time at Rookwood. Nothing trivial: acute vomiting, rigors, crashing headaches. The latter, I learned later, were a part of my condition—to give it its fancy name, Autonomic Dysreflexia, a situation in which the autonomic nervous system (that part of the body’s electrics which controls functions of which we should be unaware, such as blood pressure, heart rate, gut function and so forth) over-reacts to a stimulus. In this case it was a response to the inflammation of my bladder; the inefficient emptying was causing the recurrent infections.

In short, it was my compromised body’s way of letting me know that all wasn’t as it should be in the areas I couldn’t feel.

Nevertheless, we persevered. The ‘we’ in this case being nurses with a clearly unshakeable belief that it would work in the end, and an unhappy and vulnerable fifteen-year-old girl with insufficient authority to stop the urine-soaked nightmare from continuing.