Never Say Die

My compliance with the issue of bladder training wasn’t just about lacking sufficient assertiveness to question the regimen they’d decided upon, any more than it was about scientific fact. Doing as I was told, generally, seemed the best way forward, as events I witnessed early on showed.

In the next bed on my left, the final bed in the corner of the ward, was a woman called Lesley. She was thirty-one, had been admitted a month or so before me, and was already up in a wheelchair. Like me, she’d been the victim of a motorcycle accident, but the circumstances couldn’t have been more different. Lesley’s bike had been her own, and her accident had not been the result of any maniac driving; she’d been travelling, at no speed whatsoever, through some roadworks, and the bike had ended up in an unmarked hole in the road.

Fate had been especially cruel to Lesley. Given the circumstances, she could easily have expected to come through with little more than a few bumps and bruises. Instead, she’d had an especially unlucky landing, crushing her spinal cord at the upper mid-dorsal spine, resulting in the same level of paralysis as mine.

Like me, she’d lost the use of her legs, plus all of the muscles below the mid-chest level. Loss of these muscles had big implications for breathing, obviously, and also balance. I knew this because during the physiotherapist’s first visit to me after admission, she helpfully brought charts of the body, in order to show me what was what. They looked a little like police outlines of murdered corpses, and showed the stark consequences of different levels of spinal injury. Mine, and Lesley’s too, were shaded black below the mid-chest; this was the part of my body that wasn’t going to play an active part in the rest of my life.

Lesley and I agreed that in one moment the course of the rest of our lives had changed irrevocably. It was good to be able to talk about it to someone who was going through it too, but it was also terrifying. I think it was then, talking to Lesley, that things really hit home. That we were both changed for ever, that there was never going to be a cure, that this - all of this - was never going to go away.

Apart from our injuries, Lesley and I had marked differences; I was six feet tall, and needed an extension on my bed, where she was four foot eleven. Months later, when standing between the parallel bars in physio, we looked a little like Mutt and Jeff. We had also had very different treatment for our injuries: post her accident, she had been managed traditionally, with bed rest, whereas I had had my fractures stabilised with metal rods. She was adamant that the conservative line followed in Bristol (and also, ironically, at my parents’ choice, Stoke Mandeville) was the gold standard, while I found myself sticking up for Mr Davies’s operative approach.

I was probably not qualified to judge either way - we were both of us up the same creek without a paddle - but my sense of loyalty to my brusque consultant was keen. I often found myself bringing his name up in conversation and wondered if he wondered how I was getting on. I was later to find out that he was perfectly at ease. He’d sent me to the acknowledged ‘best place in South Wales’. Of the day-to-day horrors and humiliations of Rookwood, he obviously knew absolutely nothing.

Originally from Sheffield, Lesley was intelligent and funny, with long brown hair and a habitually determined expression. She’d had a good job in the Civil Service, based in Bristol, and also her own home, to which, it was sadly and increasingly clear, she would in all likelihood never return.

She’d also had a boyfriend but he soon became an ex because he simply couldn’t cope with her injury. She had very few visitors and, as a result, liked very much to be included when mine came - as one or both of them did every evening. At times both Mum and Dad and I found this intrusive - after all, I had Lesley to talk to all day; when my parents came, time spent with them felt very precious. But I was also aware of how lonely she was; how covetous of my lovely family.

Lesley too had been using a catheter, and, like me, she’d now been moved onto a training regime. It wasn’t working out for her either. But Lesley knew her mind and, unlike me, she wasn’t going to take things lying down.

However much we might wish it otherwise, there is basic human nature involved in all our interactions, and I was learning about that pretty fast. The situation of being helpless is not natural. It puts you immediately in a position of dependency, which is one in which no sane person wishes to exist. I no more wanted strangers to deal with my faeces than I wanted to have to deal with theirs. And I particularly didn’t want pity. Which was unfortunate because pity, in all its forms, was such a part of the experience of being as I was that you could practically sniff it in the air.

The position of my bed - indeed that of the last four beds at the end of the female section of Ward Six - felt like the end of the world. Geographically, from a hospital layout perspective, that was precisely where it was. A dead end. The end of a long ward at the end of a long corridor which was one of several spokes that fanned out from the entrance. There was, therefore, no passing traffic. Unlike Neath, with its endless bustle and activity and comings and goings, no one had cause to be at the end of Ward Six unless they had come to look after one of the four patients there. And apart from the nurses and various medics and domestics, the only people who had reason to be on Ward Six were the families and friends of people like me. People who for all the world wished it wasn’t so, that they didn’t have to find themselves regulars here. And who would? This was not your usual hospital ward, with its round of admissions and recoveries and discharges. The patients - and their visitors - were here for the long haul. Jolly farewells were few and far between.

You could see it in everyone’s expressions. The way, as they approached, to see whoever they were seeing, they reconfigured themselves to suit the gravity of the occasion. How they’d glance in your direction and then crave the chance to look away. You could sense they realised they were entering a desperate place.

I couldn’t blame them. I wished so much that, like them, I had the choice to leave, but, as time wore on and the extent of my disability dawned on me, the thought of the outside world was becoming just as frightening as my continuing confinement in the ward. I was so grateful for the love and support of my parents; being able to confide in them was the single greatest thing that kept me from the black hole that could spiral me down into overwhelming despair. With them beside me, I knew I could just about cope.

Lesley didn’t have that. All Lesley had was Lesley. And her way of avoiding the black hole of despair was to take herself off to the pub. Within ‘pushing distance’ of the hospital there were two of them: the Maltster’s Arms and the Black Lion. Both welcomed Rookwood patients. After one particular evening’s escape with some rare visitors, Lesley returned a little the worse for wear and arrived back rather noisily on the ward.

Noise itself wasn’t an issue - it was almost always noisy - but her stentorian rendition of ‘She was on the bridge at midnight…’, though completely hilarious to us patients, didn’t go down terribly well with the nurses.

By the time she’d reached the female end of the ward, she’d decided to stop serenading her fellow patients and was now keen to try and engage us in polite conversation about how we’d spent our own evenings.

Two nurses appeared behind her and told her it was time to pipe down. It seemed that, for Lesley, it was a final straw moment. Something had been steadily building inside her - something big. She suddenly erupted.

Whirling around, and in doing so almost falling out of her wheelchair, she told both the nurses to f**k off. Needless to say, this did not go down well either. In an instant, she was manhandled into bed, both cot sides were raised and her wheelchair was removed. Not just removed, either, but - or so it seemed to me - confiscated. Maybe it could be seen to have been a health and safety issue, but I didn’t doubt for an instant there was a power play involved. Indeed, the nurses seemed keen to make that fact very clear. In the fracas, I heard her tell the nurses she was wet, but they, by now, didn’t seem to care. As they left, having noticed me staring wide-eyed and horrified, one of them stepped across to my bed. Perhaps she had read my expression as one not of shock but of defiance. There can be no other explanation for what she said. Which was that I could expect more of the same treatment should I decide to step out of line myself.

I lay in bed, my heart thumping, long into that night, listening to the sound of Lesley’s sobbing. Her bed remained unchanged till the following afternoon.

If finding out all about power and control was proving taxing, there were other, less dramatic but equally important lessons to learn. Towards the end of my six-week period of total bed rest, one of the nurses, during a turning session, noticed some blood on my sheets. This development was not unexpected. Sister O’Rourke had already told me, back at Neath, that my periods would soon be returning, and, in some ways, their doing so was proof that my body was returning to ‘normal’ after its long weeks in spinal shock.

It was also, to my great ambivalence, a reminder that I was still a reproductively functioning young woman. A sexual being. But what was the point of having periods? I’d never been keen to have children anyway, but now it was academic because what man would want me? After all, Lesley’s boyfriend hadn’t wanted her any more, had he? How was I now - as a cripple in a wheelchair - going to be desired by any boy or man? Before my accident, with a mixture of embarrassment and pride, I had grown used to being wolf-whistled on a daily basis - whether in my school uniform or in my casual clothes. I had been proud of my body and filled with normal girlish glee that it could provoke this reaction from grown men. I had not yet been in love but, just like any other girl, I had hoped in due time to be swept off my feet and transported to a romantic ever-after.

My English classes had taught me the great love stories - Romeo and Juliet, Robin Hood and Maid Marian - and, like almost all girls back then, I’d watched the film Love Story and been enthralled by the love affair between Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw. That it culminated in the heroine’s untimely death from leukaemia now took on an almost unbearable poignancy. She’d been lucky; she’d been loved before it had happened. Was I likely to find someone to accept me as the cripple I’d already become? It felt impossible. I couldn’t accept me. I even envied Ali McGraw’s character’s tragically early but theatrically glamorous death; I could see no prospect of heaven on earth for myself, however short, before my own likely premature demise.

As with the business of my bladder, however, the resumption of my periods was not about sex. It was just one more embarrassment among many.

The nurse was brisk and businesslike about it. What sort of protection was my preferred choice? I told her I’d always used tampons up till now, and another nurse was dispatched to go and get one.

She returned soon after and it was duly inserted, while I lay there and considered the long-term implications my monthly period would bring with it. Exposure to the crap cart meant that while I remained at Rookwood there was little that could further mortify me. But after that? Would Mum do it? Would I find some way to manage? What did other women in my position do about it? All questions that burned but remained unasked and so unanswered. I was naturally shy about such intimate matters. It was bad enough living it, without having to discuss it.

Two hours passed and it was time to be turned once again. Another nurse this time, who also saw blood. ‘Looks like your period has started,’ she said.

‘I know it has,’ I answered. ‘Another nurse has already put in a tampon.’

I wondered at this point if I might have had a leak. My periods, after all, were sometimes horrendously heavy. Not so. The nurse made a closer inspection and, inexplicably to me, started laughing. And this wasn’t just laughing, this was serious laughing. The sort of laughing that left her fighting for breath and helpless with her unexplained mirth. It was some time before she got herself sufficiently together that she was able to share the cause of the hilarity with me and all the other patients within earshot, who I didn’t doubt were listening intently by now.

‘It’s been put,’ she explained, her eyes still wet with tears, ‘in - how shall I put it? - the wrong orifice!’

I imagine she probably thought I too would find this funny. Indeed, in the telling - and it’s been something I’ve told, often - it generally makes people smile. But at the time I could no more have laughed about what happened than I could insert the wretched tampon myself from a position lying flat on the bed. My natural sense of humour about such things deserted me. I was wholly, toe-curlingly horrified. I simply couldn’t believe that there was a nurse on the ward (a nurse who looked about sixty) who either didn’t know where a tampon should go or, worse, cared so little for putting it where it belonged that she just shoved it anywhere it would go. Where, I thought wretchedly, would she put my next suppository? I felt violated. I’d been lying bleeding for two hours, with a tampon in my rectum, entirely unaware that anything was wrong.

I didn’t know the reason - could she really not have known? - but one thing became blindingly obvious. That the trust I’d put, of necessity, in all the carers around me was misplaced. Was mistaken.

Was gone.

chapter 7 (#ulink_05e372f5-eab2-57bc-a3f2-a0bab4a28cdc)

Sport. The final frontier. Well, not exactly the final frontier. More the first, last and everything-in-between frontier. Sport, for people like me, or so it seemed, was the only frontier. At the very least, the only way forward.

Two weeks into my time at Rookwood Hospital, a way forward was something I very much needed to find. Confined to bed, however, the prospect looked tricky. I couldn’t move any part of my body beneath my nipples so there seemed little chance of my making any sort of bid for escape.

I had obviously had a number of shocks during the five or so weeks of my new life as a paraplegic. I had become somewhat battered, both physically and emotionally, and, or so I thought, somewhat inured to the relentless round of bad news my life seemed to have become. But there was more.