Dear Readers,
Until now, I have been shielded from the costs of disability because of our wonderful and vital NHS. This will change when I get home due to the considerable costs of remodelling the house, and my need for round the clock care.
I ask, therefore, that if you enjoy The Kureishi Chronicles, believe in paying for good writing, and want to help with my recovery, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Lets keep this show on the road.
The world was always a dangerous place. I guess it’s taken me a while to realise it. This ward of the hospital in north London is full of people who have had accidents. There are none, so far as I know, with degenerative diseases like MS. So there is a lot of talk about human misfortune; haphazard, calamitous, and near fatal mishaps. You would think being on this ward that everyone in the world was a moment or so from being, for instance, run over by a car, or struck by lightning, which happened to a friend of a friend of mine, a man who was killed just as he was about to get married.
In fact, another friend of mine fell over recently walking across the room. She not only sprained her ankle, but injured her tendon, and was on her back, unable to walk for two and a half weeks. Another friend came to visit me to discuss my injury. That night she went home to Paris to prepare for a theatre show that was opening on the following Monday. That night, she fetched a chair and stood on it, in order to water some plants she had hanging from the ceiling. It almost goes without saying that she tumbled from the chair and, when falling, extended her arm to protect herself. The arm snapped, and she had to carry her injured limb to hospital, where she lay on a gurney for eight hours before she was operated on. Her show was cancelled. Another friend of mine, who has also visited me in hospital, stepped out into the path of a cyclist who then crashed into her. The cyclist was severely injured and is now taking legal action against my friend. These are only recent occurrences. There will no doubt be more.
In here, there is much talk of contingency, of what might happen when you are not thinking about where your body is, watering your plants, or walking down the street. There are injured surfers; there are many cyclists, some of them very young; there are motorcyclists; there are car accident victims; there are two men in here who had disasters on trampolines. Swimming pools are dangerous, particularly if they are emptied over night, which someone on this ward failed to notice. And there are many people who have fallen down the stairs. You are lucky to survive going up to bed each night.
If you don’t want to be severely injured or even killed, avoid bathrooms, stairs, kitchens, gardens and the street.
I met a huge clever man in Rome, and like my friend Jon in the bay next to me who fell on his head while rock climbing, was severely depressed. He had fallen heavily down the stairs and it had taken him three years to learn to walk again. He told me that now he could walk one-hundred and eighty steps and was very proud of himself. I envy him that many steps. At the moment I can stand up in a hoist for about twenty minutes, but I cannot take any steps at all, and I wonder if one day I ever will. I would like to walk again, but my main priority is trying to get my hands moving. At the moment they are useless. I can move a computer mouse a few centimetres, but otherwise I am reliant totally on other people for all the things you need to do with your hands, of which, I’ve begun to notice, there are many.
I am nervous now for my friends and family all the time. They are not aware, nor should they be, that at any moment, their present life could be over, if they slipped in the shower, or if they got hit by a reckless motorist. It is not something you should worry about; it is easier to live without increasing your burden of petty concerns. But as I say, living in the hospital of accidents teaches you that random evil stuff can happen to you at any moment. The world is a killing machine - the simplest move could turn out to be fatal.
This is what I think about, lying here in my hospital bed, how this could have happened to me. This time last year, in October, three months before my accident, I was a happy-go-lucky, innocent person, swinging about the world, enjoying myself, and complaining cheerfully. Now, since I fainted sitting in a chair - rather than sitting on the sofa or lying in bed, which would have been more convenient - I am a near vegetable, and am denied the pleasures that were in store for me. This has half-changed the way I view the world. I now feel anger and spite towards it. The other day, I was trying to become religious; I wanted to set up a relationship with God. God, I thought, would be a great person to hate for all this; he could take the blame; it would be his fault, and it would focus my anger. But I wasn’t convinced. I couldn’t hold the belief together. God wasn’t there. I couldn’t wish him into being.
So an accident is just accident. It is truly contingent. There is no meaning to it. You cannot think yourself around it. I love the fact that the silent films I grew up watching as a kid, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy and so on, were made not so long after Freud wrote his great book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Freud seemed to find meaning in mistakes and accidents; they expressed unconscious desire. But there is another category of accidents that really are just accidents. I don’t believe my friend who stood on the chair to water her plants was unconsciously trying to have her show cancelled - but I may be wrong about that.
But the kind of accident I am talking about does not involve unconscious intention; not the slightest bit of it. And that is the problem with accidents - sometimes they are really just that - they are random, inexplicable events. There is no accounting for them. No one to blame.
Hanif xx
Accidents with devastating sequelae often leave you with a ‘what if?’ feeling, which is a waste of time because we can’t re-spool time and do things differently.
I took my husband to Amsterdam for three days in March to see the Vermeer exhibition, and to thank him for being my carer. I’ve had disability of hands and heart and lungs and removal of colon and leg and loss of fingers and toes for many years.
On day one, my NHS prosthetic leg came off in my hotel room as I was walking out of the door. It went flying into the adjoining bathroom and I went flying onto the ground, where I managed to shatter my only remaining tibia and fibula. Two weeks in a hospital in Amsterdam followed (A and E was hellish, I was told to be quiet by the nurses as I sobbed in agony) but the ward was fantastic. Who would guess that in Amsterdam you can ask for not one kind, but for different kinds of psycho/social support: psychologist, social worker, religious figure, or spiritual guru.
I was not fit to fly back, so had to pay £20,000 to get back by ambulance, helped by beautiful friends who had a collection and raised 8K.
And since then, I’ve been unable to walk . Casts caused five pressure sores. One of these was in the Achilles tendon and necrosed right through, so I now have foot drop and wouldn’t be able to place my foot flat on the ground even if my bones were healed.
After six months of non-healing, they erected an external fixator on my leg with 16 pins going into my bones and what looks like a three storey gerbil hutch of cages. I haven’t slept more than an hour since. A lot of it is the pain of the Achilles tendon which seems to not respond to morphine.
Anyhow, I know there is no point in mulling to myself ‘if only...’ Yes, if only I had been given a prosthetic leg which fit properly; if only I had not sent my husband out of the hotel room minutes before so I could have a nap (and then realised I missed him and put on my prosthetic leg and headed for the door), if only someone had realised that the cast was giving me five pressure sores - I complained about the pain in tears every night to the junior doctor on call and she always said she would tell the person she handed over two in the morning, but the message never reached the consultant.
But really, any sort of wistful musing leaves me feeling unhappy. Yesterday I watched the film Breaking Glass, which came out when I was a teenager writing for the New Musical Express at school. I heard later I was going to be offered a staff job the year I left London to study medicine in Edinburgh. I feel melancholy when I think that I could have had two careers and ended up having none- I had to take early retirement just three years after becoming a consultant anaesthetist, and I was also trained as a physician. So I had more letters after my name than in my name but I could no longer write my name because of losing the fingertips to gangrene and the swollen, ulcerated remains going into contractures.
Sometimes it’s hard to see the right side, even though I still write - book reviews for The Spectator. I spend a lot of time in tears nowadays, which I can’t remember doing in the past ever, unless I was thinking of a discrete trauma such as a break-up.
Tonight I have invited friends round. We will drink and I will order in delicious Indian food. I know my life is coming to an end, but I’m determined to live it before I leave it.
I slipped on a wet floor in my favorite library one day on my way to do my research. I cursed all the people with umbrellas who had shaken them just as they walked in the door. A few weeks later, I tripped over one of the new bike bumps in London that were meant to protect bicyclists but broke my cheekbone because I hadn't realized they were in my way. You're right that every day there are a thousand ways the world can thwart our future life, limb, movement, even our ability to process ideas. Your writing gives hope to so many people who have been thwarted by accidents, both material and immaterial. Every letter you send makes me sure you have the power to move that mouse a little further tomorrow and take one step and then another in the weeks to come. I hope you have wonderful music to accompany you now in the hospital of accidents and I thank your family & friends for helping you to get these messages to all of us who cheer you on. Know that what you write matters immensely.