As if it hasn’t been difficult enough, we are now asked to change room again. It will be the third room I have shared since arriving here in mid-January. All the rooms are identical, painted light blue, with low ceilings and two beds side by side about six feet apart.
The roommates change each time, which is a bit of a strain. Each move is an abrupt and jarring alteration because Isabella and I are asked to move our things immediately and relocate within an hour. This time, I have the good fortune to be sharing with the Maestro, who has returned to the clinic after a spell in hospital. We are good pals and it’s a pleasure to share with him but I still find the change traumatic.
I’ve been increasingly panicky and nervous over the last week. I have had a buzzing in my ears, a hot feeling throughout my body, and a terror that I am going to faint again, as I did on that terrible day of my accident. I am scared and out of control. My body feels as if it wants to shut down.
Despite being here for three months I don’t seem to have calmed down. Each day is relatively similar to the previous day, so it is possible to form a defensive ring of habit, but my defences seem as weak now as any time previously. I worry and I am afraid for the future. If the definition of trauma is that of an overwhelmingly unexpected event which takes time to psychically organize, then I have been subject to too many shocks recently. I am afraid when I am separated from Isabella; I hate to be alone.
You could say that every day we are subject to new experiences which we have to organize ourselves around, but the changes here - while not cruel - have been upsetting. I guess in an everyday world the force of habit creates a buffer around us, through which we try to save ourselves from too many abrupt shocks and changes, which is why people remain in lives that seem from the outside to be uncomfortable, if not quite wrong for them. But familiarity gives our lives a comforting shape and form. My life here does at least have some repetition and domestic structure, but is not a comfortable one. In order to survive at all, one needs familiar things.
I have Isabella, her presence and her words to create reliability. In some ways I have become like an infant. But one that has been an adult at least for a time, and has experienced agency, a glimpse of some freedom; an agency which has now been withdrawn, leaving dependence and the rage of helplessness.
At least with Isabella I have recognition. I need to believe she knows who I am and what I am suffering from; I need to believe I know the same about her. She sees me; she knows me. I see her; I know her.
This idea of mutual recognition, of shared understanding - a kind of mirroring - is part of the reason why I write this blog, and partly the reason why I started to write in the first place. I remember as a teenager wanting to write stories and novels because I thought that someone out there would recognise me and would understand what I was going through. Although I grasp the idea that stories are fundamentally entertainment, I see them not only as a species of superior fun, but as an attempt to communicate something essential about suffering.
Of course some traumas are excitements. Sexuality for one thing, particularly for the young, is a mixture of fear and excitement. There is a sense in all sexuality of wondering whether one can survive it and indeed take pleasure from it. One has to learn to endure one’s pleasures as well as one’s pains. If we can overcome our traumas, and indeed learn from them, then we will feel a sense of triumph.
What I am experiencing in this clinic has been an affront to my happiness and complacency, to my sense that the world was basically okay and the right way round. I can’t get over this sense of being annoyed by the indignity, if not the stupidity, of what has happened to me, as if it is a mixture of tragedy and farce, which is exactly the essence of Kafka’s great work The Trial.
My physio is a sensitive, wise and Zen-like character. Slowly he has me standing up, first on a standing bed, where I am strapped to a gurney and rise up, Christ like, above the gym. It is an amazing feeling - the gym lights in my eyes - to be so tall; and I manage it at first for five minutes, and then ten, and then for fifteen before I begin to feel dizzy and nauseous.
Next session he puts me onto another machine with a seat under my ass, which pushes me up into a standing position. This time, unlike with the gurney, I am not so high. It is more like a normal standing height. Again, I can manage standing for ten minutes, or maybe a little longer before the gym swims before my eyes and I desperately want to lie down again.
I am puzzled as to why doing a simple thing like standing up should have become so difficult and, at times, unendurable. But if you haven’t stood up since Boxing Day last year, then I can see why it would seem such a dazzlingly complicated achievement. But each time my physio convinces me to do it, I stand up for a little longer. On the second machine, with the seat under my ass, Miss S insists on accompanying me and she sits in her chair smiling and yelling encouragement. She is not surprised by how scared I am. It is normal to feel so vertiginous.
They are preparing me for a robot-like machine called the Lokomat, which helps those with spinal injuries to walk again. You are strapped and suspended inside this walking machine in what seems to me to be a terrifying thing, like having an iron mask placed over your head and padlocked.
I am afraid of this machine. I am afraid of becoming claustrophobic as well as nauseous, and embarrassing myself by freaking out. I am my physio’s challenge. At the moment I am absolutely refusing to go into this machine. This is not the last you have heard about this. This walking machine will be my next step. I’m looking forward to it, and I am not looking forward to it. More to follow…
Your loving writer,
Hanif x
Dear Hanif, Thank you for keeping us updated. We are all here rooting for you and I believe you will be up walking again as you go through these therapies. The fact that they are giving you such therapies means they believe this too. One thought: have you had any acupuncture treatment? In Eastern medicine, they see issues of vertigo and fainting as imbalances in the flow of our internal energies. Western medicine doesn't acknowledge energy at all. We've had some excellent results from acupuncture in our family. Perhaps Isabella might bring an acupuncturist into the hospital to treat you? The treatments are painless, deeply relaxing and meditative so they can help with anxieties too. My Japanese acupuncturist has said that once the energy pathways are balanced again the progress is permanent. I really like Japanese acupuncture as they say with you the whole time and only use one needle and sometimes a little massage. Meanwhile, it's such good news that you are bunking in with the Maestro! Good company is good medicine! Please tell him that we are rooting for him too and expecting miracles all around. With love from across the planet. ~Cat B
Hanif, I had the feeling that I should write to you when I read one of your dispatches, one that I felt your hopelessness deeply. I love to read your words, and often can truly feel your feelings. This is not always comfortable. To explain why I feel your feelings I will write, briefly, about my own experience; I had a worm in my brain, it caused grand mal seizures (with the unexpected reality that I could no longer be alone outside of my home, and could never know if I would fall, convulse, stop breathing, and die.) This was for 6 years. Then, miraculously, I met a Cuban neurologist that correctly diagnosed me. I subsequently had a 6.5 hr awake craniotomy to remove her (her name was Tania the Bitch; not her scientific name--but mine.) I was awake during and after the surgery, and am cured of the seizures. Before, and even now, there has been so much confusion and uncertainty in my brain, and I better understand your thoughts because of my own. I want to offer you what I use now to quickly calm myself in these days; Youtube videos of breathing exercises for high blood pressure and stress. There are many, and many are 10 minutes or less. You can find one that speaks to you. They work for anxiety, fear, and lowering your BP in a quick and peaceful manner. Sending love and peace to you and your Isabella.