1996 - A New Life

1996 August Bank Holiday.

She decided that we should go to the cinema. I had no problem with that. She chose another Sc-Fi film, 'Total Recall', and I had no problem with that either. I didn't watch the film, I spent the 120 minutes worrying about whether I would have a job to go to at the end of next month. I was on the wrong side of a company takeover. Not good but it was only economics; people conquer debt and bankruptcy. It's tough but subsistence living is still living. I worried, over-thought and worried further, until someone said 'you're stressed out, you are going to be ill.' Wrong phrase to use with me; it was too modern and  intangible.

I went to bed in blue boxer shorts, the sound of the TV rising from the underground, rising up and passing through the floorboards.In spite of the hollers from below, I must have fallen asleep quickly. I do not remember any nightmares or happy or sad dreams. It was a deep and bottomless sleep, a benign nighttime, that anticipated an eventless Saturday.

I never made it to Saturday though, not in terms of my old life, so it was Friday night, when I was confronted with two paramedics trespassing in my bedroom and questioning me as to what drugs I had taken. Confused, I could not answer. My jaw, like the rest of my body, felt like it had been dislocated . I was paralysed and prone, I ate the dirt off the carpet, I looked for invisible dust mites; I was down and I was out.

Things started to hot up when I was carried from the bedroom and set down in the ambulance. This was the point at which I started to look around and begin to associate objects with their function and their mission: heart monitor,defibrillator, tubes for aspiration, hypodermic needles, syringes, drugs, rubber gloves and lastly, there was the mask, the one that covers the mouth and the nose; the same one that's released when the plane is coming down. But I did not want oxygen and I did not want my mouth and nose covered because these are things that tell you, that you just may be dying. You cannot exorcise this feeling when it takes root; the intense 'panic', a 'terror' that only the hunted know, the sick 'fear', that waits the for the bullet of a firing squad; it all adds up, and the smell of death is everywhere

However, amid all the confusion, a part of the brain is still trying to act rationally and it' asking some very big questions: 'I am only thirty three and I am too young to die', 'where are my children', 'where are my mother a father', 'there's no god', 'no man on a cross'; there is nothing, not one grain of comfort to be had. I am totally alone; scenes from my life are not replaying; all their is is pure dread.

I can hear the ambulance screaming and I am moving. The orange lights shine down from above. I am conscious, I am watching every peak and trough on the monitor screen and every slight increase or decrease of my pulse rate. The ambulance slows and opens its doors. Its a warm and clear night. The stars look like pin heads in a sky of black paper. The casualty doors open and close. It's bright in here, behind the hospital walls.

An Open and Candid Invitation.

I was talking to a psychologist friend of mine quite recently about 'blogs' and he suggested that I write about the last 19 years of my life. My reply was simple; 'why don't you xxxx off.' Then I began to think, my life has never been glamorous or peppered by worldly experience but it has been different and perhaps, interesting.

To be frank...I have travelled little, I have never worked abroad, no; I have been tethered to the same small town that I grew up in, the one I could never leave. Some may say that I should of been more ambitious, more ruthless, cared less about others, but that's just not me. I have always been in for the long haul. And that sort of mentality has served me well. Especially in the places that I have 'holidayed' in. The places on the edge of the towns: the hospitals.

'Hospitals', have become over the years my hotels, restaurants and coffee bars, in which I have literally put my feet up and wiled away my days just waiting, always waiting for my brain tumour to return or a family member's cystic fibrosis to worsen. I think a lot about how 'massive' everything has become, how everything in my life has been reduced to 'life' and 'death' in it's barest sense. When you are in this place, it becomes really difficult to understand everyday life, you know, what's on the TV tonight, shall I eat out, what clothes to wear etc. Difficult and meaningless, that's it. 

People often say 'you're lucky. People die of brain tumours' and yes they are right in a very obvious kind of way, but living with the memories and the fear of re-occurrence, presents even more obstacles, irrational ones. My latest one is, 'will I wake-up in the morning.' Hence, sleepless nights are the norm!
This is how it goes on and this is what I'm going to do with this blog, just go on and on until I come to terms with some of my issues, by the way, I don't like using 'I' and 'My', but I suppose I have little choice.

If this is a too raw and random. I'm sorry. Just ignore the following.