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.