CHAPTER 32

 

 

#69: CHARLI XCX featuring BIG FREEDIA, cupcakKe, BROOKE CANDY & PABILO VITTAR

"Shake It"

from the album Charli

Released: September 2019

 

 

In the early morning of Friday 18 April 2018 I presented at St George's Hospital to be admitted for an elective operation. This was to remove a massive inguinoscrotal hernia and return the gastrointestinal elements to my actual abdomen. In order to ensure that there was sufficient space for that to be done without compromising my lung or heart function, expander pads had to be inserted into the abdominal area and the whole thing repaired with a mesh. I had already been advised by the surgeon who would be operating on me that he would try to avoid a colostomy if possible, though warned me that it might still be required.

I had been fully briefed on the logistics of surgery by numerous consultants, both at St George's and at my local workplace, the Royal Marsden Hospital in Chelsea. I was told that the risk of mortality was small but significant. I knew that the hernia should have been sorted out years before, but circumstances, mainly financial, precluded that from happening, as well as my own understandable but futile worry that this might be a cancer. Nevertheless it now needed to be sorted out urgently or I might not last too much longer in any meaningful sense, and most meaningless ones.

Hence I knew exactly what I was letting myself in for. I was prepared. This doesn't mean I was unafraid. The meal Lena and I had eaten at Five Guys in Clapham a few evenings before, which I was convinced would be my last major one. The blog posts I wrote warning of potential impending fatality, with particular reference to "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me" by Elton John. In fact this is what I wrote about the latter, two days prior to my admission:

This isn’t quite the last piece of music I’ll be writing about before taking a long break from writing this blog (and most other things) – there’s one more song tomorrow that I’ve been persuaded to write up before I disappear – but the situation is this; I am imminently due to go into hospital for major surgery to treat a long-standing and hugely-annoying hernia. This should have been sorted out years ago but for reasons too tedious to document it’s only being sorted out now. It is going to be a long, fairly complex and in places possibly pioneering procedure. I am being operated on by world-class surgeons whom I trust implicitly and there has been much liaison between my local hospital (where I’ll be going) and the hospital where I myself work to enable this to happen.

 

However, I have to warn you that the procedure carries a fairly high risk of what medical people call “morbidities,” mainly to do with breathing and cardiac issues, for which I will be closely monitored in Intensive Care. Everyone involved is optimistic that I will come through this and make a full recovery from the silent agony which has been plaguing me over the last eleven months or so in particular. Nonetheless, this operation can go wrong and there is a very small risk that I will die from it. The risk is no more than 2.4%, but it has to be borne in mind.

 

If anything happens to me, therefore, I would anticipate that somebody else take over the writing of this blog and carry on what I have left undone. As I say, these are surgeons of the highest international esteem, I have been fully warned of the potential risks, and if things do go wrong, no blame is to be attached to any of the people involved. In the meantime, Lena plans to resume her UK number two blog, which will hopefully give you plenty to read while I am away.

 

Since we (i.e. Lena and I) have already written extensively about this song on several occasions, I can say nothing further apart from noting that as a (hopefully temporary) sign-off point, its appearance here is very timely and I should not need to spell out the song's relevance in this context. In the meantime, many thanks to everybody who has been reading this blog as well as my other writing, and especially to Lena without whom none of it would have been written. And thanks to those Beach Boys who came back right at the end to ensure that this story doesn't, yet, end.

 

 

I arrived by taxi on a cold and sunny early Friday morning. I would have presented at seven a.m., or perhaps seven-thirty. As Lena and I waited with many others, BBC Breakfast was being screened on the overhead television in the preadmissions clinic. I felt as though I were lying at an angle to that screen, as though waiting in the transit area, preparing to fly towards the afterlife.

Eventually my name was called. Lena went off for the day, by mutual agreement, to do some shopping, probably in Wimbledon. I proceeded one upward floor in the elevator, and on presentation in the preoperative theatre room I was met by a couple of young and fairly eager junior anaesthetists who smiled at me, apologised for the wait and the hardness of the stretcher on which I would have to lie in theatre itself. After one or two benign false starts, the mask was applied to my face.

I don't recall any fear or panic on my part, even though I was absolutely aware that this might be the last thing I experienced on Earth. As I slowly drifted into a snooze, I felt...philosophical, fatalistic, thinking, well I can relax now, it's all going to be done for me, it's out of my hands, and if I don't wake up again then it's been an interesting life. I faded into darkness.

I have no clear recollection of the time between then, about nine-thirty on the morning of Friday 18 April, and the beginning of June. I apparently spent forty-four days in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). The initial operation, which had ended up taking something like twelve hours to do, went well, I was later told, but then complications set in; as there was a 65% chance of that happening, it should have come as no surprise. Specifically there were cardiac and respiratory complications, and as I understand things it was a major effort for me even to breathe.

 

 

Many months later - I revisited the Unit in early 2019, largely for psychological reasons - the Intensive Care Consultant who had looked after me during my extended stay told me that I had regrettably been subjected to what she called "state-sponsored torture." However, since the purpose of that torture had been to stop me from dying, I could hardly protest against it. I was shown the amply-equipped bed (Bed 8, it was) which I had occupied, with all the tubes, wires and devices one would expect. It is an uncomfortable but unavoidable truth that most long-term ICU patients are unlikely to survive their stay. My case, I was told, was delicately touch and go for some considerable while.

As I say, I do not remember too much about my ICU stay. Lena tells me that I watched the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on Saturday 19 May, that the nurses provided me with a small iPad-type device on which I could view the proceedings. I don't recall witnessing a second of it but Lena assures me that it definitely happened.

The one main thing I do recall from the period is one evening (I think it was early evening anyway, perhaps on a Monday) when the Physiotherapists came around and visited. Obviously they wanted to get me moving again. I had no problems at all moving my upper or lower limbs, even though I'd been lying for perhaps a month already - and my Consultant later admitted that they had probably missed a window for mobilisation in that period.

But when they asked me to stand up, and I thought deludedly that it would be a simple matter to do that, it was abruptly horrendous. It felt as though twenty-nine elephants had suddenly jumped on my back. Pain beyond horrendous and excruciating. Visions of fifties black-and-white TV, specifically of a postman approaching a post box. I discovered that actually I couldn't stand. Not yet. Not ever? The physios did their patient best but even clinging to one of those rotator-type balance devices was nearly impossible.

Things gradually got better from the physiotherapy point of view. Because of their heavy workload I'd be lucky to gain their attention twice or even once a week. Sometimes I'd dread their amiable visiting smiles because they'd want to put me through something which I knew would prove agonising. But they were miraculously patient with me and worked very gradually to build up my movement abilities again. It really was like having to re-learn to walk. Yes, it hurt unbelievably at times and I'd make my agony known. But I actually began to look forward to their Thursday morning sessions in the gym one floor downstairs from my regular ward - if nothing else, they had a watercooler and the water from it tasted like manna; this was a scythingly hot and windless summer which at times reached a temperature of 39 degrees.

That was not the worst of it, though. In early July I was finally deemed fit enough to go on a regular ward, on the fourth floor. I don't really recall the transfer but my condition had stabilised and was now, if anything, gradually improving.

That's as maybe. But what I haven't told you yet is that I needed to be taken back to theatre thirty times to have my vacuum-assisted closure (VAC) wound dressing changed. This was usually done on a Friday or Saturday, and the inevitable NIL BY MOUTH signs meant that I usually missed the Friday fish supper, much to my muted chagrin.

Furthermore, these repeated retuns to theatre involved administration of anaesthesia, which clashed with the antibiotics I had been given, which in turn clashed with various morphine dérives given to treat my pain. What this meant was that my brain got fucked up, was no longer able to distinguish fact from fantasy. I had never taken recreational drugs in my life, but on this occasion I got taken on an epic and seemingly unending trip. And it was an extended, soiled tapestry of lucid nightmares.

There were other factors, of course. The pain which meant I could only lie on my back. If I rolled over that pain would become markedly less tolerable. Eventually they managed to get me to move to a bedside chair, but for what at the time felt like forever, they needed to do that via a hoist. From bed to chair, two simple steps away from each other, two simple steps too complicated for me to take. In addition, because certain nerves in my buttock had been taken out as part of my initial surgery, I had developed an ongoing anal numbness which made prolonged sitting almost unbearable. I needed to move, but couldn't truly move. Not with a catheter and an enormous drain hooked to me. The pain I endured from that catheter would have tried any saint's patience. Go to the bathroom and wash? How can I with this almighty ball and chain attached to me?

The worst of things, however, were the aforementioned lucid nightmares. I cannot put them in chronological order so can only tell you what I remember, and even here I have excluded experiences which are unspeakable, even though they only ever occurred in my mind.

Oh, before I do that, the heat. Yes, the stifling, suffocating heat on a ward bereft of air-conditioning. I had the fan on in my face for pretty well the whole of my stay on that ward. Early on in that stay, though, I was placed right next to the window, with its panoramic views of mainly Croydon; the Crystal Palace towers barely visible on the far left, my home as yet seemingly unreachable. One Sunday afternoon it was bad. Opening the window just made things worse, since all that came into the room was more hot air. Dimly a radio was playing Rod Stewart singing "Forever Young" and I actually thought I was going to die, that was the end. The song still gives me the creeps for that reason, regardless of who is singing or sampling it.

The pain, oh yes the pain. My ceaseless howls which drew protest from a novelist across the floor from me on the ward. I explained my predicament and apologetically promised to keep things under some degree of control. Not that this was an issue with others on the ward. Memories of living in Fulham in the nineties, working in the Fulham F.C. club shop (not me, but other patients, now repositioned in Morden or somewhere in Kent). An elderly and cultured gentleman who I guessed was not long for this world discussing with his wife, or was it his daughter, his life of travelling around the globe, recounting his experiences (one patient died on the ward while I was there but I can't recall who it was, except it was an old man; that much I remember).

Then there was the blind old man who had been sent to us, privately, from Moorfields, who had undergone seemingly endless operations with no real ophthalmological improvement. He'd be up all night talking with his ever-present carers and was regularly visited by a rather frustrated-looking family. He was admitted under a first-name-only psuedonym. I didn't want to pry. He relished a distant memory of fish and chips. Odd, the things one remembers. Perhaps, if he is still with us, he is still on that ward; who knows?

The convict who was admitted under police guard, who had perhaps done something unspeakable. Actually he was perfectly friendly to everybody, including me, but again prying is for others. One or two "health tourists," one of whom told me that he had been an inpatient, due to paralysis (although he was easily mobile), for fourteen years. I kept frantically asking the Physiotherapists whether I was going to be here for fourteen years and they wearingly reassured me that I would not. The other was another old man who clearly relished his bed and surroundings as a home from home, although he was eventually sent downstairs to the ICU.

At this point you might think I'm utilising every excuse not to talk about those lucid nightmares. But talk about them I will, and to boot now. How do I begin to characterise them? One recurring facet was the need to make a vertiginous leap from one level of the ground to another. When I carried out the leap I did it well enough, but there was always a paralysing fear of doing it. When I came slightly more to my senses I realised that this was because, as I was perpetually lying on my back, I had a distorted picture of the beds and everything (and everybody) else on the ward. It looked, from where I was, that I'd have to leap down to get to them. Many was the time that I'd be stuck upstairs on the bus, unable to go downstairs and get out, or somewhere in a shopping mall, or at the entrance to a large Waitrose - and it would always be the same. Or sometimes I'd just be on the ward, albeit in highly unusual circumstances, and have it happen.

If I happened to be stuck on the top deck of a bus I'd have no choice but to remain there until the bus reached its destination, which more often than not was St George's Hospital. On arrival - although my mind confabulated different locations in Tooting, such that the hospital could be entered where the 333 bus stopped, across the street from Tooting Broadway Underground station - I would magically find myself back on a stretcher, being taken back to my ward, with my pleas to be careful in respect of handling, and I would always but always wake up back there, on the ward.

My drug-addled fantasies were nauseating. For some time I thought the entire hospital to be a gigantic conspiracy, a CIA-funded staging post for corporate heads, where patients didn't really need treatment but were held prisoner there for ever. International conspiracy paranoid time. I demanded to one hapless Consultant that I be discharged, even though I was clearly in no shape to be sent home (I later apologised to that same Consultant in his outpatient clinic; he shrugged and advised me not to worry about it). On one occasion an exceptionally patient Lead Nurse put me in a wheelchair and took me out into the open to sit for a bit. It was sunny, bucolic and unreal. I imagined that this was a secret garden up on the 96th floor of the hospital - my distorted impression was that this hospital was tall - but she asked me if I knew where I was, and I said I didn't, and she told me very gently that this was St George's Hospital, a place in which I have worked in the past and know extremely well. But my addled mind couldn't take it all in.

The little flats I could see surrounding the hospital, filled with people busily but happily going about a marvellous summer's morning. Something which, at the time, felt entirely out of reach to me.

BUT WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO TELL US ABOUT

I worked, or was made to work, at a large department store called Jane's. On occasion it was improbably situated above a chemist's on Streatham High Road. On others it was more recognisably in central London. I worked and goodness knows what I did there, except it stayed open for long hours and in the evening I'd participate in, and perhaps even lead, a theatrical performance. It went down very well but at the end of the night I'd be tired and ask to go home. I was told that it was nearly midnight and it was too late for me to leave.

Then I'd be taken to an alcove behind a staircase. The entire area, walls and floors, was coloured in deep blue. My female colleagues would ask me to roll over in order to change my inpatient gown and incontinence pads and clean me. Since I could not do this without provoking insufferable pain, they sighed with a weary smile and said they would physically have to turn me over in order to do this. I was grabbed and turned over and it was excruciating; I howled with pain. Interestingly, when they turned me over, the walls and floors immediately changed colour to bright scarlet. It was like an enlarged romper room. I later noted that one of my undersheets was coloured deep blue on the top, and bright scarlet on the bottom, and Lena certainly confirmed that the nurses had to turn me over in order to clean me.

This occurred on multiple occasions. I kept turning up to work at "Jane's" even when I knew I didn't have to. I wanted to quit but they wouldn't quite permit me. I can't remember what actual work, if any, I did there, but I know I didn't enjoy it.

I can't structure this in any meaningful way (other than by vague category); I'll just have to relate the dreams to you as and how I remember them.

A.C.F. WILSON

Film and theatre director. Renaissance man, even though his work all seemed to be about the end of everything. I imagined two of his works. The first was an apocalpytic drama for television where a huge meteroite smashes into Earth somewhere in the West Midlands and basically obliterates the planet. It was multifaceted; I owned it in the form of a weird three-dimensional DVD box set and you could watch two scenes at once, or switch from one to the other.

I'm fuzzy about detail. The 1963 flight I talked about at the end of entry #77 served as a sort of prequel; it warned us that the end was already a prospect, because Earth had been gravitationally weighed down by the excess of vanity buildings. There was a guy scuttling around in an office and you cut to discordant, deep piano echoes as you saw the crater that the office was to become. It was all about what different people were doing on the day that the meteorite struck. There was an Elkie Brooks-type female session singer arriving at a studio somewhere in the countryside. She was wearing a scarlet leather jacket and looked slightly bored - she had clearly been around the business for perhaps far too long - and I knew from somewhere that the actress playing her had actually died before the film came out.

There was also me, standing in the middle of a deserted amusement arcade, again in the West Midlands, immobile - one of the key precipitating factors in post-intensive care syndrome (more about the latter to follow) is the inability to move, which if you were lumbered with a catheter and drain, as I was, is perfectly understandable - but knowing that this was the exact spot where the meteorite would strike. It was 1973, though, a long time before that would happen. The lights were fruit machine primary-coloured and gaudy and announced, in big orange letters, MALCOLM PREECE.

This Malcolm Preece was playing standards on a Bontempi-level electronic organ. Not that I could actually see him but he was there. I remembered the name - a huge behind-the-scenes musical star of the fifties and sixties who had experienced a calamitous downfall because of some unexplained scandal, and now here he was, reduced to playing for nobody - and, apart from me, there was nobody there - in some cheap place in the provinces. How desperate must he have been? I knew he had committed suicide in 1986. As for me, I had forty-five years to get out of there. But I couldn't move.

The other one was a theatre production. This is going to be a rambling story because I experienced many visualiations of seventies suburban Glasgow and Lanarkshire. In fact, in one setting I was in a clinic in Glasgow, and there was a stern nurse, and there was my mother, and I was sitting up, though still essentially immobile, in bed. At the bottom of the ward I could see the dark, wintry path leading from the top of Spindlehowe Road in Uddingston into Maryville Park (on another occasion both my parents were there, and I was getting treated somewhere that wasn't Glasgow).

There was the time I skirted around one side of Tollcross Park and the street was full of early seventies shops, unchanged but all shut; it might have been a Sunday. Thoughts entered my mind in relation to a non-existent (but a generation older) clone of me who had a middling career as a pop singer - actually a pretty pathetic one - but died suddenly in 1973 (that year again). In other dreams there were parallel settings; two classmates from primary school who looked identical but were different (one was into sausages and salsa). In another I was dining with members of somebody's family (not mine) around the corner on the Tollcross Road itself, and again I was unable to move.

But in this dream I couldn't breathe properly. I had visions of a Glaswegian cabaret singer called John Somebodyorother from the sixties; black-and-white period footage, dark-haired, popular in Scotland, and didn't he die some time ago? Not the case; the nurse looking after me accompanied me in the ambulance, which was racing through Glasgow in the wintry dark - and, just short of the Kingston Bridge bypass, we stopped at a large outdoor football stadium and there was John Somebodyorother, now white-haired but very pronouncedly still with us and giving a concert. Of course I can't recall a note of what he sang, if he sang anything.

I was then taken to the (long-gone) Glasgow Apollo theatre, where A.C.F. WILSON was directing a performance art piece about the Titanic. And somehow the production took place underwater. I don't know how I managed it, but I got down to the theatre's basement, beneath the water, and sat in the front row.

It was a reconstruction of one of the decks of the Titanic. I saw a reading room with armchairs and bookshelves, elderly gentlemen reclining with book and pipe. Everything, both visually and aurally, seemed to occur in extremely slow motion. A black Scottish terrier wandered around the front edge of the stage. It slowly passed by me and nipped at my right foot - I discovered that I was wearing slippers.

(You will therefore not be surprised to learn what an impact the Titanic Rising album by Weyes Blood had on me when it came out, barely seven months after I had been discharged from hospital. It was as if I had borne witness to a premonition of the record. I read about it in that morning's Observer and immediately leapt on a bus and made it to Rough Trade East, where they had one copy left, as though it had been saved for me, was waiting for me to come and find it.)

 

 

I looked up this A.C.F. Wilson on the lucid dreaming internet and he was an unassuming middle-aged fellow - spectacles, receding hairline - who had studied under Brian Eno at the University of East Anglia. I rechecked him on the real world internet post-discharge - his impact was that vivid - and all I found was an "acfwilson" who was one of my followers on Twitter and liked the Glasgow-based band Orange Juice.

TREATMENT FOR LIFE

I got referred elsewhere for further treatment. I remember crossing Westminster Bridge but not what I crossed it in. To aid my powers of recognition there were three Big Ben towers at the bridge's head. I then flew - by balloon? - in a general northeasterly direction across central London before landing in front of a tacky fly-by-night clothing store at the Tottenham Court Road end of Oxford Street. The shop sign was written (or printed) with orange lettering on a black background.

But the shop was a front. When you walked into it and through the back, you suddenly encountered an up-to-the-minute, busy general hospital with doctors and nurses hurriedly scrambling around with notes and equipment. I was seen and treated there by specialists, who promptly took turns to operate on me. I watched what they did and marvelled at the result, though didn't remotely grasp that actually I was watching myself.

On some days I woke up freely moving around, in a busy, bright and sophisticated lobby. I was out of my chains. I saw Jay-Z and Kanye West in a spot down below, sipping Martinis and begging me not to jump down and join them, but I jumped anyway.

On some days I screamed at the nurse begging to be put to sleep because the pain was intolerable. On some days I found myself on a ward very far from home. I looked out of the huge bay window and it looked rather like Old Trafford. Why had they sent me up to Manchester? It turned out to be a Dignitas-style establishment where they slowly and painlessly put people out of their misery. A nurse appeared with a ticksheet and asked me if I fully understood what was going to happen, how they would gradually withdraw my life support, element by element. The owner of this establishment also appeared for a chat. I recognised him - he had been a football star and still looked and dressed like it was 1978. But then nothing much happened. I'd see the owner/former footballer reclining happily downstairs on a long couch/bed.

Later I'd be on a coach going back to the hospital, wondering where my jeans had gone and whether I had the nerve to ask the people I know had taken them to give them back. They were uploading people into the luggage container of the coach and one of those people was the owner/former footballer, in the same happily reclining pose.

INTERLUDE: VAC DRESSINGS ABSORB EVERYTHING

Every time I held anything in my hand it would dissolve in one way or another. Food, drink - it vapourised before I could taste or even touch it. So much else would "melt" into the dressings area, including wallets, coins, paper currency, books (England's Dreaming by Jon Savage, for some reason, was one), even penknives and, ultimately, my clothes.

 

 

FIFTIES

 

 

I was perched at the top of this staircase, unable to move, frozen by fear to the spot. At the other end of the corridor was a television set. It was about six-thirty in the morning and a black-and-white callsign appeared. A nurse appeared and I pleaded for help but she gruffly shrugged her shoulders and told me she couldn't.

WAYS OF LIVING DOWN SOUTH

Living in this artistic complex and I'd see the surgeon who operated on me running over a Bridge of Sighs running above me and waving to me.

Living in a ramshackle outhouse, can't move, can't do much of anything.

Record shopping procedurals; all done in a straight line from Brixton to Putney, although I recognised none of it - in other scenarios I imagined Tooting High Street to be far more populous and industrious than it already is - finally arriving at a shop with rare and desired records which were known to and passed around a group of knowing people which didn't include me. Back on the ward, in the summer evening light, that group would read and share a trendy magazine to which I had no access. The Physiotherapist took pity on me and offered me a copy to read. It contained yellow print on a fuzzed white background. I could read none of it. I asked for a doctor but despite the summer evening light was told that it was midnight and all of the doctors had gone home. The eternal feeling of being deliberately left out of life.

AWKWARD CASE STUDIES

I was in what looked like the waiting room of an Australian petrol station in the early seventies. Waiting was slow and painful.

I was in an early seventies department store. Large, distantly-positioned music centres which I could smell. Cross-combined with an art gallery which sold strange Christmas cards-cum-CDs while Simon and Garfunkel floated across the speakers (what speakers?).

I was in some terrible mid-seventies shop, perhaps on the South Shore of Blackpool, which seemed to sell nothing more than motor accessories, chiefly tyres. I was held in bondage there for hours, long after the shop would have rationally closed. I heard indistinct but incus-level clear voices saying it was three in the morning and should we change his stoma pouch or not? The learned desperation of junior doctors and overnight nurses, the voices violently vibrating towards one from impossible angles. The voices promising they'd shake it, they'd shake it all on me.

My sense of smell was intensified throughout all of this.

I was stretched out on a stretcher, found I was naked, but other patients blithely took that in their stride and carried on pontificating about not very much. Where had my jeans gone? I walked out to find that I was at the southern end of Camden High Street in 1991. It was a pleasant and sunny Sunday. What's that garage on the side street?

I was watching the end of some ponderous, mid-seventies BBC comedy drama about a nonentity of a besuited middle-aged fellow. It ended without applause or comprehension and I found myself in unbearable pain, crawling along Tooting Broadway of a Thursday twilight as though ploughing through muddy glue. I could hardly mobilise; every step required a major realignment of my breathing. There was no road, as such, only lots of market stalls and some electrical stores which might and I screamed

 

 

TRAIN

One late Saturday morning the Charge Nurse on our ward told us that we were all going to the seaside for an outing. How the hell were we supposed to do that? Don't worry, she said, this entire ward is mobile; you don't have to move a muscle. "Where exactly are we going?" I asked. "Um - just to the seaside," the nervous Charge Nurse replied non-commitally.

It was twelve noon and suddenly the ward started moving. I watched my view of the corridor alter. Pretty soon we were out into the open; I could discern the outside buildings of the hospital as the train suddenly took a deep dive into a tunnel. We were told that the "train" would also be calling at Sutton. I said that I hoped there would be help, or at least wheelchairs, to escort us from the station platform to the coast. I certainly couldn't be expected to walk it.

But we got stuck at "Sutton" and couldn't move any further; not for hours. It was a curious Sutton station which looked exactly like one of the entrances to Tooting Bec Underground, and it was dark. Sometimes I would see a busy station platform - Preston, perhaps? - where familiar faces would pass by with cups of coffee and wave at me. Five or six hours of this.

Eventually, night fell and we were told with regret that, due to a technical fault, we wouldn't be going to the seaside at all and would be turning around and coming back from Sutton when a driver becomes available IN THREE HOURS' TIME. In the meantime nurses gathered around thr beds and chatted with us. The old Indian guy in the far corner bed was watching something on the paid-for television; a film whose plot was horrible and I won't recap it here.

We did seem to inch back "home" slowly, although even on Sunday morning I noticed that "Sutton station" was still dark while the window on the opposite side showed blindingly bright sunlight. I imagined, in words of loud protestation, that this entire process had taken seventeen-and-a-half hours.

I don't know what hell happened to me on that Saturday.

TAKEOVER

I imagined that the ward I was on was going to close and that the entire area had been sold off to private business. One Sunday morning I noticed with horror that, where the nurses' offices had been, there was a Boots and a WH Smiths, and that outside families were freely visiting them.

I further believed that the area had been sold off to the owners of HMP Wandsworth and that it would be converted into another prison wing, complete with patrolling Alsatians.

One Sunday evening the ward moved again, as though it had been forcibly relocated. It drove rather like a coach might travel and opened up onto some non-specific countryside. It seemed as though it hadn't travelled very far. In fact it hadn't travelled at all.

RADIO

Goodness, the radio that I heard. One Tuesday lunchtime I caught this incredible station playing unbelievable music - sub-sub-subwoofer tribal dub. What was it? It wasn't on the bandwidth of the DAB radio which Lena had kindly bought me to stave off pain and boredom. Was it some obscure, internet-only station? Then I came to other senses and realised that I was listening to Smooth Radio 2 playing "The Way It Is" by Bruce Hornsby and the Range.

 

 

CyberGold, Panda, Fix, Encore, Chill, however...those stations were real.

 

 

HOMBURG

 

 

See entry on "Homburg."

DEATH

Twice I thought that I was going to be killed.

The first time it was with this patient, this guy in the bed at the far end - C17, the same bed to which I would subsequently be moved - who was nice enough but in my dreams got angry. He protested loudly that the doctors and nurses weren't discharging him when there was clearly nothing wrong with him and he was fine to go home.

His protests climaxed when he announced, loudly, that he was going to blow the ward up. Various members of his family, as well as uniformed officials, were all revealed to be in on the plan, even the woman who caught my eye and looked at me in disbelieving distress.

He and his accomplices began by trashing the bed in which he had been held. No assistance came from outside; the area had clearly and cleverly been systematically locked off. Two hours, we had two hours to go before everything would blow.

I couldn't move but wasn't scared; instead I just thought, philosophically, that, well, if I've only got two hours left to live, I could have done more with the time I'd been given, etc. etc. It all eventually reared up towards a climax. They got special flammable materials into the area, started soaking the area (but none of it, curiously, reached me; not once did they even acknowledge me). The woman who had previously looked at me despairingly now pleaded that she didn't want it to go this far, everybody's going to die including you, is all this worth it...

And then suddenly the drama ended and they all turned to the applauding audience and bowed. Yes, it had been a play. That's all it was. All it could have been.

The second time was at around four in the morning. The nurses on night duty invaded the ward, informed us that they were a covert extremist cult and were going to kill us - again, they said this to the other patients, but never did anyone speak specifically to me. They cleared the bookshelf of the man in the bed next to me of all his books on cinema, which they claimed were degenerate and were to be destroyed. The old guy across the ward from me, who looked to be a wealthy health tourist, took the  poison they forced him to consume with no protest - only mild, wry amusement.

Then his pulse accelerated to something like 950 bpm and I thought his life over. But there was no clear physical reaction from him, and I noticed that his pulse eventually went back down to a far more regular 70-80 bpm. I had in part figured things out by now. Again the nurses told us that it was only a play; the film books were returned, unharmed, to my neighbour.

I had noticed that the nurses had planned a two-week fancy dress extravaganza because I misread a tiny numbered notice just above the nurses' station. By now it was six, and the nurses came on duty. I asked one of them if they'd been here earlier. She laughed that she hadn't. Then she saw the horror in my eyes, realised what had happened and said "No - no - NO - it didn't happen! We would NEVER do anything like that!" I hadn't even described what "anything like that" entailed, but she knew what post-intensive care syndrome was about, and there were mutual tears and hugs.

Nobody told me about post-intensive care syndrome. I only found out about it long after my discharge. If only someone had taken or found the time to explain the condition to me, if only I'd been given the chance to talk with other patients who had gone through the same imagined/unimaginable ordeal. It is now approaching five years since my admission to hospital, and while I have physically recovered to a degree, I have never made a satisfactory psychological recovery. Those lividly lucid dreams - complete with many other, even more horrifying ones which I will not discuss here - have remained implanted in my memory, to their tiniest elements.