Читать книгу The World I Fell Out Of - Andrew Marr, Andrew Marr - Страница 11

The Warden owns the shade.

LOUIS SACHAR, HOLES

An apricot-coloured world, shading to russet, was actually rather an intriguing place to inhabit. You don’t sleep, when you’re on morphine, you just travel to strange places behind your eyelids, restless journeys through an orange landscape, journeys which leave you exhausted and confused. At night, I frequently found myself at the bottom of a cave, looking up like a potholer at rock faces which were clad with thick, hand-knitted russet wool – chunky cable-stitch, knitted on a giant’s great big fat knitting needles, as if to give you hand-holds when you climbed, but I didn’t need them because I was on some kind of cherry-picker, floating effortlessly up, up, up, exploring the openings and ledges on the woolly surface. Close to, I leant in and examined the texture, the thick twists of cable stitch. Up, up, I go, high into the stifling dark of orange woolliness.

That was one of the nicer destinations to which morphine took me. Other times, when it was daylight, and I was gazing at the ceiling tiles in the ward, I saw crude graffiti had been scratched. Evil messages to me. I caught the words subliminally. Fuck off, it said. But when I trailed my eyes slowly back to look more closely, the words had disappeared. Sometimes the tiles lifted at the edges, and I saw eyes peering down at me – sometimes rats’ eyes, other times, illegal immigrants’. Somewhere, in some sane fragment of my brain, I was horrified – my illiberal subconscious was betraying me, my inner Daily Mail reader emerging. The other part of me was preoccupied with the need to tell the authorities. Surely they shouldn’t be there. Not living in the ceiling. I knew things were bad in the NHS but surely not that bad. I felt under threat. But before I could call out, express it, the morphine carried me away somewhere else, and I forgot.

For three days, over the Easter holiday weekend, I lay motionless in the high-dependency ward of the spinal unit, waiting for my surgery. They had me on a specialist spinal bed, which tilted from side to side, to relieve pressure on my skin, and I was allowed neither to eat nor drink. Every so often the nurses wet my lips with a sponge on a stick. I pleaded for water, but they could not give me any. I pleaded with them to turn my pillow, to relieve the pressure on my head, but they refused to do it as often as I would like, because the neck was unstable. It took three of them to do it – two keeping my head motionless. The other one flipping the pillow. For three days I was unaware of anything else from the real world. I don’t know if Dave was there; I drifted.

My only certainty was that the ward was a dangerous, volatile place and I was a silent witness, buffeted and bewildered by the drugs. My instinct was to hang onto consciousness and concentrate very hard on survival. My view, when I was with it enough to open my eyes, was still that bit of ceiling. Out of the dark, in the periphery of my vision, emerged a face. A tiny woman with short grey hair; a kindly, self-effacing sprite whose voice offered me a mooring. ‘I’m Christine. I’m your named nurse,’ she told me. ‘I’ll look after you now. Together, we’ll get you through this. Things are going to get better.’

The connection she made held me, steadied me, a rope to the shore. She told me she had been a spinal nurse for more than forty years; she spoke with confidence and calm optimism. When she was not there I drifted alone again, fearful. Over the time I spent in hospital, I was cared for by dozens of nurses who were, like all human beings, a mixture of sensitive and insensitive, flawed and uncannily dedicated. With all of them, I sought kindness and a connection; the essence, surely, of any benign human relationship. And with most I found it, with few it was lacking. There was no other nurse, though, who gave me utmost sanctuary in the way Christine did when I was most in need.

Days and nights merged and I was unaware.

I could not feel my body, but I sensed strongly that my legs were raised up in the air in front of me. Floating up high. Later I learnt this was a common phenomenon of a new spinal injury, because they weren’t; they were flat on the bed. The other pressing physical sensation was of a steel band tightening around my ribcage, like the hoop holding together a whisky barrel. I could feel nothing else in my torso but that band. Most peculiar. Later I discovered this was my diaphragm. Our bodies, brilliantly evolved to survive, breathe in two ways – via the intercostal muscles around the lungs, and by the action of the diaphragm. The connections for each emerge from the spinal cord at different levels, like a safety net, a fallback system: I had lost the first but retained the second. My injury had paralysed my chest muscles and I was breathing solely by the rise and fall of my diaphragm. Had the break happened a few millimetres higher, both would have been knocked out and I’d have needed a tracheotomy and a machine to breathe for me. But I didn’t know this. I knew very little. I had no skin sensation at all … could only feel my head and back of my neck on the pillow. Just to test I was alive, and to release some distress, I chewed angrily at my bottom lip, the only autonomous action left to me. Just then I vividly appreciated the attraction of self-harm. Soon I could taste blood, but felt absolutely no pain. Why wasn’t it hurting? Only much later did I realise that this was the effect of the morphine.

Because my neck was unstable, they needed to secure the vertebrae at the front with a small metal plate. Before the operation, there were chats, which I only very vaguely remember, with both the anaesthetist and the neurosurgeon. The operation was tricky because my neck had swollen so much that from the ears down my neck flared out towards my shoulders, like some monstrous steroid-happy body-builder. It looked so grotesque Dave did not allow Dougie to visit me for several days.

‘You made an international prop forward look swan-necked.’

So swollen was my throat that the act of intubating me for the anaesthetic was risky and the operation, to plate the front of my sixth cervical vertebrae, took several hours. Afterwards they were worried that my throat would close up with the additional trauma, so they kept me on a ventilator to breathe for me, a big fat air tube in through my mouth and down into my lungs, and I was even more sedated. I couldn’t speak. A drip fed my body with fluid; a catheter drained it out. Of all this I was oblivious. I also had a nasal-gastric tube up my nose and down my throat, through which they passed the ground-up drugs into my stomach. When I was with-it enough to cry, the tears ran into my ears and soaked the tape securing the feeding tube to my face. I could do nothing about this; it was the same exquisite misery as when you have a streaming cold but are unable to blow your nose. The only thing to do was try not to cry. Christine had told me things would get better and she never let me down – I just had to take shelter in my head and hang on.

To enable me to communicate while on the ventilator, the nurses hung a laminated card with an alphabet by my right arm. After my fall, Pam, a dear friend of many years, rushed from France to support Dave. I have snatches of memory of them both at my bedside, with me conducting irritable, faltering mime conversations with them, spelling out the words by waving my right forefinger at the letters. My mind – I was convinced – was as clear as a bell; I became increasingly exasperated when they failed to keep up with my slow-motion spelling and grasp the words. They can’t be this stupid, I thought crossly. One day they arrived and said happy birthday – I remember feeling a genuine sense of shock and surprise. My birthday was 13 April, surely not yet. But I had lost control of time; I’d been on a ventilator for more than a week and the sound of its rhythm, sucking and sighing, the persistent beep-beep-debeepbeep behind my head, had become the vortex of my entire life. My real world was inside the apricot. I waited, while the scene changes came thick and fast and the only constant was the machine, sighing and pinging apologetically.

Some nights, my bed was in the corner of a room that was being used for a party. They’d opened an Indian restaurant on the ward. There were vast buffets of curry spread out, people came and went, laughing. My bed kept being moved. Every day I was in a different room and strived to orientate myself. One night I had a bird’s-eye view overlooking a city, which lay across the curve of a bay. In the dark the lights of the city were twinkling, reflecting across the water. Another night, workmen, wearing high-vis jackets, were digging up the floor around me. Then my bed split in two across the middle and I was sliding down into the gap, suspended over dark, deep water, and I kept crying out to the nurses to tell them I was going to drown, but they didn’t understand. One nurse was lying on the floor behind my bed snogging a workman. Another night, I was kidnapped – strangers used a fork-lift truck to take me, on my bed, out the back of the ward and stow me in a horsebox. They wanted me to go back to the cross-country course and testify that my accident was not their fault.

A family game from childhood haunted me, the rhyme shimmying around in my head. It had come from my mother, who played it in Northern Ireland in the 1920s on the way to picnics on the beach, sometimes Tyrella, sometimes Ballywalter. We played it too, obediently, on the back seat of the car. You crossed two fingers from one hand, opened a little, over the two fingers on the other hand, creating a neat, square, inviting hole in the middle. As you offered the gap to the person next to you, you chanted:

Put your finger in the crow’s nest

The crow’s not at home

He’s gone to Ballywalter to gather shelly stones …

And then, squeezing on the other person’s finger, you shouted:

He’s coming

He’s coming

He’s nipping!

He’s nipping!

And you squeezed and squeezed, and held them, trapped tight by the finger, until they squealed for mercy.

At one of the ward rounds, in a window of comparative sanity, I remember meeting my consultant for the first time. Mariel Purcell was young, a tall cool stylish Irishwoman, with long dark hair she wore loose. She wore sassy dresses and high heels. ‘We are keeping you on the ventilator,’ she told me. ‘You have a lung infection and we are giving you antibiotics.’ Later, when I was off the ventilator, she was more expansive. It was pneumonia. I was strangely thrilled, in the way you are when you’re a kid and you’re going to have something to boast about when you go back to school. It was like being eight again, falling off roller skates and cracking a bone in your wrist. But at that point I was just frustrated. I’m fine, I tried to tell her with my eyes. The purgatory of the ventilator jammed in my mouth was becoming unbearable. I wanted it taken out. I pleaded with the nurses on my alphabet card. W-H-E-N? T-O-D-A-Y? At the weekend, they said. Soon. They lied. Lied repeatedly and prodigiously. The weekend never came. Day followed day. I inhabited some lost bit of space, some cul-de-sac on the dark side, all alone, floating along in my own ghastly spaceship of tubes and sighs. Beep-beep-debeepbeep. Beep-beep-debeepbeep.

I remember when they took the ventilator out – there was an unpleasant rippling sensation as the corrugated ridges of the tube were withdrawn from my throat, I had a fleeting vision of those perforated blue drainage pipes, the kind you dig into the soil of your garden. Then it was over and I was drawing in my own air, could talk again. My jaw and my ears ached, despite the morphine, my tongue so dry and fat I was barely decipherable. I pleaded for a drink, but they refused: it was still too dangerous for me to try swallowing. At one point Christine moved across my line of vision, dragging a machine on wheels.

‘You don’t know this, but today is a very good day, a very significant day for you.’

I looked quizzical.

She smiled her shy smile. ‘I’m taking the ventilator away from your bed space. You’re making real progress.’

At some point during that time, on a morning ward round, the doctors clustered inside the curtains round my bed and asked to do an anal examination. What I didn’t know was that this was the test to see how paralysed I was. The spinal cord ends in the perineal area, your bottom, and if you have sensation in your anus, it indicates how badly injured your spine is.

I was rolled on my side and they stood behind me. Can you feel that? Can you clench your bottom? No, I said. Nothing. They were silent, grave. I decided, in my morphine haze, to be a good hostess and fill the silence to cover up any embarrassment. After all, my body was the party, wasn’t it? ‘That’s the nicest anal examination I’ve ever had,’ I said in a jolly more-tea-vicar sort of voice, trying to lighten the atmosphere, turning my head so I could grin at them. I didn’t understand why they didn’t smile back.

The severity of a spinal injury is measured on a scale developed by the American Spinal Injury Association – the ASIA impairment scale. If you are Asia A, you’re completely buggered, basically: you have no power or sensation preserved below the injury to your spine. You will not recover function. Asia B, you have sensory feeling below the injury but your muscles don’t work. Asia C, some muscles do work but they’re very weak. Asia Ds have muscles, at least half of which have reasonable strength and they can walk. And Asia Es, lucky creatures, are normal healthy people.

I was diagnosed Asia A. Completely buggered. They didn’t tell me that. Not then.

Only the ward was real. My other life had receded to some distant place. My sanity, my compensation, was to pretend I was indeed that war correspondent on the front line, compelled to start recording this crazy story, to make sense of it to myself. Besides, it was good copy. I was finding things quite fascinating, in a rather grotesque way. By writing, I figured, I could justify my absence to my bosses at my newspaper, The Times. It’s peculiar how much of a priority this felt at the time – a measure, I suppose, of my desperate determination to hold onto something familiar and re-establish some control. Work could save me, keep me viable. At the same time, it represented escape from emotional anguish. Very few things made chronological sense to me. Unbeknownst to me, Dave came every day. Other visitors were discouraged by the hospital and he was like a Rottweiler keeping people at bay. Later I heard some of the details of events outside: Dougie had been away on an Easter ski trip in the Alps and apparently it took him a couple of days to get home; his mates performed a heroic drama-filled dash to get him to Geneva. I honestly don’t remember the moment when I first saw him at my bedside; grief and morphine have kindly erased the memory of the encounter. I hope he has forgotten too: but even now, years later, I am unable to ask him, in case I reawaken the pain. In some dark corner, I have a terrible memory of trying to give him a thumbs-up gesture with my right hand as he left, and realising with shock that I couldn’t; my thumb wouldn’t move – simultaneously realising that he had perceived the same thing. At the time I was aware only of the unbearable hurt I had inflicted on my child … and him being extraordinarily brave and composed and trying to comfort me.

Dougie’s best friends from university, I much later discovered, came to stay at our home with him to comfort him during the first couple of weeks. I thought that was wonderful, that he had friends as fine as that. He was always more of a doer than a dreamer and I realised after my calamity that he was happiest when l asked him to do practical things; it was welcome distraction. When he knew I wanted to record what was happening to me, he brought in his Dictaphone. After he had gone I asked the nurses to place it beside me on the pillow and switch it on. I spent half an hour or so rambling gently about how I’d got here, trying to be professional, coherent. I had a job to do. A job to try and keep. I expressed anger at my own stupidity in falling off. Then I ran out of energy and the machine kept running, recording my breathing and the voices of the visitors in the bay opposite mine. Perhaps in my head that corner of the ward was still a curry shop at the time, or maybe by then I was at the stage of being convinced that a crowd of football casuals had got in and were trying to steal from my bedside cabinet. Shimmying between sanity and madness, I managed to summon the wit to ask a passing nurse to hit the off switch.

The next day Dougie took the Dictaphone and promised to email the recording to London.

They must have transcribed it and put something in the paper because at one point Su Pollard phoned the ward to talk to me, which was precisely the moment I knew my spaceship had landed on another planet. Su Pollard, for those under forty, is a wacky English character actress best known for a sitcom in the 1980s called Hi-de-Hi, which I had been aware of, as a young twenty-something, as a piece of cheesy middle-brow telly for my parents’ generation. A totem of its time, like Morecambe and Wise. Su is famous for eccentrically outsize glasses and a funny voice. Good-humoured Eighties kitsch. I had never met her in my life.

‘Call for you,’ said a nurse, holding the phone, eyebrows raised, a rather amused expression. ‘It’s Su Pollard.’

It must be a morphine moment. She would drift away in a minute.

‘THE Su Pollard?’ I said.

‘Sounds like her.’

‘But I don’t know her.’

‘It’s you she asked to speak to.’

Too random. Had to be opiates. The nurse held the phone to my ear and I had a short, apparently lucid conversation with someone who sounded exactly like the hapless holiday camp chalet maid Peggy Ollerenshaw whom I’d occasionally seen on TV thirty years ago.

Of all the people I least expected to discuss my plight with, it was Peggy Ollerenshaw. (© Getty Images/United News/Popperfoto/Contributor)

‘Your article moved me so much I had to phone you and speak to you. You’re very brave and I send you lots of love,’ she said.

‘That’s really sweet of you,’ I said lamely.

‘I’m rooting for you.’

‘Thank you.’

I still don’t know if it really happened or not.

At night, I experiment with the only bit of my body that still answers me, that has a glimmer of feeling. My right hand, weak and floppy and fast becoming numb, fumbles down past layers of exhausting obstacles, past sheets and tubes and swaddling gowns to reach the bare skin of my hip. Exploring in the dark. The one-way sensation of touching my own warm skin, and feeling nothing back, is most peculiar, as if it is an alien I am attached to. My fingers are not giving me trustworthy signals, because their nerve connections are damaged too, and retreating further into shock. What’s so devastating is that the skin I touch feels fleecy, beautiful, devastating; all these things at the same time. Because it belongs to me but it doesn’t belong to me. It’s someone else’s; it’s like reaching down and touching your lover’s body in the night. How peculiar. Four-fifths of my body has divorced me, but it’s still attached to me. I’m two people – me and the rest of me. I am eerily still … but inside I’m screaming and waving. I’m helpless as a beetle on its back, except my legs don’t even wave to express it. My name, it would seem, is still Melanie and I am a doubly-incontinent tetraplegic. Where do I go from here, seeing I have already blurted out something about Switzerland and Dr Purcell didn’t respond?

The movie Trainspotting was really accurate, you know. The stuff about coming off morphine, when your body is a seething rats’ nest and nothing will calm it. Although I didn’t realise what was happening at the time, because I didn’t even know I had been on morphine. All I knew was that it felt worse than anything I’d ever experienced. Even though my body was paralysed and insensate, I felt that it was jangling all over, itching, shivering – compelling me to cry out for relief, for death, for anything to make it stop. Inside my brain, restless leg syndrome multiplied a million times, ants crawled inside my skin, devouring me from within. One vivid day I became convinced my bedding was soaked. The mattress and bottom sheet were sloshing in icy water: I was certain I was freezing alive, shivering, nagging for more blankets.

‘I can’t give you any more blankets,’ said the nurse. ‘You’re not cold.’

‘Please, I’m freezing,’ I wheedled. ‘Please. Be kind.’

‘Kind?’ she said. ‘Heart like a swinging brick, me.’

She wasn’t joking. She was on duty one weekend morning when they were desperately short-staffed – they often were at weekends – and running very late, taking hours it seemed to me to attend to each of us high-dependency patients in turn, log-rolling us to wash us. The morphine withdrawal must have been at its peak, for I started crying out from the sensations in my head. Outwardly motionless on the bed, I was inwardly consumed by chemical distress and bewilderment. I could see them log-rolling someone else in the distance; although I must have been imagining it, because the curtains were always closed when they were washing someone. The room kept changing in shape. I shouted again but still no one came. Of all I had experienced after my accident, in its totality, that was my most desperate lonely moment, the point when I couldn’t go on. Like someone near death, my instinct was to shout for my mother. But she was dead, I knew that, so I shouted for my sister. She lived in France and I had not yet seen her, but I had regressed to childhood; my big sister would make it better. Lindsay would make them help me.

‘What d’you want?’

It was Swinging Brick and she was pissed off.

‘I feel awful,’ I said. ‘Please …’

‘We’re busy with other patients. We’ll get to you when we can.’

I never cried out again.

Lots of other patients vocalised their distress; I listened jealously to them screaming and yelling, calling out repeatedly. I was too repressed, too polite. Posh girl in bedlam. It’s only funny now, much later. How I used to envy them their release, these unseen uninhibited souls who raged aloud, who set loose their pain upon the world at large. I wished I too could wail and curse. The way I’d been brought up, you suffered in silence, you were never rude, never made a fuss. There was one voice I often heard shouting at night – a young argumentative male who roared with anger and rage, despair coming from the deepest, darkest torture chamber. ‘Why?’ he used to shout. ‘Why can’t I fucking move? Just tell me why.’

I asked Christine about him.

She sighed. ‘Oh, that’s Snafu. He’s one of mine too.’

‘Is he OK?’

‘He’s finding it hard.’ She sounded sad. She didn’t say any more. I would find out later for myself.

In general the cursing was epic. Legendary. When West of Scotland working man meets catastrophe all he needs is a victim to let rip upon. The spinal unit had a resident psychologist, a gentle New Zealander, a bit of a waffler who must have helped some people lost in the shock of paralysis, but I found him irritating. Everything he said seemed anodyne. But then who wouldn’t seem ineffectual, with the unenviable job of counselling people in the rawest of grief? We existed in a world beyond platitudes, beyond consolation. On the ward, I still couldn’t raise my head to see anything but I lay and listened, as would a blind person, to the voices and the noises.

The darkest of five-star entertainment came one afternoon when the psychologist was sent to counsel an older man who was refusing to cooperate with the nurses. Grunt was a tiny Glaswegian hardman, paralysed from the neck down, who was taking his plight as a personal insult and was either beyond or incapable of reason. He launched a verbal assault upon the hapless Kiwi, a tsunami of violent Glasgow kisses which no curtains round a bed could confine. His tirade was loud, sustained, fluent, uninhibited and utterly priceless: the hairdryer treatment, poetry of the utterly profane, articulating all the pain and fury inside him. Grunt was no doubt a talented curser already, but neuroscience shows that swearing actually helps people biologically to relieve extreme distress, and he was going for it. The caress of the damned, it occurred to me.

‘Fuck off. Who the fuck are you? Jesus fucking Christ what’s it to you? What the fuck do you fucking want? Yer fucking useless waste of space, yer fucking stupid idiotic cunt, nah, nah, get out of my fucking face yer fat cunt and leave me alone.’

‘Now I git it why you’re upsit,’ said the Kiwi, his voice high and mild.

‘Upset, you useless piece of shit? I’ll give yer fucking cunting upset, you bastard.’

‘B-b-but it would hilp to talk, chick out some thoughts, it’s nicissary for you to ixpress yoursilf …’

‘If I could fucking move I’d fucking express maself, I’d wring yer fuckin neck. Just get to fuck … right?’

‘Yis, Grunt … I understand.’

‘Away back to Australia yer stupid speccy bastard, yer useless cunt. Someone should have drowned ye at birth.’

And so it continued. Lying on my back, silently chortling, I was joined by one of the nurses, who dashed in behind my half-pulled curtain, stuffing her apron in her mouth to silence the giggles. We shared a wonderful private, silent moment of hilarity. It was the first time I had laughed since the accident.

Perhaps it was the third week in high dependency when I became aware lots of things were starting to happen. I’d regained the breathing; now it was basic stuff like drinking normally. Previously, much as I had pleaded, the specialist designated two-woman swallowing team, who came round and judged these things, had deemed me unfit to do so. They were the Fat Controllers of the gullet: at one point, they tested me with a sip of tea from a straw while they stood and watched, unsmiling, pens poised over clipboards. They seemed spectacularly humourless, these specialist teams. I sucked with a degree of arrogance. Of course I was fine! But much as I craved it, drinking was weirdly difficult. I found myself spluttering, coughing, and they shook their heads and took the tea away.

After that, I stopped pushing against the system. A few days later, they granted permission. A kindly staff nurse, to whom I had confided my fantasy about a latte, went and bought me one from the café. But what I had yearned for tasted acrid, strong, too hot. I turned instead, gratefully, to sucking weak, tepid, milky NHS tea – baby tea, they called it – through a straw, as she held the cup. I couldn’t believe that I couldn’t hold a cup by myself, but then I had not even started to address the size of physical loss which I faced. Denial piled up on itself; like bricks in a wall. I had nowhere near yet exhausted what Brian Keenan called the strategies of denial, convincing myself that if I could just take back control and start doing things for myself, then all would return to normal. I thought my hands would work if I really asked them to – of course they would! – so I asked the nurse to leave that day’s pile of greetings cards upon my bedclothes in front of me, rather than set them aside for Dave. Anyone can open an envelope! Surely! I tried to pick up the top card and watched with bewilderment as my fingers refused to grip. I didn’t even get to the stage of finding out they couldn’t rip paper. Then the cards slid slowly off my chest onto the floor and I watched them go, passive and helpless. So much for Get Well Soon.

My right wrist, though, had something still going for it. There was still strength there. The hand therapist Leslie had come to see me and, upon her instructions, Dougie went shopping and found me a travel cup with the handle open at the bottom. I could wedge my palm under the handle and lift a mug of that precious baby tea high enough up to drink through a straw – my first independent action. Likewise, when the Gullet Controllers had carried out Protocol Two Testing, Permission to Take Solids, I was given yoghurts and found I was just about able, by myself, to dig in a spoon and then transfer it to my mouth. The feeding tube, a ghastly uncomfortable thing that had been strapped to my cheek and down my throat for weeks, was withdrawn – a peculiar sensation as the nurses reeled the long, thin pipe out of my stomach via my nostrils, as if hauling in the garden hose. At the time I took little notice of such progression, unimpressed, impatient merely that I was so feeble at simple tasks. As I mocked and fretted, denial built. Only later, wiser and humbler, did I come to understand the extraordinary significance of this hand–mouth coordination, and how lucky I was: so many people with broken necks, several of them in the unit with me, could not do this basic task and were doomed to total dependency in order to survive. Others needed months of hand therapy, and specially adapted implements, to be able to drink by themselves or reach their mouths with food.

Time to sit up a little, another milestone. I was fitted with a white collar, like a Star Wars Storm Trooper, so that my neck was supported when my bedhead was raised a few degrees for the first time. This meant my first view of the new world. It also meant I saw my legs for the first time. Not good. Nothing – nothing at all – can prepare you for the appearance of those paralysed limbs, sprawled where you do not feel them to be on the bed, lifeless and somehow deeply misshapen. Someone else’s legs, not yours. I felt physically sick. They looked like the Guy Fawkeses we made as children for bonfire night, newspaper stuffed into an old pair of tights, puffy and lumpy in the wrong places, knees and ankles askew like scarecrows. These weren’t my legs at all; they were horrific, alien objects.

Perhaps that’s what happens when you face sudden, extreme disability as an adult: a sense of disconnect, of disbelief, which I can best describe as a compound fracture of the soul. Losing the use of one’s legs is profound, an event so fundamentally wrong that it catapults you through a door which no one else who has full function can possibly enter, into a place which often is the loneliest place in the world. Humans were not meant not to be able to walk; we are hard-wired to move, and at the deepest level we understand that in movement lies our ability to survive, to feed, to keep warm, to seek shelter, to procreate, to interact. Mobility is caveman stuff – we are programmed to understand, somewhere in our ancient genes, that those who cannot keep up are left behind to the wolves. When wild animals and primitive people fall ill, or fail with age, or grow lame, they drop back from the herd. It is natural. Those who cannot walk are left behind; they become isolated; their weakness overtakes them; they stop, lie down and die. Elephants do it; sheep do it; Native American people did it. By allowing the healthy to move on, unburdened, nature ensures the survival of nature. Walking therefore has a grip over our imagination, which helps to explains healthy people’s subconscious prejudice against wheelchairs, manifest in their impatience and irritation and sometimes open hostility. Civilisation in certain instances can desert us in a flash, because deep down it’s about life or death. Walk and win. Go off your feet and you’re history.

Long legs were good for skiing. In the Alps in the yuppie 1980s.

Now I’m sure everyone, should they ever be forced to part with them, would be partial to their own legs, but I’d always been particularly attached to mine and my initial feeling was absolute bewilderment. They weren’t slim or beautiful, my legs, but they were so unusually long they defined who I was: a thirty-six-inch inside measurement, longer than most men’s, making me over six feet tall without shoes on. I liked that. They gave me scope, shaped my identity: in their time they had pogoed to punk bands, skied down black runs, ran half marathons, walked up mountains and done crazy charity endurance stunts. This is humblebragging, isn’t it? I’m boasting, pathetically, about something I don’t possess any more. But it is the only way I can plot the scale of my loss. My legs were my closest allies, my ever-ready Amazonian accomplices, enabling me always to skip away from bores and bossiness and bureaucracy. Catch me if you can. All of which made my present situation even more difficult; the sense of bereavement even more profound. Without my legs, I was baffled. What now? I’m sure every sporty person, every individualist and risk-taker who has ever damaged their spine, feels the same. How did we bridge the imagination gap between what was, and what is? Who was this godforsaken new person who could not move? I did not know them. Nor did I know what they might become. Nor, quite frankly, did I have any intentions of finding out. I was going to get better.

Paralysis. The Venerable Bede prescribed a cure. ‘Scarify the neck after the setting of the sun and silently pour the blood into running water. After that, spit three times, then say: “Have thou this unheal and depart with it.”’

Paralysis. According to Wikipedia, defined by the loss of voluntary movement or motor function. A late Old English word, via Latin from Greek paralusis, from paraluesthai ‘be disabled at the side’, from para ‘beside’ + luein ‘loosen’. A term used figuratively from 1813.

Paralysis. According to the Egyptian physician Imhotep, 3,000 to 2,500 years BC: ‘If thou examinest a man having a dislocation in a vertebra of his neck, shouldst thou find him unconscious of his two arms and his two legs on account of it (and) urine drips from his member without his knowing it, his flesh has received wind, his two eyes are bloodshot … he has an emissio seminis which befalls his phallus, thou shouldst say concerning him, “an ailment not to be cured”.’ Give or take the phallus, old Imhotep was spot on.

Paralysis: all in all, a complete bastard of a word.

The human skeleton is designed to protect your core nervous system at all costs: the vertebrae link like chain-armour around it, grow bony spikes on the outside to foil intruders. The spinal cord is the wiring from central command and control; it is the engine of your free will; the power and pleasure of your flesh. When the spinal cord is damaged, it is indeed like a nuclear attack, the ultimate hit. Your body does everything it can in defence: it shuts down, retreats into itself, sends fluid to the site of the injury. Every resource available goes to the core and the extremities get forgotten about. The surface of your hands and feet become thickened and leathery with excess skin. Your heart rate slows, you start to retain litres of water and swell all over. The body remains in a state of suspended animation for four to six weeks, during which time accurate diagnosis of the extent of your injury can be impossible. Some weeks after my accident a deep ridge started to emerge from the cuticles at the bottom of my fingernails and slowly grew its way up: a tremor in my body’s rock stratum; a record of the geological seismic shock within me.

They don’t hang about on the NHS. As soon as my neck was judged suitably stable, they started to hoist me into a wheelchair. There is a set regime to protect the skin on your backside from pressure sores. You start with half an hour a day in the chair, then an hour. You build up. You carefully toughen your epidermis to its new weight-bearing role in life. Overnight, your buttocks have become the soles of your feet. When you accustom the skin to that fact, you’ve reached the magic goal in spinal rehab of ‘up as able’. You’re then allowed to sit in your chair all day. This process takes weeks.

Getting up was a ritual like preparing a medieval knight for battle, a fairly accurate reflection of the pace of life with a spinal injury – achingly slow, with progress measured on a scale too tiny for the able-bodied to contemplate. Understand the mammoth effort, you able-bodied, and you will never again take for granted the fast, fluid ability to sit up in bed, swing your legs over the side, and stand up. First, the nurses have to dress you. It feels like they are stuffing a giant sausage. No underwear, just the baggiest T-shirt and joggers you possess. I had asked the boys to bring me in one of my 10k race T-shirts and the nurses cut the neck to widen it. It was a symbol of who I really was and my statement of intent – a sporty person who shouldn’t be here. Mistaken identity. As reality bit, I felt embarrassed and threw it away.

Then they put on my high, choking collar and they rolled me on the bed into a hard white plastic shell, a back brace, to protect my lower-down fracture, until, trussed, I resembled a Storm Trooper even more closely. Why was I so miscast? Didn’t they realise I was actually, in my past life, a female Jedi warrior? The brace on the collar extended down my sternum; the body brace came up to meet it. Thrust up into the gap between, elevated like some spoof medieval embonpoint, came my breasts. They sprouted, insensate, near my chin.

‘Jesus, your tits look amazing,’ said a male colleague who came to visit me a couple of weeks later, ‘like they’re peeking over the garden fence.’ Never was there a less sensual image.

Only then, fully armoured, was it time to be hoisted into a chair. Lack of balance and orientation from weeks spent lying flat, plus the low blood pressure endemic to my injury, made this an ordeal. Seasick and head swimming, headsick and seaswimming, I was rolled to get the hoist cradle under me, and then lifted up to dangle for all the world like a dead cow in an abattoir; whereupon they lowered me into a wheelchair, rocking me forward and back until my weight was centralised. The whole process was exhausting, lengthy and discombobulating. That first time, I cried out in fear – I had a terrifying sensation that my head was loose and was going to fall off backwards, so the physiotherapists fashioned a temporary cardboard extension to the chair back to comfort me. They told me my neck was completely stable and things would get easier but I was not convinced. Inside, I screamed at the indignity and the horror of it: outwardly, I put on a grim smile and told myself sternly that this was progress. This was how to get better. First goal, get used to the chair. Then begin the recovery.

Once in the chair, I could resume some adult responsibility. My immediate boss at The Times, Magnus Linklater, had been one of the very few allowed in to visit soon after the accident. He had told me not to worry, and kissed me on the forehead. The kiss struck me as terribly kind but rather worrying. Was I really so ill? It was evident to all but me. Then Anne Spackman, the comment editor, who told me she had wept as she transcribed that initial tape recording, flew up from London. I showed her how, now I was up, I could use a laptop with one finger. I couldn’t grasp why everyone seemed so surprised about my determination to try and get working again. Anne was followed by the editor of The Times at the time, James Harding. The nurses arranged for me to meet him in the conference room. Hazily fearful, I think I expressed my insecurities about the future. He could not have been more supportive. Could I continue to write, I asked hesitantly. The professional editor in me, despite the madness of the morphine, smelt a source of good copy. Of course I could, he said. In fact, he wanted a weekly column about my recovery, to be published in the Saturday magazine. My heart, I remember, leapt.

‘The only thing is, we don’t know what to call it.’

‘Oh, I’ve already thought about that. What about “Spinal Column”?’

Did he know, this most human, warm, sophisticated man, that he was handing me a precious lifeline? Not just in terms of my family’s future, but of my psychological survival. Here was a chance for me to create my own biographical narrative, to write towards some kind of redemption.

Labouring under many illusions, and feeling quite breezy – I do think the opiates were largely to blame at that stage – I then tackled my first session in the gym, which swiftly brought home the brutal realities of my situation. The cruel parallels of two worlds were beginning to impact on me, old and new crushing me between them: the gyms as I had been familiar with them, Lycra-ed temples of beautiful fit bodies in motion; and gyms, paralysis-style, where broken, frozen people were propped upright, in various stages of disorientation and bewilderment. Plus, there were unseen horrors to discover. I was about to have a crash course in the reality of paralysed bowels. As two physiotherapists used a hoist to lift me from wheelchair to specialist rehabilitation plinth, gravity struck. My bowels suddenly and involuntarily emptied. The only way I knew was by the sound and then the nostril-fluttering smell, which trapped me in a ghastly freeze of humiliation. What was the famous Nike gym slogan? Just do it? Well I just did. ‘Uh-oh,’ said the physiotherapist at the wrong end.

Too upset even to cry, I could only stammer my apologies, but they were totally nonplussed, matter-of-fact. Don’t worry, they said. Part of the job. Happens all the time. For me it seemed catastrophic. My first morning in the gym, when I had planned to hit the machines, develop sizeable shoulders and start my legs moving again, all within the space of an hour, and there I was being lowered, stinking, onto pads on the wheelchair, hurried back to the ward, laboriously hoisted again onto a bed of pads and rolled and cleaned like a baby. I was getting an inkling of what exactly paralysis entailed.

Over the next few days, I had a few more brief sessions in the gym when, thank God, my bowels did not betray me. The gym offered a welcome distraction from reflection. It wasn’t wise to sit and dwell on your plight. ‘Gym,’ one cynical spinal consultant once muttered, ‘is really only there to take people’s mind off things.’ You hid your despair as much as you could, if only because too many tears invoked a dreaded visit from the Kiwi psychologist, whose amiable ‘Have you got time for a chit?’ confirmed to you that matters really were wrist-slittingly terminal.

The gym in fact, became all-consuming. I got my first taste of what it would take to strengthen my arms and shoulders and returned to the ward furious at my own weaknesses. Where was bloody superwoman now? Ten minutes on the handcycle – where my hands were bandaged to a set of handles rotating at shoulder height – left me puffing as I would once have done running on a treadmill. Another big test was to propel myself for the first time in a chair. It sounds so easy but it was such a ridiculously difficult, slow-motion challenge, even just twenty yards down the hospital corridor, that when I made it back to the ward I was totally drained. My right hand, because my wrist was strong, was good at pushing but the left, a bunch of stone bananas, couldn’t grip the chair’s push rims and the imbalance made me zigzag across the lino. To compensate, I turned my left hand and elbow outwards from the shoulder, like an injured bird, and propelled with the edge of my palm and wrist. There was some residual power. Life, it occurred to me, in an image which would be repeated, honed to perfection over the next decade, was beginning to feel exactly like one of those sadistic TV game shows made famous by Clive James in the 1980s. It was the genre of humiliation as entertainment, which began on Japanese TV and in Britain evolved into I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. And that was exactly what it felt like for me, that world of crazed, pointless challenges tantalisingly just beyond the contestants’ grasp, the stream of filth and cockroaches cascading over their heads. And the celebs had it easy: they went home after a month.

With the ability to push a few yards came a tiny amount of autonomy and I started to explore the corridors around the high-dependency unit, like a toddler exploring her home. I would reach a big window, or a glass door, and peer out at the sky and a bit of treetop behind the roof. Sometimes I overreached myself and had to sit for five minutes, resting, at the corner until I was strong enough to turn. Five minutes … the most inconsequential flick of time in a spinal rehabilitation ward, where snails moved faster, their goals better defined. David Allan, the director of the spinal unit, the man who had clenched his fists in A&E for us to demonstrate what happened to my neck, had already warned me my rehab could take over a year. When he had said it I was aghast; now, reluctantly, I was beginning the process of understanding.

The awakening consciousness, the struggle to regain some form of control over my life, was encapsulated by my tragi-comic battle over my hair. When you break your neck, you are condemned to have the back of your head set on a pillow for, well, much of the rest of your life, and in the shorter term to wear collars for several months. My thick, wavy hair was problematic. Too short to be tied on the top of my head in a pineapple – the only place where it would be out of the way – but long enough to snag and mat like the fur of an abandoned dog. And it hurt. Being unable to raise my head was ordeal enough; having the elastic straps from oxygen masks to tug my scalp, tubes to stick in the hair, tears to dry in it and a collar to catch it made my daily existence more miserable. The back of my head became a hot, itchy torture and just as I had earlier obsessed about drinking a coffee, so I now fantasised about having my hair shaved like a GI. Cut it off, I commanded the most friendly nurses. They laughed at me. I blustered that I would do it myself, but of course in reality I wasn’t able to raise my head unaided, let alone lift my arms behind my head, or wield scissors. I ordered Dave to send for two of my most resourceful friends. I demanded my human right to have my hair cut.

But my husband, less impulsive than me, was concerned it would be against hospital rules or might injure my neck. He refused. I tried again with the nurses, they asked the ward sister, but she too had a touch of the Fat Controller about her, and forbade it – some specious excuse … health and safety, infection control, possibility I might sue them – and I lay and seethed with impotent fury as my Rastafarian mat hummed behind me on the pillow. I remember eyeing the sister balefully as she stood at the nurses’ station. Bloody jobsworth, hidebound by rules. Totally exasperated at my lack of control over something so trivial, I resorted to asking my consultant on the ward round. Dr Purcell raised a cool eyebrow and agreed a family member could cut it. So it was that my sister Lindsay, over from France and armed with a pair of blunt disposable NHS scissors, gave me the best cut of my life – hacked short and choppy up the back of my head. She insisted on leaving the length on top. The result was Simon Le Bon circa 1983 but I felt so free and cool and happy I couldn’t have cared less. My appearance, I had at least twigged, wasn’t going to matter that much for a while, if ever again. I had bigger priorities ahead.

Around then the doctors finally took me off tramadol and I experienced my first proper sleep, morphine-free. I remember waking with a sense of profound joy, awash with the novelty of feeling deeply rested. Unbelievably restored, at peace. All traces of the orange cable-stitch wool had gone away and the sunlight was streaming through the thin patterned curtains around my bed, a pattern of blue oblongs and squares which I had, it seemed, been studying and reinterpreting for years. For the first time the material looked fresh, normal – just cloth – not an omen, or pictures, or a metaphor, or a maze.

It was time to move into the unknown.