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Ink in the Blood
A Hospital Diary
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Now I saw that it just grew there. It was planted by fantasy. If a whole story is a fantasy, why must logic operate within it? The word ‘planted’ started another story, called ‘Chlorophyll’. By morning, I had the best part of a collection. But when I sat up and tried to write them down, my handwriting fell off the lines. I kept trying to fish it up again, untangle the loops and whorls and get them back to the right of the margin, and when I think of my efforts then, I think of them in the present tense, because pain is a present-tense business. Illness involves such busywork! Remembering to breathe. Studying how to do it. Plotting to get your feet on the floor, inching a pillow to a bearable position. First move your left foot. Then your other foot, whatever they call it . . . any other foot you’ve got. Let us say you’re swaying on your feet and sweating, you think you might fall down or throw up – you have to rivet your attention to the next ten seconds. After the crisis is over, time still behaves oddly. It takes a while for the hour to stretch out in its usual luxurious fashion, like unravelling wool. Until you are cool, settled and your vital signs good, time snaps and sings like an elastic band.
When I write my diaries I talk to myself with an inward voice. For the next week I am conscious that my brain is working oddly. Imagine you were creating all your experience by writing it into being, but you were forced to write with your wrong hand; you would make up for the slow awkwardness by condensing phrases, like a poet. In the same way, my life compresses into metaphor. When I sit up and see the wound in my abdomen, I am pleased to see that it has a spiral binding, like a manuscript. On the whole I would rather be an item of stationery than be me. It is as if my thoughts are happening not inside my head but outside me in the room. A film with a soundtrack is running on my right side. It keeps me busy with queries based on false premises. ‘Is it safe if I drink this orange juice?’ But I blink and the orange juice isn’t there. Therefore I study reality carefully, the bits of it within reach. For a while I think I have grown a new line on one of my hands, a line unknown to palmistry. I think perhaps I have a new fate. But it proves to be a medical artefact, a puckering of the skin produced by one of the tubes sewn in to my wrist. We call those ‘lines,’ too. The iambic pentameter of the saline stand, the alexandrine of the blood drain, the epidural’s sweet sonnet form.
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