Читать книгу The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly - Jean-Dominique Bauby - Страница 9

I HAD NEVER SEEN so many white coats in my little room. Nurses, orderlies, physiotherapist, occupational therapist, psychologist, neurologist, interns and even the department head – the whole hospital had turned out for the event. When they first burst in, pushing the device ahead of them, I thought it meant that I was being ejected to make room for a new patient. I had already been at Berck a few weeks, and was daily drawing nearer to the shores of awareness, but I still could not imagine any connection between a wheelchair and me.

No one had yet given me an accurate picture of my situation, and I clung to the certainty, based on bits and pieces I had overheard, that I would very quickly recover movement and speech.

Indeed, my roving mind was busy with a thousand projects: a novel, travel, a play, marketing a fruit cocktail of my own invention. (Don’t ask for the recipe; I have forgotten it.) They immediately dressed me. ‘Good for the morale,’ pronounced the neurologist in sententious tones. And in truth I would have been pleased to trade my yellow nylon hospital gown for a checked shirt, old trousers and a shapeless sweater – except that it was a nightmare to put them on. Or rather to watch the clothes manipulated, after endless contortions, over these uncooperative deadweight limbs, which serve me only as a source of pain.

When I was finally dressed the ritual could begin. Two attendants seized me by the shoulders and feet, lifted me off the bed and dumped me unceremoniously into the wheelchair. I had graduated from being a patient whose prognosis was uncertain to an official quadriplegic. They didn’t quite applaud, but they came close. My caretakers made me travel the length and breadth of the hospital floor to make certain that the seated position did not trigger uncontrollable spasms, but I was too devastated by this brutal downgrading of my future hopes to take much notice. They had to place a special cushion behind my head: it was wobbling about like the head of one of those African women upon removal of the stack of rings that has been stretching her neck for years. ‘You can handle the wheelchair,’ said the occupational therapist with a smile intended to make the remark sound like good news, whereas to my ears it had the ring of a life-sentence. In one flash I saw the frightening truth. It was as blinding as an atomic explosion and keener than a guillotine blade. They all left.

As three orderlies laid me back down, I thought of movie gangsters struggling to fit the slain informer’s body into the boot of their car. The wheelchair sat abandoned in a corner, with my clothes tossed over its dark-blue plastic back-rest. Before the last white coat left the room I signalled my wish to have the TV turned on low. On screen was my father’s favourite quiz show, Letters and Numbers. Since daybreak an unremitting drizzle had been streaking the windows.