Never Say Die. Lynne Barrett-Lee
idea took hold and wouldn’t go away. She’d been right; the ‘me’ to whom she’d referred no longer existed. The ‘me’ who lay inert on a bed in Ward Six was a different animal entirely. The young girl who had had to have her clothes cut off her body for surgery had now become someone who needed her clothes cut up to put on her, to make the dressing process easier. A small thing—an eminently practical thing, obviously—but one that seemed a metaphor for everything I’d lost.
And also gained. I didn’t get many opportunities to see myself as I now was, but the business of dressing and undressing afforded depressing glimpses of how much things had changed. I’d always had as many self-esteem issues as the next girl—maybe more—but one thing about which I’d always been proud was my svelte stomach, which was concave. Less than a month after the accident and it was no more. Looking down, lying down, it had been replaced by a hillock. A hillock that made me look several months pregnant, the legacy of a body that no longer moved and muscles that were no longer toned. It was this aspect to which John (understandably stuck for small talk) alluded as soon as he arrived. As memorable comments go, his was a gem—one I knew even as he spoke that I’d never forget.
‘Where,’ he asked, ‘has your flat stomach gone?’
It was an inauspicious start to an inauspicious visit. Our conversation limped on, increasingly pointless and depressing, and he never came to visit again.
If my few visitors (and they were indeed few; travelling by public transport from Port Talbot to Llandaff was complex and expensive) were a welcome respite from the relentless tedium that made up the days, the nights were anything but. I’d never been to one, but I felt sure that if Ward Six at night time were in need of description then the tag ‘fish-market’ would suit it very well. And that wasn’t just because of the all-pervasive odour. The noise and activity simply never seemed to stop; it was cacophony central every night.
Much of this was only to be expected. Unable to move ourselves, we had to be turned and attended to regularly, but unlike Neath, where I was seen to quietly, calmly and with consideration for sleeping patients, it seemed that in here noise simply didn’t matter. Although the nursing station was well away at the far end of the male section of the ward, I could still hear everything they did. And if, by some miracle, the noise generated by loud conversations, doors banging and what sounded like a banquet’s-worth of clattering crockery failed to keep me awake, there was also the continual problem of us. As spinal patients, none of us—ridiculously—were able to reach our call buttons (day or night) because they were positioned out of reach on the wall behind our beds. We had no choice, therefore, but to shout for attention. And then, of course, at each other, for having been woken up.
Such sleep as I did get in the early days at Rookwood was visited by dreams, good and bad. Then, as is still the case now, I often dreamed I was walking. Better still, I sometimes dreamed I was flying: over green fields, blue rivers and lakes and mountains in bright sunshine, swooping up and down on the currents of air. I’d feel so free I would hate waking up. But then, also as now, most of my dreams were nightmares; the anxious awareness of footsteps behind me, a malevolent presence I could never identify, and the fear of being unable to run away. The worst nightmare of all, though, was waking every morning, seeing the ward and having to face my situation again.
But however the machinations of my unconscious mind might have helped or hindered the process of coming to terms, nothing was to have as much impact in those early days as what I was soon to start seeing around me.
Up until now, I’d been cocooned in my own little bubble of perfect, unique misery, but Rookwood was soon to remind me that I wasn’t the only one to whom fate had been cruel, that there were people who were worse off than me. About six weeks after my own admission, another road traffic victim was admitted. She was nineteen and had also been knocked off a motorbike, sustaining head and neck injuries. Consequently, she couldn’t speak, and though she could move her arms and legs, those movements were spastic and uncontrolled.
Like me, Bridget had a ‘before’ picture on her locker, one of a staggeringly beautiful young woman, with long black curls that fell almost to her waist. Much as the contrast in my own situation hurt me, it was as nothing to hers. Her face was now horribly contorted and dribbling, and the glossy curls had all been cropped. What was worse, to my mind, was that her mother had a mirror and seemed constantly to feel the need to show her the state of her appearance—to this day I have no idea why.
It wasn’t just looks that mattered either. One of my most enduring memories of that time was the boy across the ward who had lost the use of both his arms and his legs, so didn’t even have the luxury of two functioning limbs.
One day, he asked my mother if she would scratch his nose for him and this upset her so much that, once she’d done so, she had to leave the ward in a hurry so that he wouldn’t see her tears. The memory today still brings a lump to her throat.
Slowly, then, I began to take stock and take heart. There was really so much that I could do for myself; my situation could be so much worse. In comparison with these people I was lucky. Me? Lucky? How could I possibly feel that? I didn’t know, I didn’t care, I was simply grateful that I did.
I just hoped the feeling wouldn’t go away.
While it was clear that my walking days were definitely over, it was still important that my back had the best chance of healing straight and strong. This mattered not only for posture but also for balance; I had a whole body to lug through life with me but only half the usual amount of sensation. The first six weeks of my time in Rookwood, therefore, were spent lying flat in my bed while the bones in my back healed in the correct alignment, supported by the operative rods.
During this time, as had been the case since the day of the crash, I had a catheter. This was not, however, considered ideal. The plan was that during the last two weeks of this stage the catheter would be removed and ‘bladder training’ would be undertaken, in preparation for what would be the next stage of my rehabilitation: getting myself up into a wheelchair.
How this training was to be achieved was a mystery. How did you train something you couldn’t feel? The theory, as explained to me, was simple. A proportion of spinally injured people, apparently, had ‘reflex’ bladders; it was hoped that once the catheter was removed, mine—whether I could feel it or not—would somehow re-learn what to do. That, given time and training, it would hang on to its contents until I prompted it to do otherwise. The regime, based on this, was simple. I was to drink at least three litres of fluid a day, trust in the miracle of autonomic physiology, and then, on the hour, to ‘express’ it.
The idea made me feel like a heifer. I must drink, drink and drink—three litres is a LOT—and then, once a bed pan had been shoved underneath me, I must make contact with my bladder by means of rhythmically tapping my lower tummy below my belly button, on the hour, to kickstart the process of emptying.
This wasn’t the load of mystical hogwash it seemed (no crazy chanting or joss sticks were required) but something that apparently had its roots in proper science. The theory was that the physical stimulation that the tapping produced would, more often than not, be successful. Tap it, it seemed, and you could turn on the tap, and your expressing would be a success.
There are lots of things that make the average adolescent want to curl up and die. But for most teenage girls, already beset by insecurities about looks, hairstyles, choice of clothes, numbers of friends and so forth, any angst that came under the umbrella ‘bodily functions’ was perhaps the richest seam of trauma a girl could ever mine. Bodily functions were personal. Private. Going to the toilet, particularly the nonwee variety, just wasn’t, as I suspect was and is the case for most women, something one generally shared. Something no human would ever want to share. Indeed, much of my and my friends’ time was spent in convincing each other, particularly boys, that we didn’t have bodily functions at all. If—horror—we had to use a loo in a public place for ‘number 2s’ we would stuff half a roll of loo paper