Melanie Reid - The World I Fell Out Of

In between interruptions, we learnt to endure the passive tyranny of those long hours, where no limbs stirred, no sheets rustled. These were not normal wards. You have no idea how eerily morgue-like paralysed patients are in bed when they cannot move. Nurses are notoriously superstitious; there are rich stories of ghostly scares on night-time wards with darkened corridors. Delphinium, one of the regular night shift, told me of the fright she had when a patient, paralysed from the neck down and normally as still as a corpse, sat bolt upright as she passed, the result of a sudden, unexpected spasm. Muscle spasms could happen, but rarely as extreme as that.

‘I was like, waaaaaaah. Nearly crapped myself,’ she said. ‘He didn’t even wake up.’

Night time. Even if our bodies were by necessity quiet, our minds were their own torture chambers, forever churning the random nature of the accidents, the screaming bad luck which had damned us to stillness. Why us? Why me? And often, if we did dream, our dreams tormented us by putting us back on our feet again. Dreams so vivid that when we woke, it was especially desolate to rediscover reality. One night I dreamt that Vitamin D tablets were a miracle cure for spinal injury, and because I already took them as supplements I was able to walk again. There I was up on my feet, walking unsteadily round the ward helping my fellow patients reach things from their bedside tables, and waiting for the doctors to arrive so I could tell them the good news. I woke up, convinced it wasn’t a dream, fighting a sickening lurch of hope and then disappointment before cold logic kicked in. I remember one night I even said to myself in my subconscious, now don’t be fooled, this is a dream, you can’t really walk again, and then I dreamt that to test it, I had woken up, and it was true – I could actually walk again. Double-dip dreaming. A plot within a plot. But of course everything remained within the parameters of the dream. Waking that morning for real was particularly cruel.

Always in the night there were the needy patients, the ones who became queasy or overcome with pain, or indeed were just desperate for human contact to break their desolation. We had call buzzers on wires; paraplegics had theirs on the bedside table, because they could reach. Tetraplegics with some arm function had them draped across their bedclothes, as in my case. Those who could move only their heads and shoulders had them by their cheek, so they could turn their head and press them. I hated using mine, but many people didn’t have the same hang-up. There were also the confused souls who couldn’t locate their buzzers, and they would just cry out, ‘Nurse … nurse …’ Of course the nurses couldn’t hear, but the rest of us in the room would be woken, and someone in a nearby bed would press their buzzer instead.

Doobie had a habit of rushing in, crying theatrically: ‘Who’s buzzing NOW ?’ and striding crossly towards the patient with the flashing call button above their beds.

‘It’s Elsie,’ the buzzer-ringer would stammer, defensively. ‘She can’t press her buzzer.’

And we lay awake and listened to poor wee Elsie being administered to, because we had no choice. One night, when I was on a further course of antibiotics for a lung infection, I woke with an overwhelming need to vomit. I pressed my buzzer and heard for the first time the distinctive slap, slap of a footfall I would come to dread.

‘What is it?’ she said. Not kindly.

‘I’m sorry but I feel really sick,’ I gasped. I was panicking inside. This had never happened before. I didn’t even know if I could be sick.

She said nothing, but turned on her heel and disappeared. Soon she returned with a papier-mâché NHS sick bowl, the grey bowler hat of despair. Her body language was contemptuous. She thrust, almost threw, it at me, and walked away, leaving me to be sick alone. She didn’t say a word.

It was my first introduction to Nettles.

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