4
Wolfson
After several months of being in a coma whilst at the Atkinson Morley Hospital, Tim finally came to visit me when I had regained consciousness.
“Hi Chris, Chris hi it’s me Tim”
This was what I heard coming from the edge of my bed with flashes of Tim coming into view. At first I wasn’t sure if it was a dream or not. When I realised it wasn’t a dream I sat bolt upright.
“Chris are you hungry, can you hear me, are you alright?”
It was like he was asking twenty questions all at once. I tried to talk but nothing came out. Tim called a nurse over.
“What am I doing wrong? He doesn’t answer me? I don’t know how to communicate with Chris, what do I do?” Tim said sounding very stressed.
The nurse seemed to ignore Tim’s pleas for help, coming over to me and addressing me rather than Tim.
“Gosh Chris you had a sore ride, how are you? Can you tell me how you are?”
All I could do was make an involuntary noise, which she responded to.
“Don’t worry Chris you’re in safe hands, can you nod your head for yes and shake your head from side to side for no?”
I tried with all my strength but I had lost my ability to move my head and neck.
“Ok Chris let’s try something else, what about blinking twice for yes and once for no?” she asked.
I blinked twice.
“Oh good, well done Chris, you are back with us.”
The nurse went away for about 10 minutes to continue discussing my case with the doctor, leaving Tim to talk to me about football. He hoped that by doing so he would get a response.
“Which out of these football teams is your favourite?” said Tim, showing me a football annual.
“Liverpool?”
I didn’t respond.
“What about Chelsea?”
Again I didn’t respond. I wish I could have said to Tim that I didn’t like football much. Instead, thinking he was being kind he brought me a load of football videos for me to watch. Watching them kept me busy up to till 9pm that night; I have little interest in it anyway.
The next day I woke up to the noise of someone using a food blender, presumably to churn someone’s breakfast up. To me it sounded more like someone trying to kick-start a Harley Davison it was so loud. I heard the kettle in the ward kitchen click on and off five times before I even got to see a nurse on the ward again!. Later that day Angie and Val from a rehab unit in Chailey, close to where I lived came up to see me to discuss the possibilities of me going there once I was well enough. Angie piped up.
“I wonder how long Pat will be in the lane.”
That was obviously a joke, which I hadn’t got to grips with yet, but it turns out that Pat was a smoker and she used the lay-by in the lane outside the rehab unit to have a crafty cigarette. So when Pat was down the lane it always meant she was having a cigarette. Pat later joined Angie and Val next to my bedside once she had satisfied her craving. Pat was to be my future physiotherapist from Chailey. She spent ten minutes or so studying my physique, it was clear that I wasn’t ready to move onto Chailey just yet, when she said.
“I’ll have to get back to you in a month or so”.
It was about ten minutes after they had gone, when this random couple male and female, who looked to be in their late twenty’s early thirty’s, came up to my bed and pulled chairs round to the side of it sitting down. It couldn’t get much worse for me than being beaten by two fully grown adults. It started with punches and then they stood on me, it felt like, my head was in pain for the rest of the night and I’m not sure what it ended with. The clock had struck quarter past eleven when I next came to. I stayed up the rest of the night wondering why they had come and attacked me without even a word of explanation.
Looking back I now know that this was my active imagination being corrupted by the severity of my brain injury and the pain my body was experiencing.