HICKATHRIFT PRESS

Ian Corns is Head of English at King Edward VII School in King’s Lynn. He recently swapped the familiarity of the classroom for an 18-day stay in the town’s Queen Elizabeth II Hospital –  realising some uncomfortable home truths along the way

I don’t know if you’ve ever reached that rather unsavoury and frankly grim juncture at which you suddenly realise you can no longer trust your legs to do the simplest of jobs – like support your body. These are the legs that you’ve taken entirely for granted all your life, in my case across 56 reckless years of spontaneity. In all honesty, such a realisation of my own vulnerability will never leave me. In fact, it has to be said, I’ve framed it, encased it and pinned it to the grey wall of my mind, where it will always be on display. No matter the haziness and fogginess induced by time, that most deceptive of antagonists, personal susceptibility will forever remain a beacon of awareness. Things change. We’ve always known it, but I suspect none of us have ever been quite ready for the hammer blow that reality serves up.

The truth is when you’ve been admitted to hospital and wheeled in a bed up to a ward, your dignity and humanity are already being stripped away. Upon arrival at my berth, I became instantly aware of my fellow inmates examining me, analysing my entry into their established world and trying to work out, from first impressions, if I had a chance of benefiting the sterile ambience which stood tall all around.

“I hope you’re not a snorer,” said the guy sat up in his bed directly opposite, his voice sounding deep and hollow in an intrusive, echoey way. “The last bloke we had snored the place down. It was like the walls were shaking. None of us got any sleep.”

I love a good comeback, the type where you put someone firmly in their place, this becoming the prescribed lane in which they must continue to run until told otherwise. And it would be easy for me to come up with an absolute ‘corker’ of a put-down for the sake of this article – one where I ‘bend it’ a bit and ‘own’ the room from the outset, bathing in immediate respect. Something like – “How do you know you don’t snore?” (Ans: “Because my partner tells me I don’t” – Me: “Oh, you do have a partner then?”) or “Aah, you must be President of the Welcoming Committee.” But this, unfortunately, would be wide of the mark. My weary, watery reply amounted to nothing more than: “Erm, I’ve been told I do snore, but I’ll try and manage it while I’m in here.”

“I suppose no one really knows what they do when they’re asleep,” he replied thoughtfully, as if trying to mitigate my inconvenient arrival from the perspective of a one-man kangaroo court amid key intentions of being ‘reasonable’. The rest of the infirm party peered out from their ghostly alcoves, silent.

Having been pumped full of intravenous medication downstairs in the ‘Same Day Emergency Centre’ and told that I’d be kept in for the foreseeable future due to sepsis, it would be candid to state that I was a long way from finding my feet (so to speak). The ‘Sister’, a woman of real authority, immediately handed me some hope, before wrenching it away, God-like, from beneath my nose: “This is a Short Stay Ward,” she stated (my eyes must have lit up), “but our record is one and a half months. And even then, the patient was relocated to another department.”

With my heart already floundering somewhere in the basement of the building, a sudden realisation further shrouded the day in melancholy. I saw there were no tvs on the ward, the reason – upon enquiry – being that this was the only block where reception was not up to scratch. And things were about to get much worse…

“At mealtimes,” said another nurse, “we need to know what we can and can’t feed you. Do you have any allergies?”

“I’m fine with all foods apart from every kind of nut. I have a nut allergy.”

She took out a marker pen and strode down the side of my bed, focusing her attention on the whiteboard behind me. I looked at the patient boards across the way (names changed for privacy):

“Tim Smith (preferred name: Bob)”

“Billy Andrews (avoid penicillin)”

“Michailov Dzertsky” (nil by mouth)”

Once the scribbling behind me had stopped and the nurse had departed, I took a quick, tentative look at my own credentials on display for the world to see.

“Ian Corns (no nuts)”

Disappointed, I felt a coin of sweat slither down my forehead. I glanced over at Tim, opposite. He seemed to be somehow amused. Though he said nothing.

When you’re battling ‘the shivers’ due to a high temperature, and I mean shivers which overwhelm your whole body so that most movement becomes involuntary, it’s tempting to request numerous blankets to form a cocoon of comfort. This is definitely something which I’d insisted on and – at least as an introductory ‘offer’ – the staff had acceded to. That was until one particular ‘old-school’ nurse (who had retired but then “returned to the profession on account of boredom”) saw what was going on.

“What are you doing? Your temperature is sky high. Get those sheets off. You need to be cooling down, not heating up.”

To my dismay, she started opening all the windows next to my bed. “If it were allowed, I’d take you out into the courtyard and hose you down with cold water,” she continued. “Seriously. You’ve got to break this temperature thing. Break it!”

I have no idea if this kind of strategy can be found in current nursing manuals, or indeed if it has ever been fundamental to medical training sessions/seminars. I sort of doubted it and still do, though her blunt, combative approach had resonated with me entirely. I appreciated it. It made me feel as if I was going into battle at least with some back-up.

The next night, in anticipation of the usual ghoulish visitation of the Shivers (via a temperature in the forties), it was clear the veteran nurse in question had written up some handover notes and insisted everyone read them. At 7.30, just as darkness outside was descending and my friends, the pigeons, began to blur like vague ink stains on an adjacent roof, a nurse arrived to open the windows. The draught immediately engulfed me. My winged companions flew off in a brief riot of fervent, feverish flapping, before aligning and arcing first symmetrically, then in tandem – soft and languid now on their way to roost somewhere beneath the sinister sky. Uncomfortable and instantly chilly, I quietly considered how much I envied them.

“We need to be ready,” said the nurse conspiratorially, before applying cold wet flannels to my armpits and against my chest. Then, she produced four large hospital towels, each one having been doused in water prior to her wringing them out. As the first waves of reaction to my ‘spiking’ temperature hit me, and my emaciated body undulated, she started wrapping me, from shoulders to feet, in expansive layers of damp cloth. I was being mummified. And for that night at least, my temperature was pulled into line, and I rejoiced at the fact my human spirit had somehow been preserved.

If I had to steer this article towards a meaning/purpose, other than an emotive narrative, I could definitely praise the NHS. This is clear. I could furthermore use it to examine humanity or to document my observations of leadership in another profession. Perhaps these have already emerged implicitly. My intention, though, has only ever been to broach the one thing that visited me time and again, an extension perhaps of my already affected literary mind courtesy of, say, the Inspector in “An Inspector Calls” and Charles Dickens’ “The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.” My Achilles heel, something which prior to hospital admission I never knew I possessed, comes via four basic letters: F-E-A-R.

But it’s not as you’d perhaps expect.

My dad came to visit me. I learnt later that he’d asked the staff if I was going to die. In fairness, the night before, I’d attracted the attention of the Crisis Team at just gone 3 am, standing over me with worried/sympathetic expressions like commemorative statues as I lay broken and defunct in a bed that was saturated in sweat. In truth, I wasn’t unduly fazed by this. If the worst was about to happen, then so be it. I wouldn’t really know much about it.

For many, FEAR can be found lurking around different personal corners. Take relationships, for example – things can linger destructively, issues solidifying like a terrible placename running through a brittle stick of rock. My partner is one of the kindest and most fair-minded human beings I’ve ever met. But she loves her holidays. And if she’s upset about something, I’m definitely going to know about it.

We’d booked a week away in Crete from August 4 – 11. Every time the doctors came round on their daily walks, they told me my bloods and temperature were climbing all over the place, and yet they continually reassured me that they were ‘on it’ and getting out for the trip abroad was a reality. It was going to happen. We still believed it. Needless to say, as the days rolled by and the conversations of liberation dried up, I could see the hope in the eyes of my missus draining away. Heartbreaking. But it wasn’t FEAR. There were no defining moments as precursors to us sliding down the pan. She knew these were just unfortunate circumstances and that we were in it together. I texted one of my mates saying I thought I’d let her down. He replied, “Would you think the same if it was her in hospital?”

“Of course not.”

“Well there you go.”

I’m sat in a bed on a ward and, after drowsing, the nurse pays me a visit to take a blood sample. This is the return visit after two previous failed attempts to locate a vein. The pressure to yield blood is astronomical. The doctors can’t go forward with their investigations without it. A sense of failure is tangible as the problem continues. I can see the dejection in the nurse’s face. I feel terrible, particularly after two needles have earlier been plunged fruitlessly into my hand and arm, something which feels akin to a screwdriver boring deep into my soul, the carefully rehearsed introductory words, ‘Quick, sharp scratch!’ somehow making it worse.

But this isn’t the FEAR. This is me having iron deficiency, as well as sepsis, and recently discovered pneumonia. It constitutes a certain level of acceptance. It’s why I’m in hospital. It’s the job of the medics to find a solution and, no matter how painful in the spur of the moment, this is not FEAR.

No, FEAR is something else. Something bigger and perhaps paradoxically simpler. FEAR is finding that, looking down, you can’t trust your legs to hold you up. You feel like you need the lavatory. It’s a thirty-yard walk down the corridor. You’re in your hospital bed and, before making the journey, you have to make yourself ‘decent’. There’s inmates, visitors and nurses milling about. There are youngsters, cleaning the floors, earning summer money.

And there’s me, finally ready to put one foot in front of the other as I seek to use the toilet – my bladder tightening, my apprehension at the prospect of having an ‘accident’ relentlessly building. Everything’s controlled by the mind, isn’t it?

My knees are bent. Feet unsure. And why wouldn’t they be? There’s an unhelpful easiness with which we incorporate the word ‘stand’ into everyday parlance. ‘Stand up’. ‘Stand and deliver’. ‘Stand tall.’ ‘Stand together’. ‘Standing room only.’ We use the concept of ‘standing’ like it’s a natural, automatic, ‘go to’ cultural experience. All the more pressure and emotional struggle, then, for those whose lives don’t follow this script.

As I seek to elevate myself into a proper standing position, my thighs exert stabbing pains which hurtle randomly up and down each sinew like stolen cars, never taking the same route twice. This is the FEAR. Will I always be like this? In a few weeks’ time I’m due back at work – is this to be my new state of being? Unsustainable, isn’t it? Whatever you do, don’t fall over. Balance. A result of drinking more water under doctor’s orders means you’ll have to make this trip on an endless loop. Good luck with that. And, as I try to break the inertia by forcing my legs to move, I’m conscious of the fact that I can barely achieve even the basics of what society defines as ‘walking’. Someone says, ‘Mate, use this crutch.’ A nurse enquires: ‘Do you need a wheelchair?’ I feel like I’m shuffling slowly down a tunnel of unwanted attention. My old adversary, Tim, sitting opposite, merely stares into space, struck perhaps by the struggle and futility of it all.

Fast forward to tea-time… breakfast the next morning… the following week of medical incarceration… the situation remains the same: legs conducting pain like volts of electricity, and the protagonist struggling to make it from A to B without his life flashing before his eyes.

Will I always be like this?

This is the FEAR. Time and time again, and – ultimately transcending eighteen days of medical intervention – it will remain the FEAR, I’d say, for a very long time…