Moio sudno na vozdušnoy poduške polno ugrey

Sorry about that, I’m learning Russian at the moment.

Anyway, leading on from the last entry… the next few days are lifted straight out of a David Cronenberg film festival. Nightmares on a scale I could never have imagined.
As I’m being wheeled down from recovery I’m hallucinating like crazy. As I stare up at the passing ceiling tiles, I see their corners lift and swarms of crawling insects pour through the gaps. I close my eyes to escape the horror and vivid excerpts of the last few hours flash through my mind. I see everything compartmentalised, my personality, my memories, my thoughts and feelings, all neatly arranged in DFS like displays. It’s hard to explain, but I’m looking in on my mind and how it’s arranged from a third person perspective. Surreal yet terrifying!

I drift in and out of consciousness punctuated by fits of uncontrollable nausea. My wife holds my head while I vomit, tears of despair roll down her soft cheeks.

I wake to find myself sharing a room with another recent post-operative patient. I attempt the most basic of conversations in an effort to establish some form of normality. Big mistake. ‘Great, they’ve stuck me in with a lunatic from Tooting’, if this was on the ‘outside’ I’d be clamping his wrists in quick-cuffs and carting him off to the nearest psych-ward. Where’s my Asp when I need it? I drift off again.

My sleep is interspersed with visits from nurses taking temperatures, blood pressures and urging me to drink and pee. As one of them leaves at around 2am I strain my eyes in the semi-dark, and stare across the room to my manically depressed roommate. I’m startled by the presence of a small fiery demon hovering over his bed. I squint my eyes, still there. Well he is from Tooting after all. Am I seeing things, or have structural changes taken place within my brain that enables me to tune in on a different wavelength?

The medical staff are not happy with my recovery and decide to move me into the main ward for closer observation. It’s been at least 10 hours since I pissed last, and I’m constantly being coaxed to pass urine. However, I can’t pee into a paper bottle lying on my side, I need to be vertical. I attempt to raise myself, but the movement of the mattress and my left side paralysis make it impossible. By now the pain in my bladder is becoming unbearable, so grabbing my left leg with my right hand I pull my self over to the right hand side of the bed. With one deft movement I swing my legs over the side, touch the floor, heave my self-upright with the ‘good’ leg, and grab the paper bottle. Great plan, except I haven’t factored in the ineffectual left arm that won’t be able to hold me steady while the right hand is holding the piss bottle. I collapse in a heap, flailing in the dark in an impromptu bath of my own piss and shattered pride.
Before I know it I’m surrounded by scowling Philippino nurses. In about as much time as it takes to say, ‘are you taking the piss?’ I’ve got a catheter strapped to the side of my bed. I never thought I’d be so pleased as to have a pipe with a kink passed through my urethra. Wonders never cease.

So many cats, so few recipes.

Okay, the title's got your attention. First of all, sorry dear patient reader, I've been pretty remiss with my blog entries of late. I promise to put things right. So here goes...

Seven days pass quickly, and I’m soon being wheeled back down to the operating theatre. For some reason to do with expedience, I have been informed by the anaesthetist that I’ll be wide-awake for absolutely everything this time around. This includes the stitches from the last op being pried out and my scalp being ripped back. If I’m ‘lucky’ I’ll even hear the ‘schlock’ noise as my skull is popped back open. These people must think I’m some sort of unfeeling cyborg for me to take this much battering without batting an eyelid. Personally, I feel like a cross between Ray Liotta’s character in the closing scenes of Hannibal and a Terminator unit.

One of my surgeons prior to scrubbing up

I was beginning to think that I wished I never had found out about the bloody tumour in the first place. Ah well, If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy?
Despite being in theatre for four or five hours, I remember very little of the procedure. It’s strange how the human psyche blocks out memories that are too distressing. Indeed, repressed memory is one of the most controversial subjects in the history of psychology and psychiatry. A repressed memory, according to some, is a memory (often traumatic) of an event, which is stored by the unconscious mind but outside the awareness of the conscious mind. Some theorize that these memories may be recovered (that is, integrated into consciousness) years or decades after the event, often via therapy or in dreams. I hope to God that this isn’t the case.
Another hypothesis is that cortisol, a chemical released during trauma, may induce forgetting. Cortisol appears to have the ability to erase details and possibly induce amnesia.
On the other hand, I may have experienced a form of organic amnesia, whereby damage to the medial or anterior temporal regions caused by either the surgery, or the incidental stroke I suffered, brought about a loss of cognitive processing while I was under the knife.
Alternatively, it could be the case that I was so dosed up on Rohypnol its surprising that I even remembered waking up that morning.
Whatever the case, one thing is for certain; you didn’t tune in for a clinicalneuropsychology lecture! Well you can take the boy out of academia, but you can’t take academia out of the boy!
What I do remember is lying on my left side, propped up at a 50 degree angle, the anaesthetist standing in front of me. Every couple of minutes she asks me to wiggle the fingers of my left hand as if I’m playing the piano. Happy with my performance, she asks me to do the same with the toes on my left foot. I see no one else, as they’re probably all behind me ‘scooping’ away. I feel no pain.
Next thing I know is I’m awake in the Recovery Unit again. I’m thirsty, I’m prodded, I’m poked, I’m used to it. After a while some doctors come to see me. They go through the Glasgow Coma Scale, and are sorely disappointed with the performance of my left hand side. Not as much as I am though.
“Hemiparesis”, they call it. ‘FUCKING PARALYSED DOWN ONE FUCKING SIDE’, I call it!
Yeah, The trouble with life is there's no background music. At that moment in time I could have really done with some!

As you can see, my hospital bed was rather hard. I didn't like pyjamas.