The World I Fell Out Of. Andrew Marr
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they are stuffing a giant sausage. No underwear, just the baggiest T-shirt and joggers you possess. I had asked the boys to bring me in one of my 10k race T-shirts and the nurses cut the neck to widen it. It was a symbol of who I really was and my statement of intent – a sporty person who shouldn’t be here. Mistaken identity. As reality bit, I felt embarrassed and threw it away.
Then they put on my high, choking collar and they rolled me on the bed into a hard white plastic shell, a back brace, to protect my lower-down fracture, until, trussed, I resembled a Storm Trooper even more closely. Why was I so miscast? Didn’t they realise I was actually, in my past life, a female Jedi warrior? The brace on the collar extended down my sternum; the body brace came up to meet it. Thrust up into the gap between, elevated like some spoof medieval embonpoint, came my breasts. They sprouted, insensate, near my chin.
‘Jesus, your tits look amazing,’ said a male colleague who came to visit me a couple of weeks later, ‘like they’re peeking over the garden fence.’ Never was there a less sensual image.
Only then, fully armoured, was it time to be hoisted into a chair. Lack of balance and orientation from weeks spent lying flat, plus the low blood pressure endemic to my injury, made this an ordeal. Seasick and head swimming, headsick and seaswimming, I was rolled to get the hoist cradle under me, and then lifted up to dangle for all the world like a dead cow in an abattoir; whereupon they lowered me into a wheelchair, rocking me forward and back until my weight was centralised. The whole process was exhausting, lengthy and discombobulating. That first time, I cried out in fear – I had a terrifying sensation that my head was loose and was going to fall off backwards, so the physiotherapists fashioned a temporary cardboard extension to the chair back to comfort me. They told me my neck was completely stable and things would get easier but I was not convinced. Inside, I screamed at the indignity and the horror of it: outwardly, I put on a grim smile and told myself sternly that this was progress. This was how to get better. First goal, get used to the chair. Then begin the recovery.
Once in the chair, I could resume some adult responsibility. My immediate boss at The Times, Magnus Linklater, had been one of the very few allowed in to visit soon after the accident. He had told me not to worry, and kissed me on the forehead. The kiss struck me as terribly kind but rather worrying. Was I really so ill? It was evident to all but me. Then Anne Spackman, the comment editor, who told me she had wept as she transcribed that initial tape recording, flew up from London. I showed her how, now I was up, I could use a laptop with one finger. I couldn’t grasp why everyone seemed so surprised about my determination to try and get working again. Anne was followed by the editor of The Times at the time, James Harding. The nurses arranged for me to meet him in the conference room. Hazily fearful, I think I expressed my insecurities about the future. He could not have been more supportive. Could I continue to write, I asked hesitantly. The professional editor in me, despite the madness of the morphine, smelt a source of good copy. Of course I could, he said. In fact, he wanted a weekly column about my recovery, to be published in the Saturday magazine. My heart, I remember, leapt.
‘The only thing is, we don’t know what to call it.’
‘Oh, I’ve already thought about that. What about “Spinal Column”?’
Did he know, this most human, warm, sophisticated man, that he was handing me a precious lifeline? Not just in terms of my family’s future, but of my psychological survival. Here was a chance for me to create my own biographical narrative, to write towards some kind of redemption.
Labouring under many illusions, and feeling quite breezy – I do think the opiates were largely to blame at that stage – I then tackled my first session in the gym, which swiftly brought home the brutal realities of my situation. The cruel parallels of two worlds were beginning to impact on me, old and new crushing me between them: the gyms as I had been familiar with them, Lycra-ed temples of beautiful fit bodies in motion; and gyms, paralysis-style, where broken, frozen people were propped upright, in various stages of disorientation and bewilderment. Plus, there were unseen horrors to discover. I was about to have a crash course in the reality of paralysed bowels. As two physiotherapists used a hoist to lift me from wheelchair to specialist rehabilitation plinth, gravity struck. My bowels suddenly and involuntarily emptied. The only way I knew was by the sound and then the nostril-fluttering smell, which trapped me in a ghastly freeze of humiliation. What was the famous Nike gym slogan? Just do it? Well I just did. ‘Uh-oh,’ said the physiotherapist at the wrong end.
Too upset even to cry, I could only stammer my apologies, but they were totally nonplussed, matter-of-fact. Don’t worry, they said. Part of the job. Happens all the time. For me it seemed catastrophic. My first morning in the gym, when I had planned to hit the machines, develop sizeable shoulders and start my legs moving again, all within the space of an hour, and there I was being lowered, stinking, onto pads on the wheelchair, hurried back to the ward, laboriously hoisted again onto a bed of pads and rolled and cleaned like a baby. I was getting an inkling of what exactly paralysis entailed.
Over the next few days, I had a few more brief sessions in the gym when, thank God, my bowels did not betray me. The gym offered a welcome distraction from reflection. It wasn’t wise to sit and dwell on your plight. ‘Gym,’ one cynical spinal consultant once muttered, ‘is really only there to take people’s mind off things.’ You hid your despair as much as you could, if only because too many tears invoked a dreaded visit from the Kiwi psychologist, whose amiable ‘Have you got time for a chit?’ confirmed to you that matters really were wrist-slittingly terminal.
The gym in fact, became all-consuming. I got my first taste of what it would take to strengthen my arms and shoulders and returned to the ward furious at my own weaknesses. Where was bloody superwoman now? Ten minutes on the handcycle – where my hands were bandaged to a set of handles rotating at shoulder height – left me puffing as I would once have done running on a treadmill. Another big test was to propel myself for the first time in a chair. It sounds so easy but it was such a ridiculously difficult, slow-motion challenge, even just twenty yards down the hospital corridor, that when I made it back to the ward I was totally drained. My right hand, because my wrist was strong, was good at pushing but the left, a bunch of stone bananas, couldn’t grip the chair’s push rims and the imbalance made me zigzag across the lino. To compensate, I turned my left hand and elbow outwards from the shoulder, like an injured bird, and propelled with the edge of my palm and wrist. There was some residual power. Life, it occurred to me, in an image which would be repeated, honed to perfection over the next decade, was beginning to feel exactly like one of those sadistic TV game shows made famous by Clive James in the 1980s. It was the genre of humiliation as entertainment, which began on Japanese TV and in Britain evolved into I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. And that was exactly what it felt like for me, that world of crazed, pointless challenges tantalisingly just beyond the contestants’ grasp, the stream of filth and cockroaches cascading over their heads. And the celebs had it easy: they went home after a month.
With the ability to push a few yards came a tiny amount of autonomy and I started to explore the corridors around the high-dependency unit, like a toddler exploring her home. I would reach a big window, or a glass door, and peer out at the sky and a bit of treetop behind the roof. Sometimes I overreached myself and had to sit for five minutes, resting, at the corner until I was strong enough to turn. Five minutes … the most inconsequential flick of time in a spinal rehabilitation ward, where snails moved faster, their goals better defined. David Allan, the director of the spinal unit, the man who had clenched his fists in A&E for us to demonstrate what happened to my neck, had already warned me my rehab could take over a year. When he had said it I was aghast; now, reluctantly, I was beginning the process of understanding.
The awakening consciousness, the struggle to regain some form of control over my life, was encapsulated by my tragi-comic battle over my hair. When you break your neck, you are condemned to have the back of your head set on a pillow for, well, much of the rest of your life, and in the shorter term to wear collars for several months. My thick, wavy hair was problematic. Too short to be tied on the top of my head in a pineapple – the only place where it would be out of the way – but long enough to snag and mat like the fur of an abandoned dog. And it hurt. Being unable to raise my head was ordeal enough; having the elastic straps from oxygen