Stroke Passages
[Early Saturday afternoon, October 20, 2007]
Someone whispers – no-one gets out of here alive. Is this person being rhetorical or am I the intended audience? Light dapples through my eyelids.
If I could’ve replied at this moment I would’ve described my passage into the place of no-return – In three dimensions – simply by describing the flow of my blood alternately pooling at my feet then my head, then seeming to drain from the back of my throat; all the while I’m gently rolling from side to side.
[post discharge, January 2008]
Through multiple attempts (this month), I’m trying to remember the life-saving treatment I received in the ICU. But to do this, I have to evade the hospital concierge who keeps directing me to the ICU visitor registration and waiting lounge. I’m not a visitor, though, I need to embody my status as a patient again to remember the force-imbued steps of the hospital orderly transporting by bed from Emergency to the ICU: the decelerations and accelerations through automated (securitised), or heavy-plastic, swing-gates quarantining clinical departments; the right-angle turns, left and right, into adjoining corridors; and the lift passage to the level above. From such remembrance of force, I came upon the final barrier to my search, an anonymous gate into the ICU, accessible only to staff and bed-bound patients.
Of course, my access was prohibited, until, that is, a theatre nurse passing between departments enquired into my peculiar presence in this non-descript corridor. Aften listening to my story of illness, and how I came to be at the present location, she summoned open the gate with her ID card and ushered me to the exact same ‘bed’ I’d recently occupied. The tables were turned; another patient, now, unfamiliar to me – and elderly man – lay where once I pondered the place from which no-one returns.