felt his hand on mine, heard his voice.
“Dad the pain” I groaned.
Then Mary, her hand on mine. Her voice frightened, I still couldn’t spare the energy to decipher words.
She was scared and so was I.
The morphine kicked in. I was looking into a tunnel that stretched from my face for twelve inches or so. If you weren’t in that tunnel I couldn’t see you. Life existed beyond the tunnel, I could hear it, feel it, but I couldn’t see it. It did damn all for the pain. Time eked forward one excruciating heart beat after another. Sweat flowed from my shaven head like thunderstorm rain drops. Mary mopped my brow more than once and then suddenly she got up and left.
‘No, please don’t’ my mind pleaded but she was gone gone. She had run. My memory snapped back to thirteen years earlier. Hanging out a window six stories up. Leah in my hands, holding her at arms length, below the billowing black smoke. Her tiny body limp. Mary had run then too, disappeared into the smoke filled room behind us. There one second and gone the next. There was no way out, I’d tried. The smoke so dense that I couldn’t breath. I pictured Mary lying on the stairs, overcome, unconscious. Do I leave Leah on the floor at the window and go find Mary? Back then, I promised god I’d be a good man, I’d never let them down, if only she’d come back, if only I didn’t have to make an impossible choice.
“Does she have a problem?” I heard the doctor ask my father. They were the first words I heard clearly since the train hit. They were also the last.
‘It’s not just me’ I admitted to my self and something deep inside me hurt, hurt so very bad. Everything got worse. My mind was lost. Pain overran every sense, every nerve. ‘I don’t want to die this way it’s not right’.
Later on, Mary was back. My dad had gone to find her. Months later he told me that he found her outside on her mobile phone. She had no intention of coming back in. I could sense her presence beside the trolley but she was a million miles away. Mary was finished with me. It would take me another year to finally realise it. She saw me vulnerable and I was out, a light switch was thrown and I was left in the dark.
The next thing I remember, I was struggling to curl into a ball. Someone was trying to stop me.
“Martin you’ve got to lay still, the scan won’t work” the words meant nothing to me.
Then I was in two places at once. I was trashing on the bed of a CT scanner. There were people trying to hold me still but I was also above, looking down. Below was pain and above was not. I’m not a religious person; I don’t know why I was looking down on myself. I do remember feeling very sad for the poor broken person I saw below and then I saw nothing at all.
The train was gone. The trolley was the only thing rolling. A nurse walked brusquely beside the trolley. Then a bed. It was dark outside. The sun had set long ago. I drifted off. My eyes snapped open, its coming. The fuck you train was back. Slam, riding the pain train again. A nurse at the bed, minutes later a doctor.
Awake again. Frightened, scared to breath. Where’s the pain? It was sure to come back. Through a nearby window I saw the suns weak first rays push the night back. One whole day, twenty four hours, hope, just a little and then none. For the third time, the fuck you train ran me over, immediate and intense, no warning and no build up. I wanted the pain to stop. All alone.
It was a blood clot. It had travelled through the site of the operation, destroying all the surgeon’s good work, and then it passed through my heart and hit my right lung. Pulmonary embolism, to this day I have nightmares about it. I survived, many don’t, it blew away any notions I had of invincibility.
The train didn’t come back again. I was genuinely happy to be alive maybe even a little euphoric. After two days I was up and moving. Visitors came and went, they brought food, drinks and magazines. Blanchardstown is a great little hospital and clean, they could teach Beaumont a lesson or two about it. I was now under a respiratory team. The P.E took precedence over everything else. It was immediately life threatening whereas cancer could take a while. I didn’t want it to take a back seat. To me, I had a sixty day deadline to meet. I was going to get interferon, no matter what. After a week, I tried to contact oncology, first in Blanchardstown and then in Beaumont. Despite repeated attempts I never saw a single soul from oncology for the twenty eight days I spent in Blanchardstown. I cannot explain how frustrating and frightening that was.
Boredom is my biggest enemy in hospital. I can’t stay in bed all day. Before the first week was over, I’d explored all the accessible areas. I found a little chapel at two in the morning on the sixth day, the door was locked. At ten the next morning I went back. The door was open and two people were sat inside silently praying. I went in sat down and savoured the silence for a few minutes. I thanked god that I hadn’t died, as I said earlier I’m not religious, but it couldn’t do any harm to be grateful. As I walked back to the ward I felt my pj bottoms sticking to my left leg. They were soaked through. I was immediately embarrassed. I knew I hadn’t pissed myself but it sure as hell looked like I did. I pulled the curtains around the bed and took off the bottoms. The dressing over the crease of my left groin was soaked through. My leg was soaked with a slightly discoloured liquid. I called a nearby nurse. The dressing was changed but two hours later it was soaked through again. It was lymph fluid. It was one of the risks of the operation. I don’t understand the mechanics of if. The fluid builds up, the hope is that the body will redirect it. If it doesn’t it has to come out somewhere, in this case it came out through the wound in my groin. I ended up using big old style sanitary towels on top of the normal dressing to keep my pjs dry. The rot literally set in. They don’t call it rotting in hospital, they call it necrotising.
It necrotised for two weeks. I was desperate for something to be done. I redoubled my efforts to get oncology involved but I was in the wrong hospital. The lowest point came in the third week. At night when I lay down I pulled the hospital linen up to my neck and put my nightgown on top. The aim was to prevent the horrific smell of my own rotting flesh from making me vomit. It didn’t work. Heaving, holding a grey container full of puke, it was all too much. A genuine good guy was trying to help me.
“Put vics under your nose” he advised “it’s a trick we use with cadavers”.
His intentions were genuine, his concerns real, but still it summed up how I felt. I wasn’t exactly the walking dead, but I wondered how much lower I could go. The surgeon came to my rescue. My parents contacted him direct and he arrived in Blanchardstown. He carried an air of authority with him. At last someone was in control. I found all the staff in Blanchardstown unrivalled in their caring attitude. I felt much safer there than I had in Beaumont but still I was going backwards. The surgeon arrived at the bedside with several others. He examined the wound.
“We will take care of this” he told me. The following day he was back. He and another cut away all the dead flesh and cleaned up the wound. Special dressings were brought in and every day after a registrar changed the bandages. The wound was open. It was so deep and so wide that it couldn’t be closed. Instead, wadding was packed into the open hole and then covered with a concave waterproof bandage. It stopped the lymph juice coming through and a healing process could begin. In Blanchardstown they were brilliant at preventing infection, hand sanitizers, double gloved, the whole works. A week later I was discharged with an appointment for oncology in Beaumont and a bag full of bee stings. The bee stings were blood thinning syringes. I had to inject one into the fatty flesh layer of my belly, one every day. They’re called bee stings because that’s how they felt. I also had the phone number of the local health nurse who was to take over the dressing. Thirty five days had passed since the lymph operation. In my mind, I had twenty five days left to get interferon,
