K.P. Webster's Blog, page 21

Tension, Relief :: Relief, Tension

This week so far has thrown up a new set of challenges. The sister who came up for a week went away again and my mum got moved out of intensive care. Before then though – my note-scraps tell me it was Friday – I felt down in a way that I hadn’t felt so far. A more selfish down, a fed-up down, which is worse than a selfless down because it makes one feel like a cad. I know it’s allowed, and I know it’s perfectly natural, but it makes me feel like I’ve let myself down. And in a sense, of course, that’s exactly what I have done.

Nice.

Later that afternoon, however, I made a sloppy Pad Thai and I baked some special cookies, enabling my sisters, my nephew and I to relax a little – actually, quite a lot. Someone even relaxed herself into a whitey. Classic. It was a lovely evening though, and a welcome relief.

But then I felt the tension yesterday morning too, and I got snippy. But I got over that too, and I’m super-aware of it and tackling it head on.

Then today was a whole new nettle facemask. Because today my mum was down. She was feeling sorry for herself. Upset over clumsy phlebotomists and the odd sharp scratchy nurse. Upset too, I think, at the new stoma she has to deal with, which is a visceral, heart-breakingly gory thing. I held her hand and tried to be uplifting. I reminded her how far she’d come, how brave she’d been. I read to her. Fetched another blanket. Did a crossword. I pulled everything from my care arsenal – everything I could reach. But nothing could penetrate her sadness. It was also the first time I’d seen her lose her sense of humour, which is just the absolute worst thing.

But I went up tonight again with my sister and boom! She was much improved. Smiling again.

Funnily enough, her bad mood coincided with being moved into a room on her own. She’d been there for two days. This afternoon she got moved back onto a ward with four other sick ladies, and, as I say, boom. Smiling again. People need people. Solitude is for the strong.

I’m trying to maintain an even keel and overall I’m very pleased that she’s gradually improving.

Also, I’ve finished my novel.

Phew.

And eek.

Filed under: 400 Words

Looking Up

I’m very pleased to report that, as far as my mum’s health is concerned, things are definitely looking up. Monday was a very low point, when we were informed that as well as lingering intestinal infection, she also has pneumonia. To counteract this, she was pumped full of antibiotics and hooked up to a three-day epidural. Consequently, she looked terrible. She was rarely awake, and unable to speak above a whisper. The worst of it though, was that she looked scared. Defeated even. There was also talk of a return to the ventilator and it was no longer a given that she was going to survive.

When we left that night, they were just about to fit the epidural. Bodies busied and loomed at her bedside as she tried to say goodbye, her voice not quite making it through her oxygen mask. All of which gave rise to another tearful trudge through hospital corridors, out into the ever-present storm and into the adjacent supermarket to buy more wine.

Sometimes you hold it all back – the tears, I mean. But sometimes, revelling in the relative rarity, the privilege of such powerful emotion, you let the waxy mask twist and leak in the full glare of public scrutiny. Thinking feast – yes, my friends, feast upon the pain of proud love, tested and true-found, flowing unfettered from this baggy broken face.

But then things picked up.

On Wednesday, she managed to remain awake throughout our visits and at lunchtime she was even asking for her teeth. Unfortunately, her teeth don’t seem to fit in her mouth anymore and there was a moment of a panic when – having fought with the oxygen mask, the nasogastric feedtube and the pulse oximetre finger-clamp to get the teeth in – we couldn’t get them out. But we prevailed.

On Thursday her speech was clearer again, she’d had her hair washed, eaten half a sandwich and was eager to get out of bed and into a chair.

On Friday she asked for a mirror, as well as a nail file to work on her teeth.

This morning she looked great. We couldn’t figure out what it was for a moment, but then it hit us. Both the oxygen mask and the NG tube were gone. As soon as a bed becomes available, she’ll be out of intensive care.

And, obviously, we’re all very very relieved. And phenomenally grateful.

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Filed under: 400 Words

‘Sometimes I can feel you getting older…’

 

On Tuesday morning I woke up to a wonderful, completely unexpected email. It was from someone I’ve never met, someone I know a tiny bit from comments on various bits of online writing over the years.

I bequeath some of it to you now, with permission….

I can’t choose a post to comment on so I’m emailing you instead. I can’t think of one thing to say so I’ll just let everything fall out of my brain while Adam Hurst plays the cello and makes all my thoughts feel like they are part of an animated film set in a rainy European city. Everywhere the sound of tires through water and shoes clicking on pavement.

I’m sorry your mom is in pain. Sometimes I can feel you getting older. This is one of those times. Most people would translate this as something negative. But it isn’t negative or positive. It just is. Sometimes life is less about fighting to remain exuberant and more about letting ourselves be pulled into the languid palm of acceptance. We are our kindest when this happens, but it is also when we strap the weights on our hearts and grow a little more tired.

I really love that.

Then she said some nice things about my writing, which I’m far too splendidly, magnificently modest to repeat.

But the whole thing just rejoiced right through me, and it fills me up to have someone respond to anything I’ve written with something so singular and poetic and personal. And it chimes so perfectly with what I was trying to elucidate here. Not the sentiment, but the very fact of its existence. The dialogue. The connection.

I love too the fact that you never know when people are reading your words. It’s like at any moment, in any part of the world, someone could be out there, dancing with your ghosts, and you only ever get to hear about it if they’re moved enough to take the time to talk to you. And when they do talk to you, and in the process they touch something in you, it’s just golden.

…

Meanwhile my mum is up and down.

On Monday we were forced to add pneumonia to peritonitis at the top of the list of things we really weren’t expecting, but then came two days of definite improvement.

And as if that weren’t enough, look!

It’s stopped raining! 

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Filed under: 400 Words

The Urge to Write

The urge to write is a funny old thing, isn’t it? I’ve always had it, since I was a kid I think, and obviously, over the years, I’ve nurtured it and attempted to turn it into some kind of career. (Ho ho.) But this is different – going through a shitty, deeply personal thing and writing about it and putting it on the internet. And I know, many writers, many professional writers would never do this in a million years. Yet it feels right to me. It is odd. Even in the car on the way back from hospital tonight I was composing something in my head. Not this. Something else. Something much more depressing than this.

I do it – people do it – because it helps. It helps me, I think, to talk about it. I also know that it can help other people too. It is after all, art, and if art is good for anything – and I like to think it is – it’s good for helping us remember that we’re not alone. (There is I’m sure a conversation to be had about whether a diary, which is essentially what this is, can ever really be art, but if you want to have that conversation, I would be really pleased if you would fuck off and have it elsewhere.)

I also love the idea, I can’t deny, of touching people. Even – maybe even especially - with something so deeply personal.  Maybe not. It feels more noble than fiction though. Certainly more noble than fiction dressed as truth. I’m thinking of the tears I teased when I was living a virtual lie. But there’s always an element of manipulation. Even now. (Maybe that’s the definition of art.) 

Thinking about it though, it’s all the same thing. I only write because I want to connect. And I only want to be good at it because I want to be good at connecting. Because connecting – communicating with love and honesty and a desire to make one another’s lives more bearable – is by far the most important thing we do. Actually, maybe it’s the only thing we do – in all of its various forms - that’s any good.

Anyway, my 400-limit is (thankfully) approaching.

Thanks to all of you who’ve been in touch – here or elsewhere – with your kind words and condolences. They have made me realise that that’s actually how we get through this stuff.

So thanks.

…

 

 

 

Filed under: 400 Words

Tense

My sister was at work today, so this morning I went to the hospital on my own. It’s a 45-minute walk or thereabouts, but it was OK because it was a beautiful day – clear and crisp and bright and ballsy, like the face of an enchanting woman in an ill-fated dream.

My mum was asleep when I got there, as she was throughout last night’s visit. Indeed, doctors are concerned that she’s becoming a little overly reliant on the morphine, and consequently sleeping too much, so they’ve taken away her self-dosing clicker. They’re also concerned that she’s suffering a little too much pain in her stomach so they’re going to give her another scan this afternoon. They’re worried she may still have some peritonitis.

…

In the meantime, she’s in and out of consciousness, but mostly sleeping.

During one short period of lucidity, we had this exchange:

‘Am I in a lunatic asylum?’

‘No, you’re just in hospital. Does it feel like a lunatic asylum?’

She nodded.

‘Some good news. Carole [my other sister] is coming up tomorrow.’

‘Another lunatic.’

Later, on coming round again, I asked her how she was feeling.

‘I feel like I’m in a lunatic asylum.’

‘You’re not, I promise. Trust me.’

‘Ha.’

Then she started singing, in a deep croak, like a severely opiated Deirdre Barlow, ‘Trust in me,’ her tubed-up arm moving like a snake.

…

Then they kicked me out to examine her wound again. Then things became annoying.

Basically it went like this:

Ten minutes passed.

DOCTOR: You can go back in now.

I went back in.

MALE NURSE: Please wait outside. I’ll come and get you when we’re ready.

I went back out.

Fifteen minutes passed.

FEMALE NURSE: You can go back in now.

I went back in.

SAME MALE NURSE: Please wait outside. I will come and get you.

My mouth fell open.

FEMALE NURSE: Sorry. My fault. I told him to come back in.

Twenty minutes passed.

FEMALE NURSE: Sorry. He forgot to come and get you. He asked me to apologise.

Visiting hours were over by then. As was the beautiful day. I collected my bag, said goodbye to my mum and left the hospital in a vicious hailstorm.

And for a while there, I’ll be honest, I was feeling fucking tense.

But it passed.

We all make mistakes.

We all have our off-days.

Mum’s scan is at 4.

Fingers crossed.

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Filed under: 400 Words

Intense

Let me tell you about the most heart-rending half hour or so of my life thus far. It happened yesterday evening, during mine and my sister’s second visit to the Intensive Critical Care Unit at the King’s Mill Hospital in Mansfield. I honestly think it beats – and by quite a substantial margin – the time when my mum and I went to visit my dad in Cherry Knowle’s nuthouse in Sunderland after he was sectioned for trying to kill himself in 1988. On that occasion, my dad didn’t know who I was. He called me Pybus. Then he went into the lavatory by his bed and we heard a slow, heavy thud coming from inside. When one of the orderlies opened the door to see what was happening, we saw my dad leaning against the reinforced glass of the window, banging his forehead repeatedly. That was tough.

Yesterday was worse.

My mum opened her eyes and saw our faces and heard our voices. She tried to move, but her body was so full of drugs and tubes that she was not able. She tried to speak but her throat was full of ventilator tube and her chin was strapped tight, so that she couldn’t even move her mouth. The only way she was able to communicate was through the furrows that appeared in her brow and the tears that began to creep out of the corners of her eyes.

I had to get away from her bedside for a while as I didn’t want her to see or hear me crying, as I’m sure that would have made it harder for her. One of the nurses happened to be close by. She asked me if I was OK. That made it harder for me.

A neighbour of my mum’s rings my sister every day for an update. Today she asked my sister how I was coping. ‘Not very well,’ my sister said, after seeing me fall apart a bit tonight. She’s right. In a way I’m not. But in a way I think I am. Because out of the horror I’m growing more positive. She’s going to be OK. Perhaps oddly, I believe it more today than I did before things went wrong. And I’m helping. Being positive helps. Tomorrow she’ll be off the ventilator. In a couple of years or so, I’ll give a granddaughter.

Keep hope alive.

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Filed under: 400 Words

Luck Cuts Both Ways

Our second trip to intensive care featured a very clear conversation with a very eloquent, astonishingly young doctor – Doogie Howser essentially – for which I was very grateful. I understand a lot more clearly now what’s happening with my mum. And she should be OK. If nothing else goes wrong, she should be OK.

So far, she’s been unlucky. First, for the colostomy reversal not to have been a total success. That was a one-in-two-hundred chance right there. Second, for the surgeons not to have noticed a nick in her small bowel when they closed her up. No odds are available for that, but we were assured that it’s very rare. Usually the surgeons notice before knives are swapped for needles.

Although we’ll never know why there was a leak in her small bowel, we do know there’s a pretty good chance it was caused by human error. Obviously, in these cases, when human error causes human suffering, it’s human instinct to want to jump up and down, smash everything in sight and demand someone’s severed head on a plate of rock salt. But that’s not helpful. We have to rise above the instinct to blame and remember, as the doctor explained, working in a sloppy mess of four or five metres of intestine isn’t easy. He didn’t use the words ‘sloppy mess’, but as words go, I think they’ll suffice.

Anyway, moving on. As a consequence of this bad luck, my mum is now hooked up to a ventilator.  A nurse explained this before we went in, so as to prepare us for the shock. Unfortunately, having not watched a lot of Casualty, I thought a ventilator was the same as an oxygen mask. So I had a bit of a shock anyway.

Turns out a ventilator is a machine that breathes for you when, for one reason or another, you can’t do it well enough for yourself. The tube that goes into the mouth and down the throat pulls the mouth open to one side, making the patient look very much like she’s had a stroke. It is a shock. It tears you apart.

‘She’s one of the eight sickest people in the hospital,’ the doctor told us, ‘but she’s doing well.’

I know things could be worse. And I know that, human error aside, we have an awful lot to be thankful for.

So we are.

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Filed under: 400 Words

Tangerine Dream

She had short black hair and brilliant bottomless eyes. Her face was sharp and unflappable, like an early-April sky after a much-needed storm. It had a clarity that hid nothing.

She had a kid too, a little boy who took an immediate shine to me and giggled as I carried him on my shoulders. She even had a small white cat that rubbed itself against my hand and purred. She had everything I wanted.

On our first night together we sat on a messy bed in a small, slightly oppressive room that was brightly lit, trying desperately not to say what we both felt, that we had each found the person with whom we knew we wanted to spend the rest of our lives. It was then, and only then, that we realised we could communicate telepathically.

The next thing I remember, she was crawling into bed – a different bed in a different room, with ambient lighting and plush furnishings – with a darker man much bigger than I. He was Indian I think and totally naked. His penis, semi-erect, was shaped like half a horseshoe of thick meat. She nuzzled it as she crept across the blankets. Her eyes locked to mine, she said, ‘He’s a very generous lover.’

By then we were living together, and I had to get out of there. Devastated, I began trawling through our dirty old house, looking to grab a few of my things. But there was nothing. I had no possessions. Dejected, I reached for a segment of tangerine that I found in a drawer. When I put it in my mouth, however, I realised it had already been chewed and spat out by the old woman who was suddenly sitting next to me. As I began fishing it out of my mouth with my fingers, she apologised.

Then I woke up.

…

That’s what my subconscious served up after finding out last night that my mum’s situation had significantly worsened. She was leaking bile, and in agony, and had to be opened up again and restitched. Worst moment was holding the cardboard hat under her chin as she vomited in a manner not dissimilar to the little girl in The Exorcist. Closely followed by watching her trying to sign the operation consent form from deep within a morphine and tramodol haze. Now she’s in intensive care.

And we’re going in.

…

Filed under: 400 Words

Reversal of Fortune

Yesterday morning my sister and I got up around 6am to accompany our mum to hospital, where she was due to have the second of two major operations. The first took place exactly a year ago, when they removed most of her bowel and connected what was left to a hole in her stomach. That hole is called a stoma. The procedure is called a colostomy, something I’d heard of, but would happily have gone to my grave without fully understanding. But there you go. Life is full of disappointments.

Yesterday was the reversal. On the way to the hospital we made jokes about her learning to poo again. We waxed positive about her being home by lunchtime.

And so on.

She finally made it to the operating theatre some time in the late afternoon. We went to see her when she’d been allocated a ward room at around 10pm. She had tubes in her arms and an oxygen mask strapped to her face. She did not look well.

‘Have they told you?’ she asked.

‘Told us what?’

‘I’ve still got the bag.’

And in that moment, all the good air leaked out of us.

We knew there was a chance they might not be able to do it. They wouldn’t know for sure until they opened her up. But because hope is all you have, you keep hope alive. As long as you possibly can.

So now my mum has to face the horror of healing, coupled with the knowledge that she’s stuck with the stoma and the nastiness and indignity of shitting through a hole in her stomach for the rest of her life. It’s not a death sentence I know, but I fear that for an 81-year-old woman with all the hope cut out of her, it could be taken that way.

Feeling pretty depressed and very tired, I came back to my sister’s and finished the second draft of the novel I’m writing. I’m very happy with it. Whatever happens to it, at the moment it feels like a big beating heart, the best and most beautiful thing I’ve ever written, and it makes me happy and hopeful and proud.

Also, I would give it up in a second if I could have my mum back with her insides intact again.

It feels unfair.

I know we have to stay positive.

I hope we manage it.

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Filed under: 400 Words

400 Words

This is my new thing: unless there’s a damn good reason, everything I write on this site from now on (or at least until I get tired of it) will be 400 words long. No longer, no shorter. The reasons for this are varifold. (‘Varifold’ is a made-up adjective by the way. Furthermore, I reserve the right to make up as many of my 400-word quota as I dequire.)

Firstly, it’s an exercise. A kind of personal test designed to stop me wasting words, because words are time, and not only is life distressingly short, but also, it’s getting shorter every day. Henceforth my intention is, if I have something to say, I get in there, I say it, I go. There’ll still be ample time to turn a fine phrase – if I choose my words well – and hopefully even touch at least one human being in such a way that can’t clearly be demonstrated on a doll.

Secondly, it’s better for you. I know you’re busy. Life is not only distressingly short but it’s packed with things to fill your time – me too by the way. That last sentence alone was interrupted by David Sedaris, Thug Notes, a rather shocking video about whatever the hell it happens to actually be about and, perhaps ironically, a very exciting story about concentrating. So – I think we can agree – short is better. Gives us all more time to get on with our lives.

Thirdly, it’s a gimmick. Who knows, if I write a few really good posts that get passed around a handful of excited people, I might get a reputation as a sharp mind in a flabby environment, then before I know it, people will be saying, ‘Hey, have you read the 400-word guy? Yeah, he keeps it brief but entertaining. You should buy his books. He’s gonna blow up this year. In a good way, I mean. Not in an improvised explosive device.’

Fourthly, I was very tired of blogging and needed something to get me going again. Maybe this is it. We’ll see.

Like I say, there will, from time to time, be exceptions. I could never have explained, for example, how I became a Jew in 400 words. So if something of equal import occurs, I will be sure to break my rules just as breezily as I’m making them right now.

Anon!

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Filed under: 400 Words