A Life Less Travelled

This is a story about change. How at any time, any age, we can make the commitment to change anything, especially ourselves. WIP.

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”

 

-       Hunter S. Thompson

Everything is washed out, grey. In the myriad of colours that make the world pulse; the subtle yellows, the vibrant reds, the sublime turquoises… all I see is grey. I’m sitting in a room, staring at a glass of vodka. It’s tempting me, taunting me. I’m drunk and sick. It’s 2pm and I want to smash that f*****g glass into little bits. 

I guess you could say I’ve come to London in search of myself. On a whim I hopped on a plane to see something, anything. My life in Auckland died a slow death; my mental state deteriorated to numbness. I need a shot of heroin to my soul; a jolt of pure hedonism, and travel, with all its endless unknowns, is going to be my saviour.

I’ve been staying at my friend Georgia’s house for two weeks. The sites’ and sounds of the city elude me. My days consist of eating bread with margarine, drinking vodka, and smoking cigarettes.

The house is freezing, thanks to the dull monotony of a London winter. Outside the world spins, blissfully unaware of the wretched human hiding behind these heavy curtains of grey. Gulps of vodka imitate happiness and bathe me in warmth. After a large skull, I lie back and think about something I had done the night before.

It was three in the morning, I was utterly drunk, chain-smoking, and sitting by myself in the backyard of the flat, looking up aimlessly at the stars. I was disgustingly depressed and self-loathing. I had no real idea of what I was doing here or where I was going next, all I knew for sure was that I just wanted to curl up into the foetal position and die. I obsessed over thoughts of suicide, overdosing on prescription pills and falling blissfully asleep. I wanted this pain I was feeling, this dark cloak that I carry with me everywhere I go, to disappear. I wanted to disappear.

I wanted something to happen, anything, to shock me out of my headspace. I closed my eyes and started to pray. I don’t believe in a god, but I liked the idea of something in the universe listening, even to a louse like me. It was all I could do to not cry. I asked this omnipotent being to hurt me, physically, to jolt me back to reality. Break my bones, stab me or beat me to a bloodied pulp. Something so severe it would force me to appreciate waking up the next morning. If not, I knew within weeks I could soon end up weighed down by six feet of dirt, selfishly decomposing, yet finally at peace, leaving those who loved me to mourn above.

I can’t bear the thought of doing that to them, it makes me sick to think about it, but I also can’t continue my life like it is.

In the background a documentary about nuclear fallout and the annihilation of the human race plays on the television. Iran, North Korea, the axis of evil ... blah, blah, blah. I decided I have to, just have to, go and see Chernobyl. It fascinates me. I’m obsessed with the ominous nature of it, with death; that so much horror can go on in the world makes me feel sick. I have to experience it, know it. In some desperate way the journey might cure me of this dark cloak I carry everywhere. I’m going, nuclear fallout and all. 

Part 1.

Chapter 1

A year earlier my life seemed to be on track, whatever that means. I was finishing my honours degree in design, making a short film about obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety; things I have had since a child. I was happy, looking forward to some kind of future. I could control my OCD and anxiety most of the time, and with the help of pills and therapy I felt confident in my abilities to cope. I shared a life with a partner who I knew loved me and who I loved too. For once I saw a life ahead of me, some kind of path that I could navigate. I had always sort of lived week-to-week, afraid of committing to the present let alone something ahead of me, out of my control.

The year was tumultuous and it took everything I had creatively, mentally and physically to finish the project. It wasn’t just a means to an end for me; it was an open expression of who I am, a public interpretation of what I had tried to hide for so many miserable years.

The weight of trying to articulate this took its toll. Nothing was ever good enough. My obsessive nature began to encroach on my work and it started to consume my life. It’s all I could think about. I would work manically for 20 hours at a time, with little or no sleep. I had to get it right, it was too important to let slip.

I was afraid of looking like a fool, to let people know I was a failure because of my illness.

It consumed my mind, filling it with dozens of fractured thoughts and emotions at once. The very thing that I was trying to document and express was silently growing… a cancerous tumour feeding off my insecurities, bloated by the rich resources of a fragile mind.

I’ve always had coping mechanisms, learnt behaviours from years of combatting OCD and anxiety, that automatically kick in when things become too much. But these barriers became meaningless to me. I needed to feel my illness in order to creatively document and understand it. So I let myself go. Every second of every day was filled with thoughts that would be frantically jotted down in notebooks that lay strewn around my apartment. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing an idea, it all mattered and it had to be catalogued. It consumed me. No idea, no piece of work was ever good enough. I hated them all. People would talk to me after class but I never properly listened or much cared for what they were saying. My mind was louder than any noise around me.

I devoured academic texts, books, films and tutorials, all alone in my apartment for days on end. I took solace in things, tangible objects that I could control, that wouldn’t judge or hurt me, or laugh at my indiscretions or obvious lack of talent. I delved into ideas of self; my own worth, what mental illness took from me, what it gave me. Had I lost something? Was I missing something? Or was I just how the universe intended?  But no matter how much material I indulged in, every creative piece of output felt academic and stale.

I wasn’t sure about much of anything anymore.

I lived in the city and would often go out to my balcony for a cigarette and whiskey. I would watch groups of people, social butterflies passing by in the night. They were drenched in decadence, trying to be noticed, dancing from street to street, living only for the moment. I began to despise them for being so cavalier; I mean, why were they not anxiously locked in their apartments trying to figure out their own meaning in the world? Why did I have to shoulder that burden?

Chapter 2

I was walking back to my apartment from university one day when I suddenly felt like I was being crushed. I got dizzy and fell to the ground, my knees bearing the brunt of the fall. People came over to ask if I was okay, and I was, but something was changing. There was a brooding darkness that was following me everywhere and it was getting heavier around me. I was struggling with its newfound weight.

Finishing the walk back to my apartment with scraped knees, I followed the elevator and corridors until I was at my door. As I opened it I was taken aback by the mess of books and papers that enveloped my apartment; all of this research but I still had not found the right way to communicate how I felt. Academic journals can’t truly explain the raw, rigorous emotion of obsessive thought. Then I had an epiphany. What if the pills I took were the cause? What if I stopped taking my medication? If I did, maybe I could actually feel my OCD and anxiety and could properly document it.

That was it. Pills were my barrier, I thought. I collected them all up into a trash sack and carried them down to the basement where I dumped them into a large trash bin. It excited me to see what would happen. I’ve been on medication since I was twelve and don’t know life without it. Now I was going to experience the real me, I thought.

After a few days I found that I could stay up longer, but it became hard to concentrate. I was going through withdrawal, my hands and body shook furiously at times, but I figured it was worth it. I was coming alive in a wholly new way, except my manic manifestations drew longer and more sporadic. I was high one second, ideas spewing out of me in feverish, flurried clusters; then depressed the next, paper being ripped up and screams dying out through my pillow. I would text my partner, Jade, thoughts or words so I wouldn’t forget, or would ask her to come over then half way through her drive tell her to go home, she wasn’t welcome as my work was unsatisfactory that day and I had to get it right before trying to sleep. My obsessions seemed to be the only things driving me, their rigid structure a welcome distraction from the commotion flooding my mind.

But as I drew deeper within myself, everything else in my life suffered. When my mind becomes so obsessively focused on one thing, everything around it becomes collateral. It's not intentional, I just can't see it happening right in front of me. Jade helped in every way she could, but this was also new territory and she couldn’t have understood. No one could have.

Jade and I had been together for about three years. She was sweet, innocent and caring, but she never really understood that side of me. She simply said there were ‘two Tim’s’. One sane, one insane I assume. I was something of interest to her, something different from other guys, something that she could try to fix. But she could only ever really sympathise, never empathise. Her world was black and white and she never fully understood grey. She was outgoing, going to events, dinners, poetry nights. Whereas I was a hermit, more interested in reading and watching documentaries about the supposed ‘real’ world as I always used to say. But that’s something I loved about her, her innocence. Opposites attract and we were polar. I think in some way we wanted to bring out our own qualities in the other person to make each other more rounded individuals, because what we lacked in ourselves we saw in each other.

But what was happening was all in my mind and I never shared it with anybody; I couldn’t as I was incredibly fearful of someone thinking I was going bonkers and I'd have to be sectioned.

As my views and thoughts began to get darker, I felt myself slowly slipping away, into something that I couldn’t control or understand. 

Chapter 3

I finished the year and did well, but any praise for what I had accomplished fell on deaf ears. By this point I didn’t even feel relief. I felt ashamed. Ashamed of the work I had created, ashamed of myself. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the film, without feeling disgust. I had failed. I had let down not only myself, but also my partner, my tutors and my family. 

Days turned into weeks and my mindset never changed, I just kept retreating further within myself. I was distant, angry and didn’t care about those around me. One minute I was the nicest, most caring person; the next I was an abusive, selfish a*****e. There was no middle ground.

I had become scared of everything, frightened by the things that I used to relish, and I took it out on those closest to me. Everything in the world was horrible and it slowly began to overwhelm me; death, animal cruelty, war, famine. Putrid. I couldn’t sleep without dreaming about how disgusting the human race was; I felt horrible to be a part of it and wished for a new plague to wipe out as many people as possible, myself included. I was drawn into a world of violence and brutality, researching for hours on war atrocities, serial killers, genocide; it legitimately began to torture me.

Humans can be such vile creatures at times, I could physically feel our collective callousness; we were all repugnant and not worthy to walk this earth.

I didn’t understand what was happening to me, and Jade bore the brunt of it. I would yell and argue with her about anything. I began to hate her for being so holy, so seemingly unaware of the horrors that surrounded her. This deep ache began to trickle into every facet of who I was, slowly eating away my identity as a man and as a human being. I was part of the problem. I could no longer look people in the eye or say I loved them; I just couldn’t understand what love meant anymore, I couldn’t feel it. Jade thought I found her unattractive, and to be honest, I did. I knew others found her beautiful and that I had at one point, but I wasn’t attracted to any person. Any sexual urges I had made me feel sick and the mere thought of touching another person sexually made me cringe. I knew I was hurting her, but I just couldn’t stop. An uncontrollable rage was building up inside of me, and sometimes I would have to scream at the top of my lungs just to release its burn. 

I had to get away.

Chapter 4

I booked a ticket to visit my uncle in Iowa. I was running, cowardly retreating into the cold of winter, hoping a busy schedule would help regain the perspective that seemed to be falling faster and faster out of my reach.

I wanted to visit the corn farm there that our family has owned for generations. My great-grandfather, Joseph Hagan, had worked the farm of corn and soy in the late 1900’s, handing it down to my grandfather and his brother, who in turn handed it to my father and uncle. It had always been such a mythical part of my life since as long as I can remember. Almost every year, since I was a baby, Mum and Dad would pack us all up, fly the twelve hours over the pacific ocean, direct us through the cluster-f**k that is LAX, on to Atkins, Iowa, where a whole new world opened up to me, a world of denim overalls, tractors, endless dirt roads, cornbread, cookies… but most of all, family. My uncle Dennis would always pick us up from the Cedar Rapids airport and drive us the fifteen miles to the farmhouse where my grandma would be eagerly waiting at the door, her hair freshly permed, dressed in beige slacks with some kind of frilly, ornate blouse she had picked up from the local department store.

It was a rare treat, a treat I relished and adored. America was so exotic to me. It was vast, strange and full of crazy adventures. And snow! At Christmas there was tons of it, pouring perfectly onto the flat Iowan countryside, blanketing the horizon like a picturesque postcard. Back in Auckland, a lot of my friends had never even seen snow. I felt special, lucky to be able to experience something so out of the ordinary. I loved putting on monstrous coats and cumbersome gloves to build snowmen and craft snowballs on Christmas morning. It was a rose-tinted wonderland, and a true testament to the power of naïvety and blind optimism only inherent in a child’s mind.

Something about the idea of miles of uninhabited road and snow-covered fields made me feel less alone; nostalgically reaching for the dreams and magic a young boy once had that were still ingrained somewhere in my mind. I wanted some of that American optimism.

Chapter 5

But this time was different. I had grown up, grown out of an idealistic viewpoint with age and had developed a healthy (some would say unhealthy) pessimistic view of the world I lived in, which had only been exacerbated over the previous months. My uncle lived in a small condominium in Cedar Rapids, about half-an-hour’s drive from the farm. After I landed I waited at the airport for him to pick me up, but he had forgotten. It was late and everyone had cleared out of the baggage claim area apart from the cleaners and a few stragglers collecting carts. I called a taxi from a pay phone and waited.

On the way to the hotel I lay my head against the cab’s window and lay witness to all the excesses of middle America passing by. The chain restaurants, overflowing with the obese getting their daily caloric fill; the never-ending strip malls, all perfectly similar in architectural mediocrity, surrounded by vacuous parking lots stretching for miles ahead. The ten lane brown highways, drenched in salt and brown-crusted snow, filled with gas-guzzling monstrous vehicles adorned with American flags and words like ‘Freedom’ emblazoned on their bumpers; all ploughing through god’s given land at the expense of the area’s natural environment. It only made me feel worse.

My grandparents had passed a few years earlier and the farmhouse was now empty. Each time we visited for the next few years we stayed in Cedar Rapids at the Residence Inn, a chain hotel with about all the class of a bottle of Budweiser at a tailgating party. I loved it though, because it was simple. Iowa was simple; no frills, no one trying to be something they aren’t. “What you see is what you get ‘round here darlin’, and it ain’t always pretty, but it’s damned near as honest as you’re ever gonna see,” I remember a waitress at a local Arby’s once telling me. For that remark alone Iowa would always have a special place in my heart, but at that moment her lovingly wry wit seemed like a distant memory.

I stopped and picked up a bottle of vodka at the Safeway on the way home and started drinking the second I got into the hotel room. It was 1am and unpacking wasn’t necessary, I’d probably just pass out in my clothes. All I needed were my psych meds and a glass. I flopped on the bed, exhausted from a long trip and turned on the television. It was filled with hundreds of channels… I had forgotten about America’s lust for cable. As I flipped through each one they all seemed to be selling me the same rotten idea: fear. Was my dick big enough? Was I overweight? Was I suffering from these symptoms and needed this medicine to make my life bearable? I mean, what had happened to America? When did it become a nation of such overt perversion? Maybe it was always this way, I had just never seen it through these eyes before.

I turned off the television and tried to sleep but I just lay there; thinking, obsessing. I took some sleeping pills and lay on the floor, it seemed to help my aching back. 2am, 3am, 4am… Each second felt like a minute, each minute an hour. By the time I had my brain sufficiently pickled by alcohol to go outside in minus zero weather for a cigarette, my body finally shut off. Nope! No more it said as it tumbled to the kitchen floor, spilling my vodka next to me.

I was abruptly woken at around 11am by a loud knock at my door. I scrambled to get up. It was my uncle.

“Oh, Tim, you’re here. I must have mixed up the day, sometimes my watch stops working.” This was a typical story from Dennis; he often goes off the grid for months before someone finds him again. He now lived in a run-down Motel 6, his beard was long and shaggy and his dusty grey hair ran down to his shoulders, his baldness hidden behind an old baseball cap. He looked exactly like I felt.

We talked and hung out. I went and visited the farm and saw my cousins who were watching Nascar and drinking Bud Light. But to be honest with you, I don’t remember much else about that trip, it’s all morphed into a brown smudge in my mind. I just know that I barely contacted anyone while I was there, I didn’t really care about what the world or the people in it had to say to me, or I to them for that matter. I thought I could see through everybody's facade. 

Chapter 6

When I came back to Auckland I knew everything had changed. Jade picked me up from the airport and I could see in her eyes that she had been crying. When she looked at me it was in brief glances, averting her eyes the second ours met. We drove back to my apartment mostly in silence, and she sat me down. I had flashes of panicked nausea as I knew what was coming. It was over. She told me she had met someone else, someone who cared for her while I selfishly ignored her needs and treated her like my enemy. We both cried, and my heart sunk to a depth I didn’t know I had. I scrambled frantically for ideas, ways to make it work… some kind of control. But it was too late. I was a child crying, reacting to something I couldn’t fathom. I felt extremes, but deep down I felt nothing. I was already too numb to truly understand its ramifications, or even properly care. I didn’t blame her; I’d never been the easiest person to love. I blamed myself. I was the ugly truth, the arrogant, selfish a*****e that drove away something, that in my eyes, helped mould me through some formative years into a decent human being, something almost worthy of being loved.

I didn’t deserve her, and she didn’t deserve me. I was broken.

For the next week I only left the apartment for vodka and orange juice. I took every kind of pill I could find to numb me. Lithium, Lorazepam, Seroquel, Prozac; all forgotten pills that were stored in my closet from years of backup prescriptions here and there. I took handfuls at a time washed down with gulps of vodka. I couldn’t do anything but lie in bed with the curtains closed, in and out of consciousness, sweating, obsessing, crying and hating myself. The few times I got up to eat something I would usually vomit it back up, as if my body was rejecting itself; it was tired of me as well. When I looked in the mirror all I could see was a heap of bones and weight, a mass unfairly taking up space reserved for the inspirational, the people working hard to better themselves and the society that surrounded them.

The battle for my mind was terrifying, I just wanted to curl up and die. Life was no longer about hopes or dreams or goals, but about the awful truth that I was living a life that I no longer cherished. Waking up was a ghastly task, taken over hastily by the vicious realisation that your day does not, cannot, bring you anything but regret, anxiety, depression and a longing for change. A change that cannot be realised through the intrinsic beauty of waking to another day, but one more day where your mere presence changes nothing.

Jade, the one person who I felt I could fully open up to, who knew my many faults and breaking points, was now the person who wanted the least to do with me. Over the coming weeks I was let go from my job for not showing up. I retreated from any semblance of whom I was and in turn I was left with something that I thought was so ugly, so deformed, I felt physically ill to be encased in its skin. I was utterly ashamed and embarrassed, so I told no one; I was good at hiding emotions after years of practice.

I knew I was sick and getting sicker, but I just couldn’t see past the black.  

Chapter 7

I had to run again, as fast as I could, worried that I could hurt myself and thinking that my problems could once again be resolved geographically. With my last pay-check I booked a flight and flew to Melbourne to crash on my friend Ben’s couch. He’s like a brother to me and it was so nice to see him. I never once mentioned what was going on, I couldn’t understand it and I felt humiliated just thinking about it. He figured I was down about the breakup and that I would move passed it, so I left it at that. But I knew the roots of this darkness reached far deeper; how far I had no idea. 

Drugs and alcohol were the only things that made me smile so they became something that would regulate every part of my day, from getting up to going to sleep. The world continued to spin, and my life lurched slowly forward, punctuated by alcohol-induced comas, benzo-stupors and cocaine-fuelled manic binges. It was a mundane life, constantly waking up to nothing of significance. As Ben would work days, I’d drink my way through some beers during the day, watching Australian television, listening to the nasal squeaking they call an accent, until Ben got home, and we could go out to bars and meet girls. I’d never been much of a womaniser, more comfortable with stability, but I thought it could get me passed the idea of Jade with another man. The more, the better, in my mind.

On one particularly off night, a girl with brazen red hair offered me ecstasy, so I obliged. She put it in my drink as a powder, then we danced, drank and did some more blow. She latched on to me, following me wherever I went and constantly sitting on my lap. By the early hours of the morning she took me back to her house in a drunken daze having no idea where I was going. There are just blurred photographs, snapshots I guess, in my brain of what happened at her apartment. By that point I didn’t give a f**k what I took or who I slept with, I just consumed. I was obsessed with feeding this insatiable dark chasm inside me, this hellish brute of hate and self-loathing that was beating my soul bloody.

I awoke to her (for the life of me I still can’t remember her name) lying next to me naked. I tried to inch my way out of the bed ever so slowly as not to wake her, but the second I moved she turned over.

“Good morning”, she said chirpily, “where are you going?”

“Ahh, just the bathroom,” I said. I hopped up out of bed, put some clothes on and went to the bathroom to call Ben.

“Dude! I don’t know where the f**k I am or how to get back to your place,” I said as Ben laughed madly through the phone.

“Just ask her to call you a taxi then I’ll meet you at the pub down the road,” he said. “Bro, pretty much every guy I know has fucked that chick, good work hahaha” he kept blurting through the phone. I hung up and walked back to her room, but she wasn’t there. I walked into the lounge where her flat-mate was sitting then through to the kitchen to ask her for her address. She was in an apron and about to start cooking something.

“No need for a taxi, I’ll drive you home, babe,” she declared.

“No, really, it’s fine.”

“Don’t waste your money on that. Besides I have pancakes cooking and we’re going to watch The Labyrinth.” Ugh, The Labyrinth. One of the longest, most boring movies ever. I seriously hate that movie. I said okay, reluctantly out of politeness. I spent the next three hours in comedown hell watching a s****y movie as the town bike cuddled up to me like we were a couple.  I’d never felt so awkward or sick as she force-fed me pancakes and whipped cream in the most unappealing, seductive way I could ever imagine. It would take a lot drugs and alcohol to erase this memory, I thought to myself.

After the movie she dropped me at the pub around the corner from Ben’s and I promised I’d call her. (I did, by the way, out of politeness once again.) As I walked through the door to the pub all the boys yelled cheers and bought me a beer.

“Now you’re a true Melbournite,” one of them said.

“F**k,” I replied, trying not to laugh.

Chapter 8

It had been a solid three-day run from that point until I found myself at a brothel at 4am not knowing how or why I got there. Sleeping with a prostitute had never entered my mind before, it always seemed ridiculous when you can just have sex for free. I had been into a couple before with mates who did use them but was never tempted. I had always felt badly for the girls, so I knew I would hate myself for it, and in some strange way I craved that. They sat me in a small, dimly lit black room, with red velvet curtains partitioning one side. One by one, women dressed in skimpy lingerie came in for me to look at and briefly say hello. I had to pick one. They were paraded like pieces of meat on hooks at a slaughterhouse, I felt sorry for them, that they were being demeaned like this, by me. But it was too late to turn back. I didn't even know if I could if I tried.

I picked number five. The names they were given at birth had no meaning here. They were here to be used, anonymously, by filthy men like me fulfilling their lust for the flesh. When she re-entered the room I looked down ashamedly, I couldn't look her in the eye. She gently took my hand from my lap and slowly lead me upstairs. I saw other men doing the same and I wanted to vomit. In my minds-eye I pictured a cheap motel room, cracked paint, soiled sheets and the ingrained smell from a thousand sweaty beasts before me. But when the door opened the room was modern and clean, but sparse and devoid of any character. It suited its intended use.

“Get comfortable,” she said, as I sat awkwardly on the edge of the bed. “Have you done this before?”

 “Ahh… no.”  

“That’s okay, you have nothing to worry about, hon.” She could tell I was nervous and that I was inebriated so her words were slow, soft and deliberate. She was blonde and buxom, but her true beauty lay in her dark brown eyes, surrounded by exquisitely long, mascara-laden lashes that curled up ever so slightly at their ends.

“You remind me of Marilyn Monroe,” I mumbled.

“Well, thank-you,” she said, looking a little surprised.

“You’re welcome” I stuttered. She reassured me that she would be gentle, and I smiled, trying to hold my head up without it wobbling from side-to-side. She checked me for STD’s as if I was at the local GP. “Sorry, it’s cold in here,” I said as she laughed. I had a shower and then she asked me what I was in to. “Uhh… whatever you like,” I said, my mind was blank. She told me to lie down as she undressed in front of me. I was so out of my mind I wasn’t even sure if I could get it up, so I just lay there, fully spread and flaccid. She knelt over me and straight away knew how to get a drunken man’s dick up and at full attention. She climbed on top of me, and so began the most awkward, soulless, shameful sex I had ever had. There was a large mirror placed right above me and for the first time I caught a glimpse of myself. I looked horrible; beaten and worn. I suddenly became aware of my surroundings like I had just woken up from a mellow afternoon daydream, only to realise I was having sex with a f*****g number.

I had to stop, so for the first time in my life I ‘faked it.’ I pulled the condom off and dumped it in the trash, then retreated to the shower and tried to wash away the act. As the water coursed over my body my insides churned with disgust. No amount of scrubbing could clean that dirty feeling; it was a stain that permeated every part of my body.

I came out and sat on the bed, my head placed in my hands and looking at the floor.

"F**k!" I yelled at the ground.

“It's okay," she reassured me. "Look, you still have twenty minutes left, would you, maybe, like a massage?” she asked kindly.

“Sure, why the f**k not. This can't get any worse.” Once again, I lay naked on the bed, face down this time as she oiled my back and shoulders. “Can I ask you some questions?” I asked her, not knowing fully how she would react.

“Sure, if I can ask you some too.”

“Okay. So, how did you get into this? Do you enjoy it?” She looked younger than me, and I could tell she was from New Zealand by her accent.

“Simple really, the money was just too damned good to pass up.” She had a sweet, soft voice; the kind that gives you a lump in your throat when they talk. She was intelligent, talking about politics, morality in her profession and how prostitution is recession proof. You could tell she was strong-willed, feisty and loved what she did. “I have a partner of five years actually, he’s totally supportive,” she told me. (This was not the picture I had, of some drug-addled, bottom-feeding crack w***e that every movie I’ve ever seen seems to portray a prostitute as.) This divergence of honesty triggered an emotional purge in me. I began to divulge everything that had been happening in my life, spewing forth a litany of events and emotions, things I had never shared before. I couldn’t talk fast enough to get out what was jumbled in my head.

She listened, she understood.

There was no judgment, no funny looks. She was gentle, and forgiving. She ran her fingers through my hair and down my back. It wasn’t sexual, but sensual, like she knew I was in pain and that this emotional connection was important to me. Her advice was simple and to the point.

“If you don’t like who or where you are, change something.” I appreciated its relevance, but its meaning was lost on me. I could barely see the immediate, let alone try to change it. We finished talking and she told me to look after myself and to be careful. I gave her a hug. It was the oddest and most expensive therapy session I’d ever had, but Number Five made me feel human again, if only for the briefest of moments. 

Chapter 9

Despite my feeble attempt at respite in Australia, I returned to Auckland in a worse state than when I had left it. I took a cab from the airport and once again retreated into my cave and tried to hide from reality over the coming weeks. I was drinking a bottle of vodka a day, smoking dope and abusing more prescription pills. Life was devoid of any real meaning, the only semblance of happiness I felt was when I was off my face. I created a maze of drugs and alcohol between myself and the darkness. It would take until morning to find me again.

I wrote letters to Jade, jumbled thought patterns jotted down in a murky haze. In some warped way I was trying to understand what was happening to me, writing down how I was feeling, addressed in a vain attempt to someone who I thought could decipher the ridiculous encryption that had become my life. I thought I was losing my mind, and I’d never been so scared in my life. I was getting sicker, but I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see an out.

I sometimes stopped by a local bar on my way home from picking up booze and cigarettes just to see the bartender there. It was a grungy, stale place with spilt beer stuck to the floor and graffiti filling its bathrooms. Live bands played there sometimes, but that day the place was empty, bar a few regulars who were trying to win their next run on the pokie machines. I liked it because no one I knew would ever go in there, and I liked the bartender because she had the balls to run the bar well without taking s**t from anybody. She was Irish, so she didn’t mince words and always had a comeback to a sleazy innuendo. She was as pale as me, with orange hair that she always wore in a bun, her arms covered in delicate, ornate tattoos and her nose and lip pierced with shiny metallic blue rings. She was all bravado on the outside, but her gentle, sensitive character broke through the facade every so often, as I’d sit talking and drinking with her at the bar. She was into new, hip, underground bands that I had never heard of, so I tried to school her on some classics.

She looked up at me briefly from cleaning some glasses, her piercing eyeliner screaming ‘wannabe punk’.

“They’re shite”, she said. “You’re living in the past.” I looked down at my drink. The ice was half-melted and dying of boredom too.

“Sure,” I replied “but I like the past, I know it, it makes me comfortable. And honestly, the future kinda scares me.”

“Yeah, you look comfortable, drinking in here at 10pm with bottles of vodka in your bag. Why don’t you just drink those?”

“Sometimes I just need an ear, and sometimes I just need an earful,” I laughed. I would drink and talk with her until the bar went quiet and the street outside became deserted, the only other living souls being the occasional stumbling drunks like me. She said she liked my ramblings, from politics, war and death, all the way to my moral compass, which was degenerating rapidly day-by-day.

“You’re f*****g mad,” she’d like to say.

“But you love me nonetheless,” I would slobber, slipping off my chair laughing. “Come on, let’s drink at my place, it’s just down the road,” I said.

“Okay, but only to get you home in one piece you nutter.”

We walked home quietly, looking at the stars and the half moon. I reached out and held her hand, gripping it tightly, not wanting to let her go.

"Easy there tiger, there's time enough for that." She cracked me up as we found our way to my building. We sat on my small balcony and I poured her a glass of wine and myself a glass of vodka, and we talked some more. I skulled the vodka, we kissed, had a cigarette and I offered her some pills. She declined, so I took them instead. I poured another glass of vodka and wine, and we kissed some more. She took me to the shower, we undressed and then everything went black. 

I woke in the morning with her naked next to me. There were empty glasses on the nightstands and cigarette butts filling up a glass of dirt brown water. I still had a crusted condom on my dick so we had obviously had sex, talked and smoked, but I couldn’t remember any of it. I was shaking uncontrollably and it felt like I was going to explode. I ran to the toilet to vomit but I just dry retched blood and bile over the bowl for ten minutes. The shaking grew more violent, and all I could do was lie on the bathroom floor. She came in and freaked out, there was blood on the toilet seat and the floor, with saliva dripping slowly from my mouth.

“F**k! Are you okay?”

“Just f*****g leave! I’m fine.” She grabbed her clothes and ran out the door. I lay there curled up on the floor for what seemed like hours, shaking and dry retching. I hadn’t eaten in over a day and I was sure I was finally dying. The strange thing is, I loved it. I loved every miserable f*****g second of it because I was feeling something. I turned to the wall and began hitting it until the skin on my knuckles grazed and bled. I could feel the pain. It was just about the only thing left in me.

Chapter 10

After that morning grew into the afternoon, then evening, I knew I had to keep moving. I was embarrassed and I longed for change, and that somehow placing me in another country would make everything right again. I told everyone I was moving to London, on a two-year visa that I had magically procured in a week, and that I had all the necessary documents to find work there and would be living with friends.

None of which was true.

I was going to travel to London where I could stay for up to six months as a tourist. I'd jump from couch to couch, living off money borrowed from my uncle, parents and my savings and using the fumes of my credit card as my last resort. From there I could travel Europe, hopping from one visa to the next with no real destination or end in mind. I went to my psychiatrist to stock up on as many meds as I could, but it was becoming difficult to hold any meaningful conversation. I would get lost mid-sentence and forget what I was talking about most times.

Through this manic, obsessive behaviour I had lost track of where I was. There was no longer any anchor tethering me to solid ground, I was adrift in a self-medicated haze in an ocean I had become disillusioned with.  I booked a one-way ticket, packed up my life, put it on my back, left my apartment, told my family I loved them and departed.  

No plan, no visa, no idea of what was in store. I saw myself as a nomad, destined to come back a changed man or in a body bag. 

Part 2.

Chapter 11

I look up just as the clock ticks to 5pm. The blanketed grey has morphed into a soft red hue as the sun sets its light for the day, replaced by the sullen allure of a London night. I have to get ready to go. I grab a shower, fill my drink bottle with vodka, do a bump of coke, check my coat pocket for my other gram & cigarettes and head out.

As I open the door, a familiar friend greets me; the dank, heavy air that is unique only to London streets, sidewalks and back-alleys during a wet winter. It almost hugs my skin as I walk, mixed with the subtle waft from local curry houses, pubs and the human waste that overflows the rubbish bins. The street is cobbled and quaint, spotted with small muddy puddles and resilient weeds, the remnants of which I hope date back to the times of Jack the Ripper and oil lamps.

I walk slowly to the tube, sipping my ‘water’ bottle, taking time to soak in my surroundings. The tube is packed, I’m surrounded by strangers all crowded together, some so unconcerned with their surroundings they can still read a book. I want to shove them all away from me; head butt one and cause a huge scene. But I just sip my ‘water’ bottle, getting odd looks from a few around me as I smirk and think about how many people I could hurt before a bunch jump me. I’m eager. It’s almost palpable.

I meet up with friends at some nondescript pub near Brick Lane, and after a quick dinner and drinks we head to another friend’s party on the top floor of an aging nightclub. The place is dark and lit with those idiotic eighties black lights, illuminating everyone’s f*****g teeth. It’s the perfect drug spot though; the place is teeming with people off their head on all types of s**t. Alcohol, coke, speed, ecstasy; I grab anything I can get my hands on. The blur of a debauched night is taking full effect. My mind is no longer wallowing in dark manifestations but replaced instead by the sudden and all-consuming exhilaration of a heavily medicated bloodstream.

As the night weaves its inevitable sordid tale, a few of us still standing end up at my friend Elliot’s flat in Brixton in the early hours of the morning. I couldn’t tell you how I got here, but the music is loud and the beer’s still flowing, with stranglers from the party still holding on and newcomers dressed in chic coats and tight jeans filling the kitchen and living room. I desperately need a cigarette though. I stumble my way through the gauntlet of foreign faces, eventually finding a narrow stairwell. Barely holding myself upright I bump into my friend John who is heading up to the roof for a smoke as well. Clasping the railing I pull myself up the stairway step by step following him, to the third floor where his room lays at the end of a darkened hall. As we enter his room a small table side-lamp illuminates his bed and the open window.

“We gotta climb through the window to the roof,” John says.

“Ok,” I grumble, following his lead, not bothered with the height for some reason, as I usually can’t stand it. We manoeuvre through the window and pull ourselves up over the hanging ledge to the roof. It’s a small, flat space filled with cracked concrete and a couple of plastic chairs in the far corner. We sit down and light up and I begin telling him about my plans to see Chernobyl. I’m almost giddy with excitement.

“It’s a whole f*****g city man, left in a sweeping rush. They had no time to pack, nothing. Car doors are still open and dinner plates still set in the same place. It’s f*****g crazy. It’s a literal ghost town, where animals have completely taken over,” I say exuberantly.

“Bro, that sounds fucked up! When are you going?”

“Booking tickets tomorrow, not sure how long it takes to get there though.”

Then, as London nights tend to do with incredible accuracy, rain drops start pattering our heads, wetting not only us but the cigarettes we have just become accustomed to; we quickly inhale as much as we can, trying to fill our lungs with their noxious fumes to savour the feeling and dampen the cravings for a little while. We head back to the window, now drenched and letting rain into John’s bedroom. I balance myself over the ledge and reach my toes out until they just barely touch the windowsill. Looking down all I can see is black, there are no lights back here and the outside of the window is only faintly illuminated by John’s lamp. I apply pressure and move all my weight to my toes, but the windowsill is covered in pools of water and my shoes just can’t grip the wood. They suddenly slip off and I realise I have nowhere to go but down. I try to grab the piping latched to the side of the building, momentarily halting my fall. This only serves the purpose of scraping the skin from my knuckles and giving me a brief moment to realise I’m falling backwards. My fingers slowly slip off the wet pipe and I begin free-fall. When no object is holding you and gravity pulls you towards earth, it happens really f*****g fast; I’d say a second per floor.

No matter how many intoxicants fill my bloodstream, they’re all suddenly overpowered by an immense rush of pure adrenaline. Nothing slows down, but my senses become overly active and hyper-alert to everything around me. The air is ice cold and thin, almost hurting my body as it slices through the rain. All the hair on my body stands-up, skin tingling as a shiver runs down my spine. The ground is black beneath me; I can’t see when I’m going to hit it I just know that eventually I’m going to come to a sudden stop. There’s no tension, but flaccidity as I gently close my eyes and try to breathe. There’s a sense that no force in the world can stop me from falling; I feel incredibly alone, scared and shocked, all in the punch of three seconds.

I hit the ground with speed and explode across the concrete. All I can feel is what seems to be the weight of the entire fall pressing against me, like the concrete is somehow tense and elastic and I’m slowly being pushed further into this immovable object from my own downwards thrust. I hear reverberating cracks around me, like the sound of a bullwhip. 1! 2! 3! Then the dull sound of moaning in the distance… is that me? I’m not sure. My body begins writhing and spasms violently in response to what has just happened to it, but I can’t feel anything. I can’t even see anything around me it’s so dark. It isn’t real. It just isn’t, I keep thinking. I’m hallucinating, something’s not right. I hear a noise from somewhere in the distance, I can’t make out what it is or where it’s coming from. Then the noise slowly becomes words as I look up.

“Tim! Tim! Holy s**t, are you okay?” All I can see is the dampened light coming from the window and John’s faint silhouette as raindrops slowly drip on my face.

“Ahh, f**k… I think so,” I yell back.  Time has simplified in a way, I’m now painfully aware of it. I try to move, to sit up, but I just feel nothing. I can move my head and arms but nothing else. There’s a dull ache in my lower back but nothing below my hips. I notice that my left leg is draped over my right, like a woman crossing her legs. It looks odd, as I’ve never been able to do that without squashing an important appendage.

As I keep looking around, everything slowly becomes illuminated. Faint objects down the narrow alleyway are beginning to show their form. I notice blood on my hands, chest and arms but can’t see any anywhere else. I try to move my toes but can’t, it doesn’t register. I can only feel the cold, the mud and the dull ache. The steam from my short bursts of breath form dense, puffy clouds like the exhalation from a cigar puff. I briefly imagine my uncle, sitting there on Christmas Day puffing away; I try to imitate his accuracy and giggle at the very thought of it.

Steam hovers around my body as its innate heat reacts with the frigid air, slowly dissolving as it rises into darkness. The concrete beneath me is freezing, like frozen glass on a winter morning and my body being fingers pressed against it. At first there’s a jolt of cold shock, but as the heat and cold mix, a short union is formed, and condensation starts to mist up the glass window. But if you pull your fingers from the glass you see the mist dissipate, forgetting most traces of you, except the oily residue left behind, a permanent reminder of that exact time and place; an indelible ink that binds you to that moment forever. I know that in this second, that this place, this feeling, will stay with me for a long time to come.

Chapter 12

John and my other friend James arrive, kneeling next to me.

“I’m fine,” I say hesitantly. “Don’t move. Can someone call an ambulance!?” I lie still, talking with James, in and out of the reality that surrounds me. More people gather down the alleyway; their voices blurring into each other, all looking horrified and shocked. I close my eyes and try to wish it all away when someone touches my arm.

“Hey mate, bit of a fall, aye?” A paramedic says, kneeling next to me. I can’t comprehend what is happening to me, it’s all moving too fast.

“I’m so sorry,” I mumble. “I’m wasting your time. I’m fine. Just need to get up and move around a bit.” I try to sit up, anchoring my weight on my elbows and push up.

“Don’t move!” he yells at me. I collapse back onto the concrete and lay my head on the mud. I feel nauseous and confused. They put a mask over my face and I slowly fall into a dream-like haze, euphoric from the gas that is now pouring into my lungs. They start to manoeuvre my limp body onto a stretcher, taking care not to move my head or spine. People are yelling and telling people to move away. They place strange contraptions all over my body, things that restrict my every movement.

“Why the f**k can’t I move my arms!?” I yell. “I’m trapped like this!” I feel irrational and scared as I have no f*****g idea what is happening around me. They move me through the house and out the front door to the street. I can hear them cutting off my clothes. “Get me the f**k out of here. Please, please, please,” I beg. My body shakes from the cold as they put a blanket over me and heave the stretcher into the back of an awaiting ambulance and close the doors. All the ambient noise of the street and people die instantly and is replaced by the harsh scratches of tearing velcro as they strap my body in. I close my eyes and dream of the stars, that I can see them above me, infinite in their magnitude. I drift back and forth, in and out of endless darkness.

“Tim you’re going to have to keep your eyes open, okay? Everything’s going to be fine. We’re taking you to King’s College hospital, it’s not far away,” I hear someone say. I open my eyes but keep my fists white-knuckled, until blurs of red light and specs of white dust start to scrape my cornea and I hear the deafening screech of sirens as the ambulance takes off in a mad rush. I can hear my breathing underneath my mask; short bursts of panicked gasps, then nothing. I’m not sure if I’m breathing or someone else is. I close my eyes and drift again, it’s my only place of solitude. “Tim, I need you to keep your eyes open, okay?” one of the paramedic’s yells at me over the deafening sirens. I open them again, briefly going in and out of consciousness. Someone pulls on my arm as they setup a drip next to me and run it straight into my vein. I turn to see James on the other side of the ambulance looking in awe, his eyes wide and his face pale.

“Where are you taking him again?” James asks. “King’s College Hospital. If you want to contact any members of his family tell them that’s where he’ll be.”

Suddenly the doors swing open and they lower me out of the back of the ambulance then push me hurriedly into the emergency room. There’s a crowd of people surrounding me, each in their own worlds, doing their own specific duties. I can’t quite hear any one person; it’s a hive of activity as I stare blankly at the ceiling, feeling prods and pokes and listening to medical terminologies as they bounce around the room. A doctor leans into my point of vision.

“Do you know your name and where you’re from?”

“Tim Hagan, New Zealand.” I apologise again for the inconvenience I’ve caused. For the next half hour, I lay there with no clue as to what is going on, stationary in a whirlwind of ideas and information unfathomable to my untrained ears. It’s strangely exciting and terrifying at the same time, but I’m not worried. I’m sure I’d be in surgery by now if it were really bad.  I lift my head to look at my lower body. I’m naked, there’s blood on the sheets around me and I have some kind of velcroed contraption around my hip area. I breathe in deeply then take the mask off.

"What's that?" I ask.

"That's a pelvic sling," one of the nurses next to me replies. "It holds anything that could be broken in one area. We're going to have to remove it to assess any damage to your pelvic region, okay?” She puts the mask back over my mouth and gently pushes my head back into the pillow. “Now I want you to take deep breaths and don’t stop, okay?” I nod. When they release the velcro strap from the sling, I feel the first shock of pain, like my pelvic area has just been flattened, similar to when you hold your stomach in then quickly release. Now I’m really, really scared. People are continually touching my feet, looking for pulses and squeezing my toes, but I can’t feel much of anything below my abdomen. I’m not sure if I’m moving my toes as I try. I can feel a strange pressure, but no movement. My lower body feels like it’s on fire. This is not happening. I can’t be paralysed.  

My breathing suddenly starts to get shorter and more panicked.

“I think I'm hyperventilating,” I mumble to nobody in particular under my mask. My heart feels like it’s going to burst out of my throat at any moment. I feel sick, dizzy and confused. I just want to die, right here.

"Okay, Tim, we're going to give you some oxygen. We need you to breathe deeply and slowly. Everything's going to be fine," a nurse tells me as she leans into my field of vision. I close my eyes and breathe in slowly, my fists still clenched. I feel a warm sensation running up my arm as I try to comprehend where I am, who these people are and why they are doing this to me; putting me through pain. The warmth spreads throughout my chest and the rest of my body, easing some of the pain.

Chapter 13

"Tim, we're going to take you to get some scans now, okay? We're going to get you an x-ray and an MRI so we can have a clearer picture of what’s happening in your body,” a doctor says. I lie staring at the ceiling, my head unable to move from being strapped in place. They wheel my bed down some hallways and into a cold, sterile room. A huge white, cylindrical machine fills the space, it looks ominous and filled with tales of suffering.

"Hi Tim, I'm James. I'm the MRI technician here." He’s a small, puny man who mumbles when he talks. He looks like he hasn’t seen sunlight in a decade and would be able to recite Pi to me in an instant. "We're going to have to lift you onto this table to take the scans, okay?” By this point all I can do is try to shake my head in small instances. Not that they care much. Now they have full autonomy, my mumbles mean nothing. More people surround the bed, pushing the side handles down and manoeuvring the sheets under my body. Someone rams a small piece of foam into my mouth. "Bite down on that," he says. I feel ill just thinking about it, but slowly bite down. It tastes like styrofoam and fills my mouth immediately with saliva. They start to slowly lift my limp body onto the scanning table. I cry desperately for them to stop, to just leave me alone. The pain is just too unbearable. If you can imagine a pain that seems to rupture every blood vessel in your body, that emanates and vibrates seemingly through every molecule of your being, then this was it. I bite down harder on the piece of foam but it does nothing. My teeth pierce into my tongue and a rush of warm blood fills my mouth. I spit out the bloodied piece of foam and try to scream, but nothing comes out, I have no breath left. Spots form in my vision and everything goes blurry. I close my eyes.

"Tim! I need you to keep your eyes open, okay. I know it's painful, but you need to stay awake."

“F**K YOU,” I say to no one in particular. “You’re doing this to me.”

“I need you to lie as still as possible,” the technician says. He positions my head in some sort of brace that feels like an ice hockey helmet. He slides two wedges underneath my head and neck to stop them from moving. I’m now motionless on the cool slab and am trapped. I just want this to be over. "I'm going to put these ear plugs in your ears, Tim. The machine can get quite loud. But don't worry, it's all perfectly normal and part of the process." He smooshes them into the folds of my ears leaving me to lie there with the dull hum of my inner ear and confusion. I can hear my breathing again, fast and short, my body almost racing to catch-up to the oxygen it needs. Outside the hospital walls the air is wet and dewy, almost soaking into your skin. Inside the hospital ER it’s warm, but that fake, stale, air-conditioned warmth. It smells like the steam from heated ammonia and urinal cakes. But inside this room the air’s crisp and cold to the touch. This mix of pain, disorientation and sharp chill is an assault on all my senses.

Then all of a sudden, it’s quiet, deadly quiet. The staff have filtered out of the room and I’m alone. A voice comes over the intercom.

"Alright Tim. I'm going to need you to stay completely still for me. The MRI will start, and you'll slowly be moved backwards into it. When I ask you to not breath you need to hold it in until I say you can exhale." This is fine with me as whenever I breathe it hurts. "Shall we start?"

“Just get it done.” The machine suddenly comes alive, pulsating and rotating around my head with a sound that can only be described as a Jedi's light sabre as it slices through the air. The table begins to move my body backwards, into the chamber. It’s a white, sterile cave, claustrophobic and menacing. It starts blaring, loud screeches that seem to go on for minutes. It churns its way around me, scanning my body for abnormalities. I just want to vomit.

"Hold your breath now Tim," he blurts over the loud speaker. "Not long to go." The drugs they gave me for the pain are slowly wearing off and it begins to get so intolerable that my mind in some way shuts off. I can feel the pain, but it feels distant now, almost ethereal, like my head is no longer attached to my body, but I can feel its phantom ache below me. My eyes begin to flicker, faster and faster, until I can’t keep them open any longer. Everything goes black.

Chapter 14

When I come to, I’m back in the emergency room, with James and John sitting next to my bed. A nurse is pumping more morphine into my arm as I inhale the nitrous oxide that has been given to me in a seemingly endless supply. I pull the mask off and slowly catch my breath to talk.

"What time is it?"

"10am," says James.

“You guys look f*****g awful,” I say between inhales. By this point everyone is coming down from no sleep, drugs and alcohol.

“You can f*****g talk,” James says laughing. Once the nurse leaves I let them take inhales of the nitrous over the next hour, letting its euphoric qualities and pain relief help their comedown. At this point I’m naked and covered in a sheet, only able to move my arms and head. Everything below my chest is on fire with constant pins and needles that feel like sharp, tiny knife stabs. A cold pack lays gently on my forehead, but the sweat keeps pouring out of me onto the pillow anyway.

"Do you think they have panadol here?" James asks.

“It's a f*****g hospital, I'm sure they have paracetamol,” John moans quietly as he lays his head on the wall in the corner. He asks a nurse for some with a glass of water.

"Technically, all medicines are for the patients, sir."

"Yeah but I've got a killer headache, you'd really be doing me a favour. Surely you have some just lying around somewhere?" John and I laugh; it’s vintage James at his finest, a lawyers’ mind with about the same amount of charm. Just as he finishes his sentence a doctor comes to my bedside.

"Hello, Timothy. I'm Dr. Kumar, one of your treating physicians. We have your scans back and it's good news, considering." I take the mask off and let out a sigh of relief and for the first time feel like I can breathe on my own. "You are very, very lucky, Timothy. The good news is we found no sign of internal bleeding or ruptured organs. You may have a concussion but you’re alert and holding conversations well, which is good. However, you have severely fractured your pelvis. Unfortunately, your right leg has impacted into your pelvic cavity, and your pelvis has fractured completely in two places, ostensibly splitting it in half here and here,” he shows us holding the x-ray up to the light as we all sit mesmerised by what we are seeing. “It also has smaller, hairline fractures throughout it, but your bladder is still intact which is very rare in cases such as this." I close my eyes and breathe in deeply, trying to piece his words together without losing focus. Inhale, exhale, repeat, I keep thinking.

“Your right femur has impacted four inches into your pelvic cavity, Timothy. This has caused the separation fracture in the right side of your pelvis. I think you landed on your right leg and it took most of the impact, then you fell back onto your left side fracturing that part of the pelvis. It’s remarkable that your leg is not broken anywhere. You are very, very lucky,” he keeps saying.

"What about feeling in my legs? Will I be able to feel them again?” I ask.

“We’re hopeful that once we move the right leg back into place and realign your pelvic fractures blood flow should resume as normal. But this may not happen until we have operated, and we don’t yet know when that can be. Right now, we need to put your leg into traction to pull it down and back into place."

"Okay, do whatever you have to,” I say hurriedly, not wanting to waste any time.

"We’ll need to drill a hole through your shin bone, just under your knee, and put a small metal rod through which will then be harnessed to weights that will hang over the end of your bed. With the right amount of weight, it should pull your leg back into place. It’s important we do it as soon as possible, so we need do it right here in the ER. You’ll be given a local anaesthetic and pain relief and it shouldn't take long."

“What? Are you kidding me? I don't want to be awake for that. Can't I have a general anaesthetic?" I ask.

"I'm afraid not, we don't have time. It will be uncomfortable, but we will manage your pain. You won't feel anything in your leg."

"Okay... Just get it done,” I say with a sigh. I look to my left at John and James’ faces. They look exactly like how I feel, wide-eyed and shocked. Minutes later two other doctors come into the cubicle and shut the curtains. They barely say a word to me after quick introductions. They have a cart with them, filled with medical equipment.

“Should we be in here for this?” James asks.

“It’s fine, as long as Mr. Hagan doesn’t mind,” one says.

“Stay,” I say to James with a firm look. “Tell me what’s going on.”

"You're going to feel a slight pinch," one of them says to me as he lifts up a needle then injects it into my shin. The other one fiddles with the nitrous oxide machine then places the mask over my face.

"Breathe deeply and don't stop," he tells me. F**k, here we go again. I inhale for as long as I can until I’m euphoric and can’t feel much of anything anymore. James and John watch intently.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“Ahh… not sure really…” I hear one of the doctors start the drill and test its rotation and speed. F**K THIS. This is just out-of-this-world, batshit insane. Then suddenly there’s a slight burn and an odd pressure as the drill breaks skin. It tingles. But as it hits bone the pressure changes, like if a pencil is slowly being pushed through my leg. The sound is awful; it reminds me of someone trying to drill through a slab of wood. The drill keeps stalling, slowing down its rotations like it’s running out of battery. I lift my head slightly to look and see the guy jamming the f*****g thing into my leg, perched over me like he’s holding down someone drowning, tensing up and pushing as hard as he can. Once it gets through the bone it easily slips out the other side. My head falls back into the pillow and once more I inhale deeply. In the haze I can feel a sharp tug and a gradual movement of my leg as I hear them apply weights one by one to the harness that is now through my shin. It’s like I’m slowly being pulled down the bed, but as I look around I realise I’m not moving at all. My leg feels heavy and stretched, like someone is trying to pull me off the bed by my ankle. I keep inhaling.

"You're bloody lucky to be alive bro," James keeps reiterating. I suppose I am. But I don’t really care either way at this point. The blood on my hands has dried and cracked, and there’s pooled blood all over the sheets from wounds on my side, legs and elbows. I can’t see all of them, but I can feel them oozing and sticking to the sheets. All I want to do is go into surgery, get knocked out, drilled and stapled; whatever the f**k they have to do to get me into some semblance of my former self. I need desperately to feel my legs again; if I have that I’ll be fine.

I just want to get out of here; this is not my plan. Travel is to be my saviour. I’m still intent on going to Chernobyl. Broken bones and f*****g hospitals are not part of this. Besides, I’ve broken bones before from a youth spent skateboarding. Eight weeks tops to recover. Then I can be on my way, with maybe a slight limp in tow, and forget that any of this ever happened. 

Chapter 15

After a couple of hours and several morphine doses later, a porter comes shyly into my cubicle.

“Hey, Mr. Hagan, I’m going to be transferring you to the orthopaedic ward."

"What about surgery?" I ask.

"Your doctor will talk with you once we get up there.” He releases the clamps that are holding the wheels of my bed stationary with a swift kick and hangs the drip attached to my arm from the side of the bed. James and John gather their things and follow. He weaves me through the hospital’s hallways, gliding around corners and waving hello to passers-by. He’s overly jovial and obviously knows the hospital intimately, anticipating every obstacle, every turn. He buzzes the doors open to the orthopaedic ward, then around the corner and into the acute unit, bed four. Bright blue disposable curtains partition me from the other three people in the room. There’s a strange hum about the place; people hurrying around, machines beeping, patients’ buzzers blaring. It’s oddly alive. James and John sit with me as the porter positions me into place. We sit staring at each other and the commotion around us, and can’t help but laugh, it’s all we can do at this point.

“What the f**k have you gotten yourself into, Hagan,” James says wryly.

“This is my vacation I guess. Drugs and lying down, it doesn’t really sound bad, actually” I say mockingly. They're good friends who know how to make light of the situation, which keeps my mind off of more serious matters. “F**k, I should call Georgia, she's probably wondering where I am.” James finds my phone, which is in a small plastic bag with all my other belongings next to my bed. He already has my camera, which had been in my back pocket when I fell; it’s scratched and dented but operational.

"I've been taking pics of everything the whole time,” James tells me. “For posterity.”

“Good man,” I reply.

I find Georgia's number and dial. The phone rings once.

“TIM! WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN!” she yells as she answers.

 “Hey, I’m in hospital. I fell off a building and broke my pelvis.” There’s silence for a few seconds.

“Wait. You did what!?”

I explain it to her again and she asks what hospital.

“King’s College.”

“I’ll be there soon.” She hangs up the phone.

When she arrives at first I hear her voice, then out of the corner of my eye I see her moving slowly around the blue curtain; she’s dead white and shocked. I laugh and smile, as my only response at this point is to joke about the situation, and I thought she would feel the same. But it isn’t laughter, it’s tears; tears at seeing her friend like this. I can only see outwards, and for me it doesn’t look that bad. Looking in at me though, surrounded by tubes, bloodied sheets and weights hanging from my leg, it must be distressing. She slowly moves toward me and up to the side of the bed.

"Can I hug you?" she asks, wiping her eyes with a shaky hand.

"Of course.” It’s an embrace that’s comforting; it calms me and gives me an undeniable sense that everything will be all right. My friends are here. I need to show them that I’m going to be fine, better than fine, so they don’t have to worry, especially Georgia. I realise that any of the hard stuff to come will lay solely on me, and I have to be strong enough mentally and physically to deal with it. The darkness has temporarily been replaced with physical pain, and I know I can deal with the physical. The mental is going to be another story. But I’m surrounded by people who I know I can trust implicitly, who are happy to be my network in a foreign country.

I feel strong.

Chapter 16

"Timothy, how are you feeling?” It’s Dr. Kumar again as he closes the blue curtains behind him. He’s followed by the two trigger-happy drill doctors.

“Uncomfortable and in a lot of pain,” I say unforgivingly. Georgia, James and John line the other side of the bed: my backup. He nods his head and examines the weights and harness.

“I think we need to add one more,” he tells the other two.

"When will I have surgery?" I ask hastily. “I can’t stay like this for much longer.”

"Unfortunately, right now your body is too swollen to undergo any type of surgery. We will have to wait a couple of days. In the meantime, you need to rest."

“Rest!? How can I rest when my pelvis is in pieces and my leg is held in place by a bunch of f*****g rudimentary weights?” I snap at him.

“Timothy, I know you’re uncomfortable, but it’s too dangerous to operate while the swelling is like this. On a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst pain you’ve ever felt, what is your pain level?"

"Twelve. It's unbearable, and it’s getting worse it seems. My lower body stings all over but I can’t feel or move anything. Will that get better?”

"That's to be expected. We will know more once we can see what’s happening in there. I'll check with the nurse about your pain medications. We will give you as much morphine as needed to make you comfortable throughout the night. I’ll check back with you in the morning and we’ll go from there, okay?”

I nod sheepishly.

“Take care.”

A nurse enters after they leave to check my blood pressure and change my saline drip.

"I'm afraid visiting hours are over. You'll have to come back in the morning, he needs rest,” she states. I say goodbye to John, James and Georgia and harden my mind for anything that could come. But I’m terrified. I can’t stop shaking. I ask the nurse about getting my psychiatric medications, but she has no definitive answer as of how to get them. I can’t remember what dosages I need either, but it worries me to think of going another night without them. I know I can go downhill fast when I don’t take them, but hopefully the morphine will help me sleep.

Saline is hydrating my body and for the first time I can feel my bladder filling up. A nurse placed a container next to my bed that I can use to urinate. I pick it up and lift my head as far as I can, trying to manoeuvre it under the sheets to a place where I think my dick is. I’m not even sure if it’s in the right place, the whole area is so swollen and stings to the touch. I try to squeeze out a small amount, but the pain is just too unbearable. They told me my bladder was bruised during the fall and this may happen, so I call for a nurse as my bladder continues to grow bigger over the next hour. I have continual urges to urinate, but no release valve. She tells me to try and push harder so I push until I’m red and sweat-soaked. The sheets underneath me are itchy and uncomfortable and my frustration is about to boil over. My bladder is like a balloon slowly being inflated with water, filling my pelvic cavity and pushing against my broken bones. The pain gets more and more excruciating.

"I can't f*****g do this!" I yell. "Please, please, I need a catheter. Please.”

"Okay, I'll find a doctor," the nurse says as she runs out of the room.

I wait.

It feels like I’m going to burst. I’m watching the clock; five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes... It becomes f*****g ridiculous. After half an hour a doctor rushes in and authorises the catheter. By this stage any semblance of privacy is relegated to my own thoughts, while my body is seemingly open for business. One nurse lifts up my gown as I lay there, naked, red and swollen in front of three perfect strangers. Through the pain of my bulging bladder I barely notice the catheters insertion, but as it drains, oh, the release! I breathe in deeply and let out a pained sigh as urine and blood leave my body, slowly moving through a small tube to fill a bag that is now hanging from the side of my bed.  A nurse administers morphine through a tube that is now running into my hand and they close the curtains, turning off the lights in the room as they leave.

The only light that peaks through comes under my curtain; a warm, slightly reddish hue that emanates from somewhere outside and dies slowly at the foot of my bed. It lets me make out shapes and objects in the room, but not much else. I try to sleep, to close my eyes, but I can’t stop sweating. The room feels like heaters are surrounding my cubicle, pumping hot air over my already burning body. I’m lying in what feels like warm, stagnant puddles as the sweat pools in the small of my back and soaks through the sheets beneath me. My pillow is saturated, and I can’t get comfortable. I’m wallowing in a pit of comedown drugs, surreal exhilaration from the morphine and the throbbing sting of my bloated body wanting to thrash about. I can’t move anything apart from my arms and head and I smell like festering meat and urine. I hold the sidebars of the bed tightly; I keep having short, potent visions that I’m falling again; falling through the bed, off the bed, just falling. I need my body to writhe, to release this disgusting energy that’s pent up inside my head and chest. But all I can do is lay there, grip the bed and bite my already bloodied tongue in an attempt to ease these insufferable urges. I’m going f*****g crazy.

I begin buzzing the nurse consistently for hours, needing more and more pain meds. Every half hour she doses me again, and twenty minutes later I’m buzzing her again. All I can do is thrash my head from side to side to take my mind off of the pain. She gives me a small piece of foam to bite down on as she gently wipes my forehead.

"I've asked the doctor to prescribe you something stronger, okay? Just hang in there." She comes back with a syringe; it’s a mean looking m**********r that looks like it could put down an elephant. "This is Fentanyl, it's a lot stronger than morphine. It'll help with the pain." She jabs the needle into my shoulder then slowly pushes down on the syringe and I die an instantaneous, black, mothball death. It’s sinister and utterly electrifying, a brutal force of synthetic opiate bliss. It’s exactly what my body is crying out for. It stops the clawing in my brain and replaces it with deep, cavernous trenches of hallucinatory dreams, falling into endless pits of cold black. 

My eyes wearily open in the morning, blurred and spotty. There’s movement around me and talking. I’m still in a dream. I can see and hear, but I can’t speak. Nurses are changing the sheets beneath me and asking me questions. I try to move my mouth, but nothing comes out. I’m still high as f**k. I close my eyes again and someone that sounds miles away asks me what I want for lunch. The question itself materialises in my mind and I can see it bouncing around from one part of my brain to the other, growing faster and faster, but I just can’t answer because my mouth is full of spit and it takes all of my focus to just swallow. I open my eyes again and there are doctors surrounding my bed. I notice it’s Dr. Kumar and he’s talking about my surgery. I nod consistently, not fully being able to understand everything he’s saying, but hearing enough pertinent words to give me the overall gist. After a few minutes he hands me a clipboard with pen and paper and motions for me to sign my consent for surgery. I scribble my name down then lay back in my pillow, not being able to hold my eyes open a moment longer. Once again, I pass out.

I wake suddenly, shocked and scared, not knowing where I am. My eyelids are heavy, and my eyesight blurred; it’s like it takes a minute to blink. Everything seems to be in a kind of romanticised slow motion, things are constantly happening around me, but my mind is unaware of their meaning or context. I can hear my heart beat, moving from a rapid pace to a slow, pulsating murmur. I want more; more drugs to keep this feeling, I never want to go back into feeling any more pain. I just can’t stand the thought. I buzz the nurse and ask her for more. She comes back with a syringe full of morphine that has to be taken orally. She checks my wristband, I recite my name and birthdate, she then places it in my mouth and squeezes. It’s a strange taste, numbing my tongue with a hint of boysenberry as it washes over my taste buds as I swallow it. I lick my lips and swirl my tongue around my mouth, savouring every last drop. I can feel it moving down my throat and into my chest, then slowly being released into my bloodstream. It’s a warm, welcome hug that envelopes me whole. My sheets have been changed and the nurses have washed me, all while I was unconscious. I lie in bed and begin to watch as the morphine soaks slowly into me.

The back of my bed can only be lifted to 20 degrees, so that’s my viewpoint for the foreseeable future. I quickly notice that the man lying directly across the room from my bed is staring straight at me, wide-eyed and intense. He’s African, with spotted dark skin and bones where muscle should be. He lets out a huge smile, filled with missing yellow teeth and built up calcium deposits.

“Hey!” he yells across the room while waiving. I wave back, not quite sure what the proper etiquette is for such a scenario. I watch him intently for an hour. He’s a shady character with a quiet demeanour, almost whispering when he talks to nurses, so they have to lean in, as if he’s telling them a dirty secret. I nickname him ‘Echo’ after the character from the show Lost. I don’t know why, but his mysterious nature reminds me of that character. You can tell he’s the bane of the nursing staff straight away. He’s constantly buzzing them with inane requests; it’s hilarious to watch. He asks for a plastic urinal, and once given one, then proceeds to piss in a coke can and give it back to the nurse. He’s psychotic, but in a strangely sweet way, as the nurses sometimes walk away giggling and shaking their heads in disbelief. He repeatedly tries to get out of bed even after the nurse has scolded him previously. He has casts around his hips and leg and can’t walk anywhere, but that doesn’t stop his determination. He tries picking his cast off, bit by bit until the nurses catch him, then lays back into his pillow with his hands behind his head in a show of smug defiance. All he does is wave at me, smile or wink and say, “Hey!” like I know what the hell he’s going on about. I try not to laugh as it’s painful, but he’s the kind of enigmatic person that interests me to no end. I ask a passing nurse what has happened to him and she quietly tells me he fell off his girlfriend’s balcony while trying to climb up to her window as she had just broken up with him. He was found by police in the garden trying to climb the fence to get away, even with a fractured hip and femur. The girlfriend had pressed charges and he was formally arrested in his hospital bed. He’s to appear in court once he’s up to moving, so he has a security guard who checks on him every hour or so. He seems to be the subject of every gossiping nurse, whether you ask about him or not. He’s a welcome distraction in the acute ward it seems.

Once dinner is served and taken away, and visitors filter out from the wards, silence becomes painfully apparent. The bright blue paper curtains that surround every bed for ‘privacy’ are drawn and segregation takes effect. From a bustle of activity and movement comes slowly dimmed lighting, faint talking in the hallways, beeps from machines and the odd murmured sigh of pain, snoring or hushed crying. My world for this moment exists in this room, this space, this bed. Everything outside of it is left to my overactive, exceedingly demoralized imagination. I can create any world I need, the more dismal the better to make my small space more of a safe haven. In my mind’s eye the outside ward is bleak and derelict, a dystopian wasteland filled with the gaseous odour of rotting, burnt flesh and bleach rising from the sprawling morgue that lies just below the hospital floors. There they take the bodies of the unidentified sad souls who have passed from this side to the next, whether laying in a hospital bed in the emergency room or dumped carelessly at the hospitals doors by overwhelmed substance abusers, to be burned in a fiery pit, leaving no sign of their previous existence or identifiable markers, as if they never existed. The walls throughout the wards are covered in coagulated, dry blood, running through an intertwining maze of corridors that lead you on a convoluted journey, merely ending up where you began.

”There is no escape!” I mumble, my eyes brightening at the mere thought. Doctors wear masks and slip-on shoe socks to hide their noise as they sift from room to room, injecting the sleeping innocent with vials of acid and watching their skin rot from the inside in a cruel game created by the bored, psychopathic night shift.

The morphine and lack of psych meds is clearly taking its toll. My mind is warping into these strange, unknown places, but I let it go free. It takes me out of my situation and makes me almost giggle as the scenarios became more and more ridiculous. But deep down I know I have to try to comprehend my predicament, to try to understand something, anything, about this situation. I close my eyes and begin to think about the past, trying to pick up pieces of information scattered amongst drunken thoughts that may have had a direct effect on where I now lay.

Chapter 17

My head and shoulders jump up suddenly; I’m awake. It’s the middle of the night and I’m screaming. I’m falling again. My left hand grips the hospital bed; white, numb and shaking vigorously, while my right arm swings sideways, knocking the water jug that lies on the side table. The pain is insufferable. I’m saturated with sweat and terrified. I try to remember where I am, but it still feels like I’m falling. A nurse runs in and tries to calm me down. She’s sweet and understanding, but it doesn’t help.

“The bed’s moving! Please, make it stop!” I yell. She pads the sweat around my face and tells me where I am and that I’m okay, the bed is not moving. I’m shaking uncontrollably, and I feel nauseous. I just want to get up and run to the toilet to release the vomit that is now filling the back of my throat, but all I can do is lean forward and convulse as it spews out of my mouth, down my chin and onto my hospital gown. I drive my head back into the pillow, gripping the side of the bed as all my muscles suddenly contract again. I keep falling. I try to catch my breath as she wipes vomit from my face but once again everything goes black. 

When I awake in the morning my hand is still firmly gripping the bed. I can smell a hint of vomit and my own stale body odour, but my chin has been wiped clean and my gown changed. My lips are dry and cracked, with remnants of boysenberry still caked into their corners. I immediately buzz a nurse for more pain relief. She comes back with the syringe, we repeat the same ritual of me saying my name and date of birth, I swallow, making sure I swirl my tongue to the farthest reaches of my mouth, so not to miss a single drop. I slowly lay my head to rest on my pillow and once again am forced to simply watch.

A hospital is such a strange place, a weird dichotomy filling the gap between life and death. Everyday, human lives are saved and lost. Daughters. Sons. Brothers. Sisters. All people who mean something to someone, somewhere. And this building houses all that pain, that suffering, that joy, that relief. It’s a place where human life is measured, and for the briefest of moments, understood. For that reason, it is both loved and hated, because in essence it is the battleground that represents the frailty of our existence.

Understanding these small subtleties as they pass through your mind while on morphine requires a lot of imagination. If you hit the perfect amount of opiate to blood, you can transcend the physical and open a whole new level of consciousness. All pain washes away and you’re left in a milky, soft fog, with nothing but the limitless potential of your own mind.

I close my eyes and begin to wander, through dreams and ideas, from the macabre to the spiritual. Through a world far more intricate, far more vivid than anything I have ever experienced. I dream of an idea of god, a universal power far greater than myself that has granted my wish to be rid of this constant grey. My thoughts begin to materialise and are swept up in a wind of pure exhilaration, morphing from the whisper of an idea to a tangible reality that exists only in the shadowy recesses of my imagination. 

It’s winter and I’m in Iowa, at our family farm. I’m standing in a corn field, looking out at miles of flat, uninhabited frozen earth, covered with the remnants of rotting corn husks left behind from the fall harvest. I’m alone, naked and freezing, the only sound coming from my toes as they dig into the dirt, trying to find shelter from the cold. My face and ears burn as the winds brake against my body. I can feel my heart pounding in my throat as I look up to a darkening sky, vast, brooding and swollen from the weight of impending rain. Its clouds form in a hurried splash of dyed colour and black ink, releasing a flood of liquid that falls seamlessly to earth. As its ink washes over me, the spiritual world begins to move around me, through me. I’m connected to everything and everything to me. I matter. Cracks form on my skin as my body slowly freezes; I begin to understand my own significance, that I’m a tiny part of something far more lucid than the complicated world I have always recognised. There is no more pain, no more cold, no more hurt. I’m a mass of blackened bone and blood. As my bones shatter beneath me I’m scattered amongst the dirt; the earth digesting all that was before, leaving only ethereal traces of who I once was, soon blown away and distributed among the fields to grow into something far more substantial.

When I open my eyes, it feels like no time has passed. My legs and feet are swollen and throb; the morphine is wearing off. I look at the clock and almost two hours has passed. Suddenly, everything is so dull and drab. All the vivid colours, all that strange spiritual transcendence has been replaced by bland white and grey again. A nurse comes to the end of my bed and pinches my toes without saying a word. She frowns, writing something in my chart then leaves as abruptly as she appeared. I tilt my head forward to look at my lower body for the first time in two days. I’m worried. It feels like it’s still frozen. I bite down on my lower lip in anticipation and lift the bed sheet. Everything looks alien; a fat, bloated balloon of a body. A mass of built up fluid and stretched red skin. Everything ‘s bruised and purple. The trauma to my body hits me like a punch to the jaw; it’s overwhelming. My right leg is at a strange angle with my foot pointing outward, but I just can’t move it back into place, no matter how hard I try. I follow the harness that’s drilled through my shin down the bands of stretched rubber that disappear over the end of the bed, holding the hanging weights that keep my leg aligned. I want to touch it all, feel it all, to let me know if it’s all actually real.

I lift my hand from its grip of the bedside railing and begin to slowly move it down my body. It’s electric, small shots of pain rush from the point of contact almost through my fingertips as they brush against my skin. I move my hand over the swollen lump that used to be my pelvis and down to touch my dick for the first time. I’m deadly afraid that there’s something wrong with it as I haven’t felt it move since the accident. It’s flaccid but feels stiff on the inside, the aftermath of the catheter that now runs from my bladder, through my dick, into a hanging bag. But I can feel it. I can’t move it, but I can feel it. I breathe deeply with relief. I wait for the nurse to come back to check my temperature to ask her if it’s normal to have a catheter.

“I mean, will I ever be able to get an erection again?” I ask sheepishly.

“With any serious trauma, different parts of the body can be affected in different ways. It just takes time for the shock to wear off and the body to adjust. It’s perfectly normal, don’t worry.”  Perfectly normal is not something I would usually associate with this, but it’s comforting nonetheless. She walks around the bed to take my temperature and as she does she gently knocks the weights that are hanging from my leg. I let out a pained sigh as they begin to sway, twisting my leg from left to right. She reaches for them as I hear a loud thud, the right side of my body suddenly jumping backwards.

“F**K!” She’s pained to try and not yell as she scrambles with the weights that have fallen to the floor. Two more nurses run over and they slowly put each weight back on, one by one. Are they f*****g serious? What’s holding them on? Fishing chord? I bite down on my lip as my right side slowly moves back down the bed.

“I need some morphine.”

Chapter 18

Dr. Kumar is back an hour later with his team to talk with me. They close the curtains and stand around my bed, overwhelming the space. They appear larger than normal, towering over me with their long, looming gazes. They know so much more about my condition than I do; it pisses me off. They’re so slow and deliberate with explaining things, like I’m a child. Just f*****g tell me! I think in some way they got off on the power of controlling the flow of information. I’m always the last person to know anything it seems. 

“Timothy, today we will be performing a rather complicated surgery on your pelvis and right leg.”

“Today?” I say surprised. Dr. Kumar holds up an MRI then an x-ray of my pelvis and begins to guide me through it, step by step. 

“Your pelvis has fractured here and here, splitting it in two places. Your right leg has impacted into your pelvic cavity here.” It looks bizarre, strange that this mess exists in my body. “We need to operate on you to see the full extent of the damage though. We will be using a keyhole camera to assess this. Our plan is to re-attach your pelvic fractures with two screws. These two screws will be permanent. Depending on how well this works we will decide at the time between two options. If the bone is too badly fractured, we will have to fuse the bones together with metal plates. This will involve creating an incision across your lower abdomen and screwing the plates into place. This is the more severe of the two options. As these plates will be permanently fixed to your pelvis, the healing process will be a lot longer and your movement will be restricted indefinitely.”  F**k me. What will I become? Some gimp using a cane at the ripe age of twenty-five? It’s not like I’m any Adonis to begin with, but surely a walker will further hurt whatever chances I have with the ladies that I already cling desperately onto.

“Okay…” I say, taking a deep breath in.

“The second option is a newer treatment, it’s called an ‘X-fix’. Think of it like scaffolding on a building. Two metal bars will be screwed into the left and right sides of your pelvis. These bars stick out through your skin and attach to two adjoining bars that will clamp together, forming an ‘X’ shape. These will be outside of your body, positioning your pelvis in the best place to heal. It will stay in for at least three months.”  Three months? Through my skin? Scaffolding? I can’t tell if my body is a temple being refurbished or they’re turning me into bionic man. Either way I’m fucked. “This is the preferred option as it will let your pelvis move around as it heals, which will mean less recovery time and far greater mobility in the future.” 

“What about walking? When will I be able to walk?” I say eagerly.  

“It all depends on the extent of the damage and we won’t know until we operate. But it will be at least three months until you can stand. Once your pelvis has been moved back into place and your right leg adjusted, blood flow should return to normal and hopefully you will get more feeling in your legs. It all just takes time for the body to adjust after such a shock to its ecosystem.” A rush of nausea fills my body; I can feel it in the back of my throat as my mouth dries to a paste. I want my parents, I need their maternal strength.

“We’ll give you some time to go over it and take it in. In the meantime, you have some friends waiting outside. We’ll come and prep you this afternoon. Everything will be okay, you are in the best of hands,” he says, laying his hand gently on my shoulder. I nod, scared shitless.

Georgia and James come in.

“I don’t want to call Mum & Dad until after the operation. They’ll just worry,” I say. I know it will be hard on them both, especially Mum. She worries about me being overseas by myself and I know it will be a huge shock for her. Plus, it was her birthday yesterday. F**k, I totally forgot.

“Well, you have to call her for her birthday anyway, right? Plus, what if something happens in the surgery? Don’t you think it’d be better if they knew?” Georgia’s right, and deep down I agree, but I’m not sure how to do it.

“Yeah, I guess so.” I want to be strong for them, to let them know I’m okay, that I can handle all of it on my own. I pick up my phone and dial. Mum answers, and instantly her voice makes everything all right. She calls for Dad to get on the other phone. They scramble in true Hagan fashion about the whereabouts of said phone for about a minute then finally centre themselves on the task at hand. It’s an odd relief, hearing their banter. It’s funny how no matter how old you are, how independent or how headstrong, in incredibly hard situations you often fall back into being a vulnerable child, looking to your parents for the answer to all the worlds ills when things just don’t make sense anymore. 

“I’ve got something I need to tell you. Don’t worry, I’m fine, but I’m in hospital.” 

“Oh god, what happened!” Mum lets out. She has heard these words before.

“Umm, I fell off a balcony and broke my pelvis.” I don’t want to let them know how far I fell or how serious it is, it will just make them more worried. “I’m honestly fine. I have to have surgery this afternoon though. Routine surgery.” 

“Oh, Tim! Are you ok?” 

“I’m really fine. Look, you don’t need to worry. I’ve broken bones before.” I try to ease their concern as best I can, but anything I say doesn’t really matter. I can hear it in their voices. I can’t comprehend how they must feel, but I can’t focus on that.  “Please, don’t worry. James and Georgia are with me. I’m honestly fine. And I know this is a weird time to say it, and I’m sorry I missed it, but Happy Birthday, Mum. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that! I knew something was wrong though when I hadn’t heard from you. Motherly instinct,” she says, almost proudly.

“I’ll call you after the surgery. I love you.”

“Ok… We love you too. Can you put James or Georgia on for a minute?” I pass the phone to James and he calms their anxiety, knowing he’s here and can be a go-between. He gives them his number and tells them he will keep them updated. I feel tears welling up in my eyes, but I don’t want to show it in front of Georgia and James. I just can’t seem to shake the feeling of being incredibly alone again, thousands of miles away from my family. My friends in London are great, but they have other lives to tend to as well. Just because I’m stuck here doesn’t change that. Every time they leave it’s on me; I have no other option.

“I need to be alone for a bit. I’ll text you after the surgery.”

“Okay, good luck bro,” James says as we slap hands. Georgia looks worried, but we hug and say our goodbyes nonetheless. A couple of tears drip down my cheek after they leave but I quickly wipe them away. F**K IT. I’m not going to let this, or anything else, get the better of me. Whatever happens, I’ll deal with it. It’s the first time in a long time that I’m actually standing up to myself. I’ve let this wet blanket dictate my life for far too long; I’ve lost all sense of self-worth. Now it’s my turn to take it back, by myself, for myself.

A couple of hours go by as I lay in wait. I’m not thinking of any one thing really, my mind is tired and overwhelmed. I’m not worried about the surgery itself. I’ve had at least five before for all sorts of stuff. I know in some way what to expect. What terrifies me is the outcome. My legs are still numb. I can feel there swelling, but it’s dull and almost foreign when I run my fingers over them. And to be honest, I’m scared. Scared that I may never walk again, or that I will never walk properly again. It’s not like I’ve been a marathon runner in the past, and lord knows I’m disgustingly gumby at the best of times, but to hear that I may never have that option in the future is a frightening thought.

My daydream is quickly interrupted by the swish of my curtain, suddenly revealing a rambunctious young man dressed in light blue scrubs.

“Hello Mr. Hagan! I’m your orderly and I’m here to take you to surgery. Don’t worry, I’m an excellent driver,” he blurts out. I ‘m not sure whether to laugh with the guy or at the guy, but I laugh awkwardly nonetheless. “I’ll try not to bump those weights on the end of the bed, but there’s no promises. I drive pretty fast,” he says as he winks at me. 

“As long as you get me there in one piece and don’t swing those damned weights, I’m ready.”  He wheels me through the corridors, down the lift, through the hospitals atrium into a waiting room full of other people in beds, all waiting for their turn to be carved up, I suppose. A man who looks just like the soup nazi from Seinfeld picks up the chart from the end of my bed.

“Hey, Tim, I’m Malik. I’ll be your anaesthetist today. Now, are you allergic to any medications that we should know of?”

“None that I know of.”

“Good, any allergies?”

“Nope.” I continue in the same vein for every question, trying to get it all over and done with as fast as possible. I just want to get in there, take the damned drugs and pass out. I’ve barely slept in three days and figure this will be a nice drug-induced nap.

“Alright, see you in there,” he says as he waves to another orderly. I’m whisked off into another, smaller waiting room, this time by myself. Surrounding me are hundreds of medical instruments, all organised along the left and right walls. I wonder about which ones they are going to use on me. Maybe that screw? Or that hook? Or maybe the packaged saw that’s leaning against the large fridge. They sure know how to make you feel at home here. A nurse walks through the doors ahead of me and introduces herself. 

“Tim, I’m Sarah, I’m going to be one of your nurses today.” She speaks in a soft, soothing tone and seems genuinely happy to be at work, a trait I find annoying as hell because I’ve never really been able to attain it.  “So, you’re from New Zealand, huh?” 

“Born and bred.” 

“I’m sorry to hear about the earthquake, sounds awful.” Earthquake!? 

“What earthquake?” 

“Oh, you haven’t heard? There was a big earthquake in New Zealand.”  

“No, I haven’t heard. Do you know where?” 

“I’m not too sure actually, somewhere south? I’m sure you’ll hear about it after you wake up.” For f**k sake, just what I need. Not only am I about to go into surgery, but my family could also be lying under a mound of rubble on the other side of the earth. “Not to worry, I’m sure everything’s fine.”

F**k you, Sarah. F**k. You.

“I’m going to put a line in your arm now, so you may feel a slight sting.” I turn to look as the needle goes in. I’ve always loved that part. It glides through my skin and into my vein effortlessly. A sudden burst of red blood floods the small container of saline; it’s a rush to see the saline and blood slowly being pushed back into my vein as she squeezes down on the syringe. “All done!” She then pulls out a marker and puts an ‘x’ on my right leg. 

“What’s that for?” I ask. 

“It’s just so there’s absolutely no confusion as to which leg will be operated on. Kind of a rudimentary fail-safe.”

“You mean they don’t know? How backwards is this place?”

“No, no, of course they do. It’s purely a precautionary measure.” From the moment I met Sarah barely five minutes before, she has upped my anxiety ten-fold, all while oblivious to a patients’ needs and fears, and f*****g smiling constantly while she does it.

Not cool, Sarah.

She opens the doors to the operating room and pushes me in. The air is frigid and the room colourless, everything seemingly blending into an off-white. In the middle of the room is a tiny operating table with a monstrous light above it, attached to the ceiling by what looks like a mechanical arm taken straight from the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are more medical instruments, laid out perfectly on little stainless-steel tables. A nurse darts around the floor wiping watery-bloody areas clean, while another is throwing used instruments into a large biohazard bin. It looks like what I imagine Josef Mengele’s Auschwitz operating room once was in its disgusting heyday; an incredibly efficient veneer, designed in part to disguise the butchery that really went on in there. Don’t be fooled, the things they do here (especially with putting bones back together) is nothing short of brutal. After some of my past skateboarding accidents I’d done research on exactly how they put bones back together and how they screw them into place. Look on YouTube. It’s incredibly laborious work, sometimes surgeons literally have to get on top of you to drill a screw in. Luckily, you’re knocked out, and have no idea what’s going on around you. Because, you see, up until the point of knock-out, it’s all soft voices and gentle touches. You go in, fall asleep, and wake up with a nurse tending to you: “Would you like some ice chips?” It almost feels like a day spa, and that’s the point. They need to create this idealised world, because every patient is usually terrified. But I know that while I’m in that small waiting room getting an ‘x’ marked on my leg, some other poor sod has just been sewn up and they’re cleaning up his mess while prepping for me. In the end this is a business.

They position me next to the table as the anaesthetist talks me through what type of anaesthesia will be used. As he’s talking, two other people place a board under my body. I’m hastily transferred onto the operating table; you can tell they have a schedule to keep and they want me in and out as soon as possible. Everyone in the room (except f*****g Sarah, of course) looks like they haven’t slept in days. Taking off my gown they place electrodes all over my body and a mask slowly covers my face.

“I’m going to get you to breathe in deeply now and count backwards from one hundred,” Malik says. I start counting, trying to hold on for as long as I can. “Okay, I’m going to inject you with the anaesthetic now, Tim. You may feel a bit of a chill going up your arm.” It enters my blood stream and I can feel it moving up my arm, inch by inch. It’s ice cold and feels incredibly unnerving. As it reaches my shoulder then moves down into my chest, I slowly begin to lose consciousness. “87, 86, 85, 84…”

Chapter 19

My eyes are shaking as I try to open them and gain focus on the room. I’m not sure where I am but I try to hold my eyelids open in short bursts to look around. Every time I do it’s like the sound of a golf club swinging next to my ear. I’m by myself, next to a window looking out onto a brownish red brick wall with a slither of sky above it. Is everything in London a f*****g brick wall? There’s a tiny bit of sunlight - the first I have seen in days - trying desperately to peak through the seemingly insurmountable force of dense, grey, overcast sky that is London’s daily winter backdrop. It’s dead silent and dark, the only light coming from a small bulb that illuminates the bathroom. I lift my head to look at the sheets laid perfectly atop my numb body. They look odd, pointing up somehow, like a tent protruding from my pelvis. I lift them up to see metal bars forming a criss-cross shape, just hovering below my hospital gown. I throw the sheets back and pull up my gown, revealing my lower body, which is covered in bandages. Then I remember it. Scaffolding! This is the scaffolding that Dr. Kumar was talking about! I don’t have plates, this is the x-fix! Then it hits me like a slap to the face that these poles aren’t suspended in mid-air they’re screwed into my body, into my pelvis and coming through my skin. It’s an incredibly unnatural feeling, but I don’t care. I wiggle my toes and can feel them wiggling, I touch my leg and can feel it. I feel a bit like Humpty Dumpty, but with a more positive outcome. My body feels whole again, like it’s all finally working together, nothing seems out of place. My pelvis somehow feels solid, not like it’s floating around freely inside my body. It’s a truly remarkable feeling.

“Hey, Tim, how are you feeling?” a nurse says as he enters the room, turning the lights on.

“Indescribable is the best word. I am really thirsty though.” He pours me a glass of water with a straw in it. 

“Tilt your head forward and take a sip, slowly. How’s the pain? I see you’ve seen the x-fix, you’re very lucky.” I suddenly realise that I’m lying here basically naked, with my catheterised dick blowing freely in the wind. 

“S**t, sorry.” I move my gown back over my body. “Yeah, I have seen it, it’s… definitely different.” I have no real words to say, my mind is just trying to play catch-up. They wheel me back into the acute ward, bed number three this time. There are no longer any weights hanging from the end of my bed, so I can be speedily rushed through doors and hallways. It’s exciting in a way. James and Georgia are waiting for me and I hug them both.

“How are you feeling, bro?” James asks.

“I feel good man, I feel a lot stronger and my legs are doing way better. I feel positive for once. It’s nice.” 

“Okay, but what the hell is that?” Georgia blurts out. 

“Haha that’s my x-fix. I think I’ll call him… Larry.” It’s the first name that pops into my head as it’s a portmanteau of my best friends, Luke and Barry. I don’t know why I think it’s funny or relevant, but I guess they have held me together in some way, shape, or form, my whole life. It fits. 

“Well, hello Larry, nice to meet you. What does it feel like?” 

“You talking to Larry or me?” 

“Both, I guess.” 

“It’s feeling pretty damned good at this point. My body feels… somewhat aligned. And this morphine isn’t hurting either.” 

“I text Luke,” Georgia says. 

“Oh yeah? What’d he say?” 

“He asked if you could feel your legs. I said kind of.” He said, “Tell him to harden the f**k up then.” James and I burst out laughing. Luke has an uncanny ability to sum up a situation effortlessly with just the right amount of elegance. 

“Tell him he’s a c**t, and he’s dead to me.”

“No problem there,” Georgia says with her head tilted and eyebrows raised. Georgia, who like me, has always had a fascination with the peculiar, wants to see Larry and how he goes into my body. I’m pretty intrigued by this as well. My nether regions are now covered by sheets and my upper body by my gown, and in the middle sticks out Larry, bold, proud and basking in the attention. I pull my gown up and Georgia starts to examine. 

“You can’t really see anything, it just sort of disappears into the bandages.” My brain still can’t fully register the fact that metal poles are half in my body, and half out. I can’t bring myself to look at it for too long. It exists down there, and me up here. The thought of an open wound both fascinates and repulses me. It’s best to leave something for the imagination, where I can manipulate the reality to suit my needs.

“It’s all yellow and bloody around the poles,” she says.

“Let’s talk about something else,” I quickly interrupt.  We chat about nothing really, quips and funny stories from London and the past. It’s nice to just feel content with someone, to share things again. I want to bottle this feeling, capture its essence, so I can feel it whenever things started to go black. In this moment, I’m happy.

Chapter 20

Visiting hours end and James and Georgia have to say goodbye. The room’s lights are once again dimmed, and I’m left with my fluorescent bed light above my head, casting light upon the bright blue curtains that seem to constantly engulf me. The room is calm; no beeps, buzzers or swishes from nurses’ feet. There is solitude at just the right moment. I close my eyes and take a deep breath and let out a long-winded sigh. A sigh that carries with it all the hurt, all the fear, all the pain. Something leaves my body, some weight that I’ve been carrying. I feel strong, powerful even. F**k the outside world, my world exists right here, with me, right now.

I begin to doze when my stomach starts making churning noises that grow louder and louder in its quiet surroundings. I haven’t taken a s**t in days. The high doses of continuous morphine keep blocking up my system. How do I even take a s**t? It’s never really crossed my mind before. I buzz for the nurse. The pain keeps slowly getting worse; I can feel a huge mass of concrete moving through my lower intestine. I start to get stabbing pains throughout my pelvic area; whatever is happening in there isn’t reacting well to my freshly operated lower torso. I start to sweat and panic, I have no idea what to do, or where the hell to do it. The nurse quietly opens the curtain, she can tell from my face I’m freaking out. 

“Umm, I think I need to, umm, take a s**t?” 

“Oh, ok, no problem. I’ll get you a bedpan.” 

“Wait, what? A bedpan? Are you serious?” She’s already gone before I can say anymore. She returns with a stainless-steel bedpan and some heavy duty looking cleaning pads. What in the actual f**k! 

“Ok, I’ve got you a bedpan.” She closes the curtains behind her and looks at me with a forgiving face, a face that seems genuinely sorry for what is about to happen. My heart sinks. 

“Don’t you have some type of tube or something? Like the catheter?”

“I’m afraid not, hon. This is going to be difficult. It’s going to hurt and take a lot of determination on your part.” How do I do it? I can barely lift my head let alone my body, it’s held together with bars and screws for f**k sake. “I’m going to raise the head of the bed a bit and you’re going to have to push up with your elbows. We’re going to have to lift your pelvic area and slide the bedpan underneath it.” This is the solution? I start sweating and I feel like I’m going to have a panic attack at any moment. But the pain in my stomach keeps getting worse and I have no other choice. 

“Isn’t there some other way?” I ask. 

“No, hon. You’re going to have to do this.” Two other nurses come into the room, one with a dose of morphine. She begins lifting the head of my bed until I’m at a twenty-degree angle. I dig my elbows into the mattress and begin to slowly peel my upper body from the sheets. I can feel the metal poles move within my body, almost creaking while the surrounding holes in my skin begin to rise and fall along the length of the bar as I take each hurried breath. I can feel their sting as open flesh and muscle rub against the bare metal. It takes my mind away from my bowels for a few seconds. The nurse places the bedpan next to my legs and slides her arms underneath my body. Another nurse does the same on the other side of the bed as the third nurse waits to position the bedpan. 

“Okay, are you ready?” I bite down on my lip and nod. They slowly begin lifting my lower body as I dig my elbows harder into the mattress. 

“AHHH! F**K, NO, NO!! PLEASE, STOP STOP STOP!!” My body is on fire, shooting pains radiating up my spine and make me want to vomit. It feels like someone is stabbing me in my torso with a red-hot knife, over, and over and over again. White spots start popping into my field of vision and slowly everything starts to go blurry. I thrash my head from side to side, biting my lip, then my tongue until I can taste blood. I feel something cold move under me. The stabbing pains continue to shoot up my spine and now into my arms, I can’t hold my body up any longer. I slump backwards into the pillow and everything goes black. 

“Tim, can you hear me? Tim?” 

“Yip, yeah, yip... I’m here.” I slowly come back to consciousness, straight back into the burning pain.

“Tim, we’re going to have to try something else, okay? You lost consciousness for about a minute and your stomach is distended.” I taste a rush of boysenberry over my tongue and my breathing slows to a crawl. “We’re going to use an enema, ok Tim? Do you know what that is?” I nod, not knowing exactly what she means. They gently turn my body over to one side of the bed, pushing my forehead into the bed railing. I feel nothing now; the morphine has taken over every aspect of my body, from head to toe. There is a sharp push in my anus. I can feel warm liquid filling the cavity. Then they roll me onto my back again. I drift in and out of consciousness for a while, until I feel and hear an almighty roar inside my bowels; something is alive in there. 

“Something’s happening I think,” I say in a scared, wimpish murmur, barely getting out the words as I’m so high. There’s no time for explaining; they push my right side over again as I let out a helpless groan, and I grab a hold of the bedside railing, keeping my upper body from falling backwards as they hold my lower body to keep me on my side. All the muscles around my pelvis and sphincter begin contracting, pulling tighter and tighter around the metal bars. The mass slowly pushes its way to the bridge of my anus and decides to stop. I’m going to have to push to get this thing out. It feels like I’m in some kind of absurd reality show, surrounded by cameras where my privacy is a commodity that has been sold to the highest bidder without my consent. I take a deep breath and push as hard as I can. Each time I push the muscles tighten around my pelvis, but I have to keep going, there’s no rewind button. I push and push and f*****g push. All the veins in my neck and face start bulging with blood as sweat drips down my face. I let out prolonged, agonizing cries, until slowly something begins to move down below. It feels like a large rock is being pushed through the cavity and I’m genuinely afraid it’s tearing my anus.

I push once more, and it emerges. I take a breath. It f*****g retreats. Every last ounce of my strength goes into contracting my muscles one last time. Suddenly the dynamic in my stomach changes. I feel a huge squeeze then the rock dislodges from its resting place and proceeds to evacuate my anal cavity onto the huge diaper pads that are laid underneath me, around the bed and on the floor. It’s immediately followed by a full flowing torrent of built up faecal matter that gushes out of my behind and all over the awaiting pads.

But f**k, the release! As my bowels empty, my body relaxes, my muscles let go of their death grip around my pelvis and my head falls down into my pillow as if not connected to my body at all. Forget the fact that I’m in desperate pain, naked and taking a diarrhoetic s**t that just keeps on flowing in front of three strangers, I have never felt so f*****g satisfied in my life. Ever. Once the torrent slows and my body has purged itself of all its rancid waste, the nurses remove the pads (while wearing masks and gloves; I feel horribly sorry for them). They then wipe all parts of my body that has touched any faeces then place some kind of large diaper underneath me. After such an unusual event, my cubicle feels calm. The nurses don’t complain; they wipe my face and brow with warm water and tell me it’s all part of their job, all while smiling. I have such an enormous amount of respect for these three nurses; hell, all nurses. They didn’t make me feel uncomfortable at all as they knew I was already mortified. One comes back in holding some morphine to calm my still tense body. I open wide, swallow, thank them then once again then drift back into a medicated dream, an all forgiving smoky mist that I have grown to adore.

Chapter 21

The next morning I’m in a different room again, this time by myself. The room is long and angled, my bed positioned in the farthest corner. The door is open and I can hear commotion outside, banging that keeps getting louder and louder. Spurts of muffled yelling fill the hallway, then silence. A nurse’s trolley squeaks along the corridor then stops at my door, the nurse pushing it just outside my field of vision. A small voice starts to talk. I can only hear her faint whispers amidst sporadic banging sounds. Then her voice gets deeper and more authoritative.

“Now, David, you’re going to have to get back into bed, you need rest.” The banging gets more frenzied. “Do you want me to get security again?” The banging stops immediately and the squeaks slowly resume again. The trolley turns and enters my room, followed by a nurse. She’s a young Asian woman, barely taller than the prodigious supply trolley that she has to haul around. 

“Hey, Tim, my name’s Laura. I’m going to be changing your dressings today.” 

“Oh, okay. What’s that banging noise?” 

“Ah, that’s David. I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to him. He’s an interesting character, no need to worry, he’s harmless.” 

“I like interesting characters,” I say proudly. I’m not going to pry too much more, it seems like a touchy subject.  “Why am I in a different room?” I ask.

"We had to put you in a kind of quarantine, for lack of a better word, because of your stomach issues.” Ahh yes, the freak show that had taken place only a few hours before, how could I forget such a thing. It must have sounded utterly bat-s**t crazy to my poor roommates. 

“Yeah, sorry about that,” I say embarrassed.

 “Don’t you worry, we’ve seen it all before. Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here,” she says, pulling my gown up to reveal Larry once more. The bandages surrounding him are yellow and sticky from a build-up of what looks like pus and other bodily fluids that have seeped through the holes. She peels the bandages and tape off, layer by layer, finally revealing the entry/exit wounds, where metal meets skin. Surrounding the metal bars the skin is oozing yellow gunk, it’s an open wound that is desperately trying to heal itself around Larry. It looks so bizarre, like these two poles are just floating there. I notice two other sutured wounds, one on my right side and one just above the base of my dick.

“Okay, now for the fun part. This will sting and will hurt a little. But you have tattoos so I think you can handle it.” 

“It can’t be worse than what's already happened, right?” 

“That’s very true,” she says with a grin. After wetting a cotton bud with some kind of solution, Laura starts cleaning the opening. It stings but is bearable. The harder part is watching it, but I just can’t look away, it fascinates me. The heads of the cotton buds are quickly soiled, and I think she realises a more vigorous approach is needed. She picks out some sponge-like gauze, wets it, places her fingers on each side of the x-fix and after applying some light pressure she starts pushing down. I let out a small, cowardly yelp as I watch the wound move slowly down the metal pole, discharging a yellow mucus trailed with blood as it descends. After wiping everything clean she starts on the other side. This time I can see bits of white flesh stick to the metal as it tries to grip onto Larry. 

In the short amount of time Larry and I have spent together I’ve kind of grown affectionate towards him in an odd way. Sure, he’s a foreign object to a delicate ecosystem, but a necessary one nonetheless. He’s literally holding me together. In a weird way he symbolises something that has been missing in me, something stable, something steadfast amongst chaos. He anchors me. Here lays this body, a body that I’ve tried to hurt, to abuse so flippantly over and over again, and it’s trying its best to heal itself, and Larry is facilitating this. No matter what I seem to put my body through, it continually fights back; it’s an innate part of its nature, continuously regenerating into something stronger, more resilient. If my body is working this hard to improve itself, then why can’t my mind? I know I have a lot of healing to do physically, but where can I start mentally? That is a far larger and more complex idea to understand, but necessary in order for me to have the willpower to even try and get better.

Laura finishes the dressings and squeaks out the door, turning right, and down the hallway into my unknown. I start reading a women’s magazine that has been left on my side table when that annoying banging starts again. David must have been sparked by the wheels screeching along the linoleum floor, he knows he has an audience he can perform for once more. His yelling is muffled and sporadic, it seems like he’s screaming until he’s out of breath. I keep my head down and try to read this British tabloid bullshit, but my mind is fixated on David. Then I hear a crack! a thud and what sounds like glass smashing on the ground. A man’s voice suddenly fills the hallway in an echoing boom.

“Nurse! I need something! You can’t just keep me locked away in here and ignore me you know, I know what’s going on around here, bunch of f*****g crooks!” His yells at times turn into soft tones as he tries to cynically joke with the nurse’s station to gain their trust after breaking it so many more times in the past no doubt. “Don’t make me come over there, ladies. You know I love ya, but if I have to I’ll f*****g run there!”

“David, just get back into bed, you need rest,” one nurse replies in a way that shows they have some kind of rapport.

“F**k rest! I’ve been doing that for days! I need methadone, that’s what I need.”

“You’ve already had some David, you’ll just have to wait.”

“F*****g nazi c***s! The lot of you! I thought this was Great Britain and we had defeated the fascists!” F*****g hell. Where have they moved me to? I can only hear voices, but I can tell he’s moving closer to my door. The hallway goes quiet, then a gaunt figure in a hospital gown gripping a metal walker edges passed my door. Please don’t look this way. I bury my head deeper into the magazine to look like I’m busy. “Hey! Hey! You. You’re new, what’s your name?” Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

“Ahh... hey man. My name’s Tim, what’s yours?” He starts turning his walker bit by bit towards my door, limping behind it. He edges his way into my room until he’s next to my bed and sits down in the chair. He has an oily complexion, pockmarked from years of acne, and the ingrained waft of a heavy smoker. His eyes are tired, yellow and bloodshot, almost sinking into his skull. Calloused hands full of sores gently grip the metal of his stroller. His skin is almost translucent, showing a maze of veins that run just beneath its surface. An I.V. drip digs deep into one of his many track marks that spot the length of his forearm. He’s a serious junky.

“I’m Dave mate, what’s your story?”

“I broke my pelvis.”

“What’s that?” he grunts out, pointing at Larry.

“That’s what’s holding it together I guess.”

“F**k mate, it just goes into your pelvis? Must’ve broken that s**t pretty bad then.”

“Yup I guess so. What are you in here for?” He seems like the kind of guy who could spin you a thousand stories at the drop of a hat, most never entirely welcomed.

“F**k mate, where do I start haha. I had to jump off a balcony and landed on a f*****g fence! Can you believe that!? The luck I’ve got I tell ya. One of the spikes went straight through my leg here.” He pulls his gown up to show a large bandage wrapped around his emaciated left leg. “It’s the f*****g pigs fault, they were chasing me.”

“Wow, no s**t. Why were they chasing you?”

“Junk,” he says with a grin. “They say I broke into someone’s house to rob them, but it was my mates place. Oink oink! Dipshits. I could smell them coming. I jumped off the second-floor balcony trying to hit the pavement but landed square on the fence and the spike went through my f*****g leg. Can you believe that? They had to call a fire truck to cut me out!”

“Holy s**t man, that’s crazy. How’d they get you out?”

“They had to cut the thing out in surgery. I’ve been here ever since. They’re trying to wean me off you see; it’s bullshit. I’ve done this over and over; it never works. But they won’t let me leave, the pigs, so I’m stuck here. It’s not like I can get far anyway.” I’ve never met a proper heroin addict before. A lot of my knowledge on the subject is taken wholly from the film Trainspotting. Ever since seeing it I’d wondered about it though, about its addiction, and how a drug like that can take over someone’s life so completely, leaving room for nothing else other than that all-consuming, fiendish pursuit of that next high. I’ve always had a mild fascination with heroin. To me it’s the upper limit of drug taking, and for that reason it’s all the more enticing. Growing up in New Zealand it was never around, so it grew to an almost mythical nature in my mind. For some reason I’ve always had it in the back of my head that I will try it if I can find it, just once. That’s my thought with all drugs, just once, to experience it. If I like it, I’ll do more. If not, it was still an experience. But here in front of me I see a living embodiment of its aftermath, and it turns my stomach. He seems so lonely and lost, the only thing motivating him in life is a drug.

“Anyway, nice to meet you mate, see ya round.”

“Yeah, you too.” He stands up and hobbles back to his room. His gown is slightly open at the back, revealing more acne and sores. You can tell life has not been kind to him and its uncompromising viciousness weathers his small frame. When he’s out of sight I take a deep breath, trying to truly contemplate the things he must have seen in his life, to be a heroin addict in the underbelly of one the seediest cities on earth. It has eaten him alive, chewed him up and spat him out. No remorse. But even with all that he must have seen, done, sucked or fucked over, he continues to push through life, a life that would be unliveable to most. I’ve never understood it, this purest of human instincts, of survival. It's written into our DNA. I’m sure he never wanted to become a heroin addict. But you have to take what life has dealt you and adapt, or recoil, wither and die. There is no in-between. Nature is brutal and utterly uncompromising. But how can this instinctive will that every human is born with switch to wanting to harm oneself like that, to abuse your own body. How did my mind turn to that? Or worse, turn to the resolve and possible action of committing suicide? What changes? And how? Is it as simple as a fleeting moment or choice, where suddenly everything prior to that action loses all relevance, and everything ahead of it is a direct consequence of that action? Like trying heroin or having that first drink. Or is it born into us, an instinctual, inevitable chain reaction that we never had control of in the first place.

If you’re like me and not careful, if you’re not prepared, it can turn into a merciless downward spiral, with no seeming out, until you hit rock bottom, and who knows what, or where, that is. Everyone has to hit their own at some point. It’s not something you can run or hide from. So, I mean, how can you recognise it? What was Dave’s defining moment where everything changed? What is his rock bottom? What’s mine? Is this it? I mean, was falling off a building onto concrete a blatant metaphor for the direction my life has taken? It’s taken this accident, this act of wanton carelessness, to actually make me properly think about where I am in life, f**k, even who I am. I’ve lost that inner compass somewhere along the line. Because if I’m honest with myself, deep down I know that on some level I wanted to fall, I wanted to hurt myself. Did this make me more careless? Maybe. I know I didn’t jump, but I also know that everything I did leading up to that moment was a catalyst to that event. I knew my life was heading towards some desperate act, some cry for help, that would hopefully either change its course, or ultimately end it. I hope that this is my bottom and I can build from its foundation.

Chapter 22

Hours pass and I’m still ruminating on it; but there is no definitive answer. I just need to wait. Wait, one of my most despised words and actions of an anxious mind.

I hear the dull, sarcastic monotone of what can only be a New Zealand accent come bellowing down the hall, and through the door come James, Tim and Akash, my good mates from back home.

“Oh s**t, they put you in your own room, eh? To keep you away from other people I guess,” Tim says.

“Haha, yeah bro, all those restraining orders took effect.” I tell them about my faecal mishap and introduce them to Larry. We chat about bullshit, guy stuff. They're some of the funniest people I know, and it hurts to laugh, but I don’t care, the feeling’s worth it. I’m just grateful that they are here, that they don’t dwell on where I am but instead treat the situation light heartedly, it makes everything just a little more bearable. They stay for an hour or so then have to head home, it will take another hour for them just to navigate the tube alone.

I turn the TV on that hangs just to my left. The screen is like the boxes you see in 1960’s American PSA commercials, beige with an on/off switch and up and down channel buttons. It flashes on with a sharp zap and black & white static, then after a few channel changes finally settles on a picture. If you’ve never seen British television before, just imagine a rainy day, stuck inside with nothing but a kettle, a box of black tea, an old tartan sofa covered with plastic, stained carpets invoking the smell of an old folks’ home laced with cigarette smoke and mould running up the damp walls. Whatever image that invokes in your mind is about as good a description as you’re ever going to get. I’ve grown up listening to Coronation Street through my bedroom wall and watching Emmerdale and Last of the Summer Wine on sick days, so I’m not averse to the British television palette. It’s comforting in its familiarity and reminds me of home.

I lay and wait patiently for my next round of morphine, looking at the clock every two minutes or so. When the nurse finally walks into my room I’m in a lot of pain, an unusual, all-body aching pain; a pain that slowly grows worse with each minute as the morphine’s potency throughout my body diminishes. There's a unique ebb-and-flow to pain management, a kind of un-exact therapeutic science that has to be timed exactly in order to form a constant barrier between my mind and that three-headed monster of pain that lies raging just below the surface. The trolley that houses all the drugs is under lock and key and tethered to the nurse as she saunters from bed to bed, room to room.

Each round more pills are added to my regimen; this time an anti-diarrhoetic, a stool softener and my long-awaited psych meds. It’s been four days since I last took them and I’m eager to ease this anxiety that has become a cornerstone of my emotional instability as of late. You see, usually you come off these types of meds very gradually, over months, so it’s a big, nasty reminder of how much my mind and body rely on such things.

The nurse fills a small white paper cup with my allotment of treats and hands them to me with some water. I can’t help but think about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and McMurphy’s utter contempt for the forced zombification of mentally ill patients by heavily sedating drugs. I, on the other hand, am from a generation brought up on pills, and have no such reservations. I don't like the side effects that come with some of them, but I know that in the right dosage and circumstances they literally can save a life. The cup is filled with all types of pills, in a variety of shapes and colours, all serving their own little specific purpose, all effecting different parts of my body. I’ve always been fascinated to know that by swallowing a single pill, my body would change. I’ve been on Prozac since I was twelve. I’ve spent many a night pouring over its use on me; specifically, why I needed the pill and not someone else. It’s always fascinated me that from a particular directive inherent only to that pill, my body can be tricked into creating more or less of certain chemicals, effectively altering its natural state and somehow making it work better. All from a small pill, taken once a day, with water, please.

I often daydream about the origins of these magical pills. They can’t all be as exotic as they’re portrayed. “The wonder pill” was Prozac’s first advertised identity, and the world was hooked. But in reality, it probably came into existence through the mind of some under-appreciated scientist, in some super-lab in a nondescript building off a highway in the middle of a state in America that is probably best known for growing corn. A pill that was approved for mass consumption by a panel of people who rely on said pharmaceutical companies to pay for their holiday to Vermont during the winter months. A pill that is manufactured in a warehouse in a developing country by people who have no access to the very pill they're producing. A pill that is shipped en-masse to wealthy nations around the world and sold at a premium to millions of people who have no other option. A pill that can change a life, even save a life. A pill that after going through all of this, and becoming such a uniquely life altering phenomenon, ends up in my stomach mixed with a f*****g stool softener. Well played, life.

I swallow them down then open my mouth ready to embrace that familiar opiate elixir I have been growing so fond of. As it starts creeping through my body, my eyelids become sluggish until there is no way to keep them open a second longer. All of a sudden, in this newfound dark space, morphine takes full control. At first it begins simplifying the world around you, your thoughts become slow and deliberate, meditating on an idea for minutes. Then quickly and unexpectedly your brain bursts to life, becoming ever more energetic, jumping from one thing to the next, eager to latch onto some small detail of a thought but just can't seem to hold on. As it continues to fill your bloodstream, these thoughts begin to spiral out of control, down a tunnel of sub-consciousness toward a tiny pin-point of light in the distance, where after many failed attempts at solidifying a coherent idea, a single thought squeezes itself out from the light and ta da! You just solved the world’s energy crisis. Everything in the world makes sense. But unfortunately, like most drug-fuelled epiphanies, it is fleeting and lost mere seconds later in another onslaught of over-powering, fractured thought patterns. I fell deeper and deeper into the tunnel until there was simply no light left.

Chapter 23

I awake once more to a flush of white noise, the room painfully bright. It stings of that ever-growing familiarity that is incessant fluorescence. Next to my bed is a soapy bucket of tepid water with a white towel next to it. I dip it in and start washing my face, ears, head and anywhere else I can reach. I’m lucky as my head is shaved, but the rest of me feels like a layer of caked in oil clings to me. I try my best to wash my back, but the antiseptic burns my inflamed skin; lying down all day has made my back swollen and red, but I can’t turn over so I’m just stuck with it. I’m starting to get used to the word at this point. Stuck. Its meaning becoming all the more obvious as each hour passes me by while I lie motionless in bed.

Just as I finish washing there comes a knock at the door. It’s Georgia, adorned with that mischievous smile that accompanies her everywhere she goes. All my anxiety falls to the floor with a thud and I take a deep breath of comfort just knowing she’s here, with me. She looks from side to side and down the hallway, as if she thinks she’s in trouble for being here. She suffers from bad anxiety too, something we have grown close over throughout the years, and she always looks adorably sceptical as she tries to figure out a person or a situation, especially new, foreign ones.

"You can come in you know", I say.

"Yeah, am I allowed to be here? I mean, you're not quarantined, or something are you?"

"AIDS. They found it in my leg."

"Ha. Ha.” she says in her characteristically sarcastic tone, "very funny." She tilts her head to the right in a look of disapproval, something she does with me often. We have a unique relationship, we’ve been through a lot together and we understand something about each other that is very rare; we both hold a deep fear. Of what, I’ve never been able to truly pinpoint, but it is always there and sometimes you can just sense it in another person. The way they hold themselves, the way they look at you, almost through you. They seem to see you for who you are, and you them, almost instantly. And after meeting them a strange feeling lingers, it festers in your gut, like some raw animal attraction bound in a wonderful, albeit sometimes misguided, attraction. And it aches. Boy, does it ache.

The more we got to know each other, the more we knew we were destined to somehow f**k up each others lives, even if only for the briefest of moments and best intentions. We tried wholeheartedly to work for something bigger than ourselves, something of meaning and significance, but ultimately it was something beyond our reach at that time and age. We met at university. I had just broken up with my girlfriend (coincidentally also named Georgia) and she, with her boyfriend. We grew closer as friends and shared a lot of intimate details about our lives; past, present and hopes for the future. We understood each other. We felt comfortable and safe, knowing we both held similar ways of dealing with the world with an anxious mind.

After months of flirting around the subject (and her dating a mutual friend) we slept together after a night of drinking, sly remarks and surreptitious looks. We knew that whatever happened wouldn't be approved of by some people, but it still felt natural, right. We were both naïve enough to say it was only physical, that no feelings were to come of it. But deep down we both knew that was a lie, created to shield us from our fear of being hurt, a hurt that was always inevitable. I was still trying to understand my own issues of anger, OCD and anxiety at the time. I could barely deal with myself at times let alone someone else who needed my attention, or even more, care and compassion. It was the first truly pure emotional connection I had ever had with a woman, but it was too much for me to handle at that time. Everything before that connection had been immature for me, purely f*****g and arguing with girlfriends. This was far different, and intense.

We ultimately ended badly because I've always had an incessant need to f**k over anything good that happens in my life, or as Georgia so aptly calls it, “being a f*****g a*****e." We hadn't really talked much after that, she moved to Sydney with her new boyfriend and I met Jade. We had only become friends again a year or so before I came to London when she flew back to Auckland and we drank too much and hashed out a lot of the bullshit. We were good like that, both able to be honest with each other. We have a special bond that I hope will never go away.

"You just missed it, I was just giving myself a 'bath’.”

"Really? What did it feel like? Can you wash your... you know..."

"Haha, yeah, just barely. It was kind of painful because of the catheter." She looks at me, then down at my dick, then back up to my face.

"Can I... see it?"

"See what?"

"You know... the catheter."

"Haha, no! I can't even see it so you sure as hell aren't going to."

"Does it hurt?"

"Not really, it stings from time to time, especially if I move it."

"So, it just... goes up there? How does it fit?"

"I have no idea, I try not to think about it." I can now tell she’s fully invested in researching catheters as soon as she gets home.

"Hey, I brought in your computer and some clothes and stuff from my place."

"YESSSSSS. Thank you, you're a lifesaver."

"I put a bunch of weird documentaries on there that my cousins said you would like."

"Brilliant, all I've been watching here is re-runs of 'The Bill' and 'Top Gear'. 'The Office' was on though, which was good. It takes me out of this place for a while. Hey, what day is it?" I’ve lost track of all sense of time, I know times in the day as different meals are served and how many hours have passed because every two, on the dot, I get more morphine. My phone died and my watch was either broken or taken off when I came into the emergency room and I have no idea where it is now.

"Saturday,” she says with a smile.

"Is it nice outside?"

"No, it's cold and raining." This makes me feel better that I know outside isn’t much better than inside. "Typical London weather."

We talk for another hour or so until a nurse comes in to tell me I’m going for more scans soon. I’ve forgotten that they’re going to happen as I got lost in conversation with Georgia. The nurse reads me the pain killer ‘rights’ routine then pulls out that large syringe. It’s more full this time, almost double the amount I normally take. This excites me and at the same time frightens me as I know why. I open my mouth and swallow. I can see Georgia's eyes get wider behind the nurse at the very thought of morphine being in the room. I know eventually she’s going to want to try some.

Chapter 24

After we say our goodbyes I’m carted out of the room in my bed by a porter called Benjamin. As we wait for the elevator a huge dope-filled smile slowly grows on my face as the morphine kicks in. I just can’t help it; it's the most exquisite feeling in the world. I can feel every vein in my body slowly push it through my limbs. It washes over my heart and stops it from racing; it fills my lungs with deep, slow, meaningful breaths; it touches the tips of my fingers and makes simply brushing the sheets of my bed a sensual, delightful experience. As my head slowly melts into the soft pillow, the huge elevator doors creak open and Benjamin manoeuvres my bed into its resting spot, next to a haggard woman slumped in a wheelchair. I assume she’s a cancer patient; she’s wearing a bandana on her head with no visual hairline and carries with her an air of desperation and hopelessness that’s almost palpable. She’s an older woman, probably a grandmother. Her face is kind and filled with wrinkles, just like both my grandma’s had when I was younger. Her skin droops gently from her cheeks as gravity slowly wears at her body. She reminds me a lot of my grandmother, Merle, back home who had passed away a few years before from cancer. She’s in no doubt a loved, proud woman, who understands the balance of life and countless other experiences unfathomable to my generation. I imagine her wisdom on life and its many intricacies is probably endless. It fills my heart with profound sadness to think that this is where it probably will end for her, for anyone in old age.

My grandmother Merle died in front of me, surrounded by her family, in a hospital bed fighting for every last breath she had. She was unconscious, but we knew in some way she could hear us. Mum whispered in her ear and told her to let go. To let go of this life and pass on to whatever was next. She let out a prolonged exhale, then just never inhaled again. And that was it, the end of her life. All of her memories, her experiences, her loves and fears... were gone in an instant. Forever. It affected me greatly at the time. I can still remember staying the night at her house on Saturdays with my sister, watching a movie and waiting for the weekly Lotto numbers to be drawn, all while eating seemingly never-ending supplies of Minties and chocolate biscuits. It’s a delightful, warm memory, but a memory that has diluted with time, filled slowly with my own experiences, my own loves, my own fears, to the point where the very idea of her is so subtle, so distant, it feels like it happened to an entirely different person. But that image, of us in front of the TV, will never perish. I wonder what this woman will be remembered for, and who will be remembering it. Will she be surrounded by loved ones? And if so will they keep her experiences, her dreams, her memory close at heart for posterity. Or will she be alone? I hope she isn't, but the balance of life is sometimes cruel. The elevator comes to a stop as the floor light pings. We smile at each other, but no words are said. It’s a brief encounter of 30 seconds, but it feels so potent, so real… and all in my head. It makes me long for home and my own family.

The elevator doors once again open and we’re both pushed out, her to the left, me to the right. Benjamin and I follow hallways weaving through the bowels of the hospital; each turn seems to get darker as I follow the ceiling lights whizzing above my head, eventually becoming a continuous blur. We turn a corner and come once again into another large waiting room, with at least ten people lined up in order, all laying in beds, all with the same dull look on their face. Benjamin edges me between two other sad souls and hands me off to a nurse.

"Hey, Tim. We're going to get you in as soon as possible for your x-ray. In the meantime, just relax." What's with people telling me to relax? This isn't a f*****g bed & breakfast. I think I’ve reserved the right to feel like I’m about to s**t the bed at any given moment, because technically, it’s already happened.

"Okay, will do,” I say with a stale, cheesy smile. I close my eyes and fantasize about another life, another time, a life where I’m a completely different human being. I’m still horribly depressed, the fall had jolted me to life for a moment, but the darkness is slowly creeping back, I can feel it running through my veins. Morphine helps keep it at bay, but it’s only a self-medication like alcohol was. My life is such a f*****g mess. I just want this all to be over. I feel a small sense of gratitude to be alive, but not in a way in which I can truly savour it. I feel no worse, no better, than I had before the accident. I open my eyes and I’m still in the same goddamned shithole hospital unable to move.

"Mate, that's some nice machinery you've got there," a voice croaks from the bed next to me. "Do you mind if I ask what happened?" He’s a skinny, odd-looking man with a wimpy moustache and crooked teeth; his demeanour reminiscent of Napoleon Dynamite's creepy older brother, Kip. He’s fiddling with his watch trying to adjust the time, showing his hands, which are covered in red, inflamed eczema.

"Ahh... I fell off a building." I’m beginning to reside in the fact that this line of questioning is going to become a regular occurrence, so my story is taking a formulaic shape already.

"How'd you manage that?" I let out a prolonged sigh, the type of sigh that politely tells someone to f**k off as I’m not in the mood.

"Drinking, early mornings, roofs... don't mix I guess."

"Oh, yeah? How far did you fall?"

"Three stories."

"S**t! You're lucky to be alive mate." I keep hearing this phrase, yet each time it’s used it becomes more and more redundant. Just a bunch of useless words loosely strung together.

"Yeah. I guess... What are you in for?"

“It’s crazy, but I’ve got a huge boil on my arse actually.” I realise he’s lying on his side, trying not to enrage his pustular friend. "I didn't think anything of it, just thought it was a pimple, until one day I sat down and almost screamed!" It’s funny to me how forthright everyone in hospital is. There’s no barrier between people like in the outside world. I suppose it's a natural by-product of being thrust into close quarters with people whose bodies are all in some way failing them, often in the most un-flattering of ways. My ears perk up.

“S**t, so what do they have to do?"

"They just cut it open and drain it. I have to stay overnight so they can check on it and change the dressings. They're hoping it doesn't get more infected. I'm waiting to get it done now." I suddenly register the fact that I’m in the same waiting room as when I had my surgery and everyone around me is in limbo for very different things. I look around the room, trying to figure out the ailments of everyone in here. Some are more obvious than others, such as a broken leg or arm, but it’s the ones with no apparent physical problems that intrigue me the most. They must be afflicted with internal problems, problems you can't see. That sort of illness has always petrified me, the fear of the unknown. I can see a broken bone or a cut lip and can deal with it. But it's the things you can't see that usually do the most damage. Tumours, blood disorders, cancers... all things that can take root unknowingly and spread to infect your entire body. It's exactly the same with mental illness, which scares me more than anything else.

Looking at the faces of everyone around me there is a very obvious thread that ties us all. Fear. It’s a look I’ve noticed more and more over the past few days, something wholly unique to hospital wards; a permeation that has seemingly taken root in its very walls and spread like an infectious disease to anybody who dared lay claim to one of its beds. It’s unsettling.

"Tim, we're ready for you," the nurse says as she pulls my bed out of the queue and guides me through some doors, down a narrow hallway to a large sign saying ‘X-Ray’. She opens the door to a solitary woman in a darkened room, waiting for me.

"Hey, Tim! I'm Jeannette, the lab technician who will be taking your x-rays." She’s a wonderfully robust woman, probably in her late forties, with a fringe and rosy cheeks, beaming infectious enthusiasm. She reminds me of Dawn French for some reason, cheery and boisterous, but without all the excess weight. "Don't worry, you won't have to move at all. We can x-ray you right in the bed.” This news makes me almost giddy.

"Oh, awesome. Moving isn't really my strong suit lately,” I quip. She giggles with a soft smile then at once seems to pirouette on the balls of her feet before walking at pace to a small side room with a glass window overlooking the x-ray machine. The nurse leaves, closing the doors behind her, taking with her the hallways light, and leaving the room dimly illuminated by a single fluorescent light emanating from Jeanette's computer. It’s eerie, but it makes me feel at ease to be in the dark. It’s gentle on my eyes and forgiving of my physical abnormalities. Jeanette bounds from one side of the room to the other, always intently focused on the task at hand. She asks me questions about New Zealand, my tattoos, why I’m in London, all while constantly moving between the small room and the monstrous robot arm that hovers above me, changing its position ever so slightly as I lay motionless. She slides a tray under my bed and flicks a switch on the arm, turning on its bright light, transforming my pelvic region into a hot area of sharp, white noise.

Watching her dart back and forth starts to kind of annoy me. I want to be able to do that. I just want to sit up, get out of bed and run as fast as I can in any direction. It doesn’t matter where I’m going, but how I’m getting there. I want to run until my legs give out, until my muscles melt into a mushy jelly and I collapse to the ground in exhaustion, then just streeettttcccchhhhh. Oh, what I'd give to be able to stretch my legs, to bend my knees or arch my back. It feels like I’ve been in an airplane seat for four straight days, sandwiched between two morbidly obese, hot, sweaty people, unable to move and strapped in tightly with no place to go. At times I have an abundance of energy, but I never have an outlet. All I can do is keep moving my head and arms, tensing my upper body muscles, squeezing my hands into white-knuckled fists all in the hope that I will one day be able to move freely again.

Jeannette finishes the x-rays then turned the lights on.

"There, you're all done. See? Painless!"

"It was, thank you." She wheels me back to the waiting room and places me in a corner, away from the other patients.

"A nurse will be with you shortly to take you to your CT scan. Best of luck, Tim, no doubt we'll be seeing you again!" The words hit me like a twelve-gauge to the chest; I realise that this will not be the last time for such a thing, that this will in no doubt go on for much longer than I originally expected. When will I be able to leave the hospital? When will I be able to leave this bed? When will I be able to see my family? All these questions circle continuously in my brain, with no real means of answering them. I feel like I’m in limbo; I have no control of the outcome.

I’m jolted out of my rumination by a nurse pulling my bed out of the room behind me.

“We’re taking you to get a CT scan now, okay Tim?” she says. The CT room is different from the MRI, smaller and less threatening, but just as cold and just as sterile. I feel nauseous just thinking about it; I’m horrified at the thought that they’re going to roll me over and drop me, that I will fall to the ground face first and land on Larry, who's tenuous grip on my pelvis would break away and rupture through my back. I close my eyes as they talk with me, their words a blur unable to breach the continuous replay of Larry cutting through me. I just keep nodding, pretending I’m paying attention. The morphine is still flooding my bloodstream; I can feel its warmth as my breaths get shorter and more hurried, my heart palpitating, fiercely pounding into my throat and chest. As my palms begin to get clammy and my forehead beads with sweat, small spots of white-light dance frantically in my field of vision.

"Are you ready, Tim?" Someone asks in the distance. I nod. With my eyes still firmly closed I’m heaved from my bed onto the small, thin table of the scanner. It’s swift and relatively painless, my body coming to rest slowly on the hard slab. Larry seems to be doing his job; he’s holding everything in place with the help of morphine encircling his steady grip. The scanner itself is far less ominous than the MRI, almost its wimpish, younger brother. I keep my eyes closed as the table moves back and forth, its scanner oscillating around me. The soft sensation of motion and sound create a sense of calm that overwhelm me; I’m going to be all right, I can feel it.

Chapter 25

The scan is over within a matter of minutes and I’m once again transferred back to my bed, then pushed through the hospitals cavernous hallways and into a new, larger room, filled with long lines of beds taking up both sides of the space, each occupied by men in light blue gowns. The walls are a dull and off-white, spotted with cracks and chipped paint. Small, quaint windows line the top of them; they seem so far up, so out of reach from my small bed. A hint of sunlight pokes through one of them, but mostly all I can see is that good ol’ wet London brick. As I’m pushed down the rooms centre, I pass everyone with a nervous smile. They all stop to look at me, some smiling back, some just staring. I come to a bed at the end of the row, my things in a large plastic bag on the seat next to it.

"This is your new home, Tim. You're now in the main orthopaedic ward," a new nurse tells me. It's loud and busy and full of commotion as I nod my head.

"Cool," is the only word I can muster. They lift me onto a new bed; it’s different though, it feels like I’m floating on water. The nurse pushes some buttons at its base and the mattress starts moving.

"What the f**k?" I blurt out. The nurse laughs.

“Don’t worry, it's just an alternating pressure mattress. It pressurises different air pockets at different times, helping with your bodies circulation and hopefully preventing bed sores from prolonged bed stays." Ahh… prolonged bed stays. It feels like each hour another small hint gets dropped regarding my future predicament. These small intimations have become my main source of information regarding my condition. They’re the only honest answers I can get out of anyone it seems.

The nurse’s leave and I begin to scan my new ‘home’. The person to my right is asleep, and to my left are the toilets. There’s an elderly man sitting directly across from me in a worn leather smoker’s chair, reading the paper. He has a small reading lamp, a quaint bookshelf and a foot stand next to his bed. Ornate frames filled with what I assume are family members surround his bed. Did this guy bring his whole reading room with him into hospital? All he needs now is a pipe and a glass of port to fulfil the cliché.

He drops his paper and peers at me over his reading glasses, then folds the paper up in a hurry. He looks annoyed, like he has been slighted in some way. He looks to his left, directly at the next patient's cubicle, which is fully partitioned off by those f*****g blue curtains. From within I can hear the low rumblings of some kind of chant, over and over and over again. It sounds like fifty people are packed within those small blue walls. The old man looks at me, then back to the curtains, then back to me.

"Can you believe this?" he spits out in a fiery tone. "Every goddamned day!” He reaches for his buzzer and presses it frantically. The chanting becomes louder, and one woman starts crying out what sounds like something out of The Lion King (sadly, this pop culture reference is the first thought I have when hearing anything resembling an African language, especially in joyous sing-a-long’s). It gets louder and louder, until she is almost yelling with what sounds like a large group of men mirroring her every word in a rhythmic hymn. The old man looks furious and has taken to standing up in protest and yelling back at them, joined in impassioned fervour by another old man who has wheeled himself out of an adjoining room.

"This is a hospital! Not a mosque!” I can’t help but grin in amazement at the spectacle, two cultures clashing in such a unique environment. The two old men peter out quickly as the chanting comes to a climactic end. Then silence. There are murmurs behind the curtains, and laughter. Then the curtain flings open, revealing about ten African men and two women, all surrounding a small, gaunt figure perched up in the bed, covered in flowers. Echo! His face beams with that ghastly, ever-inviting smile of his, but he looks jubilant and utterly defiant in the face of the old, white, angry establishment that greets him. The two old men mumble and grumble to each other before settling back into their chairs, seemingly defeated. I can see why. The men who surround Echo's bed look like African warlords, with large gold chains hanging around their monstrous necks, their skin a piercing black, that African black, proud remnants of generations soaked in sunlight, pacing from side to side, glaring intently at anyone who dared make eye contact with them.

I do, and he stares me down like he’s about to run over and smash my face into my pillow. His eyes are a sharp white, they stare right through me as I quickly look away and pretend I’m doing something else. They saunter around his bed for a few minutes until a nurse asks them to leave, visiting hours are over. As they slowly filter out of the ward, Echo is left alone in his bed, surrounded by flowers and home cooked food. I can’t help but feel a little jealous of him, I mean, even psychotic criminals get some taste of home. It seems like none of this matters to him; the hospital, the guards, the angry white faces that follow his every move. I imagine it’s because Echo isn’t really here; he exists in a world far different from mine. A world that he has created, in which he’s at the centre, unequivocally sure that his actions and convictions are not only right, but just, and that anything that doesn’t fit into this self-prescribed mould is just ether and not worthy of his attention. Oh, what I would give to share an ounce of that self-worth.

"Hey!” he yells at me. I wave back, smiling. He quickly motions for the nurse to close his curtain, as he lays back, overwhelmingly pleased with himself.

My eyes once more are pulled to the old man in the chair across the room. He shakes his head at me again, disgusted and affronted, then goes back to quietly reading his paper, muttering obscenities under his breath that are no doubt steeped in generations of ignorance and institutionalised racism. He probably thinks that because of the colour of my skin and my shaved head that I share in his bigotry. But it disgusts me. I have far more respect for a delusional criminal of African descent than a worthless white man filled with no compassion and hate. I hope I will never reach a point in my life where I become that old, befuddled and disillusioned with progress. I’ve always been terrified of ending up alone; becoming nothing but a depressed, obsessive, lonely shell of a man, drinking away lost years and wallowing in my own bitterness with no-one to care or listen. I’d rather shoot myself in the temple than wind down that lonely road.

A nurse then brakes my thought.

Chapter 26

“Hey Tim, sorry to disturb you, but we've been receiving numerous calls from your parents asking about your situation. Unfortunately, we can't give that information out over the phone. It would be good if you could contact them." I look over to my side table and pick up my phone. Ten missed calls.

"Ahh, sorry, my phone has been on silent. I'll call them now." My phone starts buzzing just as I go to dial the numbers. They beat me to it.

“Hello?”

"Tim, where have you been!? We've been trying to contact you! We've been calling the nurses station, but they won't give us any information."

"I know, sorry, my phone has been on silent.”

“Okay, but you need to let us know what's happening. Do you want us to come over there? I've been looking at flights," Mum says.

"No, honestly I’m fine, I can deal with this myself." I truly miss them, but I know that having them over here, stressing out and fussing over every small detail will only make matters worse.

"No, you can’t. You’re not understanding the situation you’re in,” Dad barks suddenly. “We’re the ones trying to figure out your insurance and how to get you home.” He’s always had a special way of not really listening to what I’m trying to say. It’s frustrating at times, but it’s a hard-headedness we both share, born from generations of stubborn Iowa farmers no doubt. But it’s his way of showing he cares, and it’s been a safety net of assurance that has always humbled me; whether I like to admit it or not. However, this doesn’t stop me from taking special pause to show my disdain for the comment by sighing deeply into the phone, instantaneously reverting back to the mindset of a bratty teenager and admittedly losing any ground I may have gained in this faux argument.

“I’m not coming home. I came here for a reason. I haven’t finished what I started. Why would I come home?” I spout out defiantly, matching the tone and sharpness of my dad’s words. It sounds almost ridiculous as I say it, but its sentiment rings incredibly true to me. “I can recover in London. I have friends here to help me out. I mean I’ve broken bones before.”

“Tim, that’s just not possible. I don’t think you realise the gravity of the situation. You won’t be able to walk, feed yourself or go to the bathroom. Who will help you with that!?” Mum cries in exasperation. “No, that is NOT an option.”

“Well, we’ll see what happens. I don't want to think about this right now. I’m trying to deal with this the best way I can. Anyway, I have to go, I’m really tired. We’ll talk soon.” We say goodbye but I’m still angry about the situation. The idea that I can’t make decisions for myself about my future infuriates me. I know it’s far-fetched, but I’m just not ready to go home. I had set out on an adventure; something that has to change my life, there is no second option. I have to return triumphant, full of learned wisdom and unimaginable tales, otherwise I fear I’ll never make it out of New Zealand again.

Chapter 27

I jump up suddenly, wide awake, to the sound of loud buzzing and hustling feet filling the dark, empty space that lies just beyond my enclosed curtains. The lights flash on as a flurry of voices scramble for coherency, each seemingly louder than the previous.

“Get a crash cart!” someone yells.

F**k. It sounds like there are 20 people in the room. I can hear the unmistakable sound of tearing velcro and the squeaks of rubber wheels as they try to grip the linoleum floors. There’s constant, chaotic movement. Metal bangs metal and fills the room with an anxious tension. I’m afraid. It sounds like someone is dying next to me, but I’m not sure.

“We need to get him to surgery. On three, one, two, three… Someone make sure his airway is clear. Where are the paddles? Ok, clear!” A loud thud brakes the tenuous silence. “Let’s move.”

They scramble out of the room as fast as they came in, a rush of movement and yelling, then silence once again. My heart is racing. I try to hear for any sound but nothing. The lights turn off and the ward goes dark once more. No one says a word. I try to fall back to sleep but just lay there, anxiously ruminating over what could be happening to the man who filled the bed next to me. I hope he’s alright.

Chapter 28

Every day seems to bleed into the next, a hustle of movement and conversation during the day followed by a heavy, sombre silence at night. Some people are awake during the day, as far as my head can turn and see, but most people are asleep, their bodies exhausted and filled to their brim with elixir. My days have mostly consisted of the same, in and out of the haze. I have two semi-conscious states, each morphing into the other one. One real, one imagined. I’m often sure I’m falling into a deep, dark abyss of endless space, only to come to realise I have just slowly blinked. These odd, almost magical little occurrences pop up throughout the day, so vivid and real I can almost touch them. Whole scenes play in my head and are acted out before me. Sometimes I’m walking to the toilet or rolling over and stretching my legs over the bed, until I inevitably come to and realise it never happened. I love them at times because they confuse me; they take me out of this bed; this room, this hospital. But I hate them more often than not because they tease me, they fill my heart with hope as I lay motionless on my back, a hope that’s not real at that moment, but one that I know can slowly grow with time if I water its seeds just right.

During one of these episodes Dr. Kumar has come to see me. He tells me I need a second surgery, so they can put another screw into my pelvis; it’s still off-kilter. My right knee is also hyper-extending, but that will have to wait until I can stand and bear weight on it. The thought of another screw going into my body permanently doesn’t bother me. It just adds to a growing collection. I’m young. The fear and pain can come later, when my arthritis kicks in at thirty. I just have to lay in wait until a spot in surgery opens up for me. My case is not as urgent anymore, I have been pushed back down the line.

This gives time for other specialists to work with me; like Dr. Russell, a psychiatrist. She’s a lanky, thin-boned lady, with a sweet, summery, aristocratic English accent.

“Mr. Hagan, may I call you Tim?”

“Sure.”

“Do you mind if we have a little chat?”

“Okay.” I know what’s coming and I’m ready for the explanation.

“I notice here that you’re on a few psychiatric medications, do you mind telling me what they’re for?” I sputter out the usual formulaic response that I have done so many times over the years with doctors.

“Are you depressed at all now, Tim?” she asks.

“I’m not really sure any more to be honest. I’m on so much morphine I’m not sure what emotions I’m feeling. I know it’s there, just waiting to come back when this all falls away and I’m left alone again.”

“Ok, that’s perfectly understandable. What makes you think your depression will re-occur?”

“Because I can still feel it, underneath, in me; it’s just numbed by the drugs. I just know that once they’re gone it will be back.” 

“Okay. I understand. Have you ever been suicidal, Tim?” The question. That hot word that spikes a burst of interest in any person working within the mental health field. I’ve been asked before, answering both yes and no at different times and know what I can get myself into if I say the wrong thing. They track your every word for meaning; it’s like walking a tightrope. But depression plus falling three stories sounds incredibly suspicious, so I answer her in my own, mischievous way.

“Yes, actually, right before I jumped off that building and right now to be honest.” She looks confused and a little shocked. I hold and pause for an awkward five seconds then smile.

“I’m just joking, don’t worry. I have thought about it before, yes. But it had nothing to do with my accident. I slipped and fell; there was no intent to it. I hated heights before this, so it wouldn’t be my method of choice anyway.” She’s still a little confused, not quite sure of what has just happened. New Zealand humour can often not be humour at all, just lightly disguised disdain.

“Oh,” she smiles “very funny. I’ll mark that as a no then with a wink beside it.” Nice. This posh British doctor of obvious high regard has game enough to fire back.

“I’ll be honest with whatever you need to ask me.” She goes through her list, checking off veiled questions hinting at a deeper meaning, and I comply honestly.

“Ok then, well that should do it. Thank you for your time Tim and please ask for me if you ever need to talk about medications or anything.”

“I will. Thank you.”

Chapter 29

The second surgery is much less formal. Whereas the first was more of a jacket and tie affair, this one feels more like a second date. Smart, yet casual; not quite as awkward, but still tension in the air. They take me directly into the theatre room, no waiting, no small talk, no earthquakes. They’re on a tight schedule, all looking almost bludgeoned to death with tiredness. I count backwards from 10, trying to withstand the sedation, but obviously to no avail.

I wake up moments later in my pulsating bed in the orthopaedic ward, a little heavier and a lot sturdier. Looking down at Larry I notice his bolts and alignment are now at slightly different angles. It kind of perturbs me in a somewhat paternal, fatherly way. I guess everything changes over time, even inanimate objects with projected human emotions placed on them.

Georgia meets my eyes at the end of the bed. She knew about the surgery and has made sure she’s here when I got back.

“Gross! Have you seen your feet!?” We delve straight into the important stuff.

“What? How can I? You know where I am right?” She looks at me with a type of contempt I’ve reserved solely for her over the years.

“No, seriously! They’re all dry, cracked and crusty.”

“Really? Well I guess I haven’t been using them much.”

“Ewwwwwww! That’s so gross.”

“Thanks! I get it! I have some extra hardcore moisturising cream that they use on my back and legs, can you put some on my feet?” Her eyes sharpen and her nose crinkles at the thought, but the creepy nature of the task is just too enticing for her.

“Ok then.” I point to one of the latex glove dispensers that dot the length of the ward.

“There, you can use those.”

“Can I though? Aren’t they for nurses?”

“Yeah but it’s fine. They literally go through hundreds of them a day.” She manoeuvres slowly over to the glove dispenser and quickly grabs a pair. She runs back to my bed and closes all the blue curtains immediately, like she has just committed a grievous crime and is hiding out from the cops. She pulls the gloves over her detailed, manicured hands and picks up the lotion, squeezing a glob into her other hand. Her face is part grimace, part eager anticipation. At first, she can’t look as she massages the oily substance into the weathered cracks, but as she gets used to it, she gets into it, massaging my heel all the way to each toe. Seeing as my feet have only been touched by a starched hospital bed sheet as it rests on my pointed toes for the last four weeks, to have them be massaged with care and attention by a close friend almost makes me want to cry at her selflessness.

It’s a sweet, peculiar moment that’s quickly overrun by the strong stench of ammonia and egg. We both look around and cover our noses. I think possibly a nurse has spilt some cleaning liquid in the bathrooms next door to my bed.

“What the f**k is that?” Georgia sputters out between coughs.

“F**k knows, but it’s foul.” Just then Georgia’s eyes widen, and her pupils dilate.

“Holy s**t!” She’s pointing to the floor next to my bed. I lift my head and shoulders slightly and try to turn my body just enough to peek through the sidebars. There’s an orange, clumpy liquid that is spilling out beneath it all the way to the curtain and into the next cubicle. Georgia steps around the bed and in the most sarcastic way possible says, “Uhh, I think your pee bag burst.” I buzz for a nurse who runs to get some towels while another tries to stem the flow into my neighbour’s living room with paper towels.  

“Don’t worry, your drainage bag just burst, we’ll get this cleaned up and get you a new one.” Firstly, I never thought the things could actually f*****g burst, but okay, the more worrying and embarrassing thing to me is the fact that that orange slush is coming out of my bladder. I have never been able to look down and see the bag’s contents, so I figured it just looked like normal pee, a light, satisfying mellow yellow. To know that my friends have been talking to me while seeing this discharge is alarming for a moment, then sinks in as just kind of funny. I have no control of any situation, so why not laugh at it. The word impermanence has become a kind of mantra of mine, so it pops into my head most days as something will no doubt go awry.

As they clean up my excretion, Georgia and I sit in a kind of stunned silence, slightly aghast, watching. One of the nurses pick up a trash bag that is full of all my clothes. It’s been lying partially open next to my bed and has not been immune to the flooding. She wipes it with a towel and puts it on my chair.

“I think these are going to have to be washed or thrown away,” she says. I look down at them then slowly begin to move my saddened puppy eyes up to meet Georgia’s. She already knows.

“Fine, I’ll take them home and wash them.” The nurse puts a new bag around the old one and hands them to Georgia. She takes it, picks up her stuff and upon departing on her adventurous ride home just says, “You owe me.” I can’t help but laugh and wryly say thank you. You see Georgia is a very well kempt, extremely clean person. Everything is just so and perfect before she goes anywhere, so to think of her riding the tube home with a bag of orange piss stained clothes in a trash bag makes me giggle a little. How evil. I’m not exactly sure what quality I exude that would bring such amazingly compassionate and caring people into my life, but it must be hidden in there somewhere. If only I could find it, feel it, know it and hold onto it for dear life.

Chapter 30

Over the preceding four weeks I’ve learned through unwanted necessity to sleep completely still on my back. I can move around a little bit, lifting my shoulders or pushing my torso up with my elbows the slightest amount to try and change positions, but other than that I’m mostly still. My back constantly burns and itches and stings to the touch. Once a day after washing me, nurses will turn me over one side at a time to smother moisturising cream all over my back and legs. It grows more painful each day they do it, as my back gets more and more inflamed. The pulsing mattress helps but can only do so much. Heat builds up and by lunch time it feels like my back is boiling in water. Morphine dulls the throbbing, but its use in this kind of situation is minute. It’s the powerhouse that deals with a smashed pelvis, not the subtlety of a swollen back. My only real solution is to try and hold my upper body up with my elbows for as long as I possibly can to let my back get air. I try and do this a few times a day until my strength wears down. The only problem with this solution is that it just adds to my constant overheating. My forehead is in a continual state of sweating. I wear cold packs on my head and go through towel after towel trying to keep up. By lunchtime my sheets are soiled with salty water and have to be changed two-to-three times a day.

My body is feverishly working to heal itself and it needs the necessary energy and fuel to do that. I am no longer allowed to skip meals, but am on a strict diet of protein, fibre and water… my god how much water I go through. Constant thirst has me grabbing the jug beside my bed and just refilling it non-stop. It began clearing my urine from a sloppy orange to a decent dark yellow. Every couple of hours my catheter bag gets drained in the toilet then put back to work. The heavy doses of laxatives and stool softeners help, but the ensuing output goes through extreme cycles. At times I can take a hit of morphine and be helped and held over a bedpan and go naturally. Other times I wake up with diarrhea throughout my sheets, so I’m always on an incontinence pad. But mostly days tend to back up into each other and the colonic will have to happen once again. I try every other way to get the build-up out, once even sticking my finger up my butt to try and move it out, that’s how terrified of it I am. But it has to happen and occurs about once a week. The longest, most painful and embarrassing thing that I have probably ever been through has become routine, just like everything else in this place.

People move in and out of the ward constantly, new faces greet the ward daily. Echo is still in his small walled off room, keeping the curtains closed constantly. But one sad day he hobbled out, police escort in tow and gave me a small, defeated looking wave goodbye. He looked weak and downtrodden, finally understanding his fate I guess. I was disheartened by his leaving but within an hour a new man with an amputated leg moved in. He kept quiet and to himself and always has his curtains shut, just as Echo did. But the way the curtains close, leaving a small gap only visible to my direction, I can always see his stump, hanging above him in a sling contraption. Twice a day I watch as the nurses undress the bandages, clean the wound and re-bandage it. It’s the most surreal looking wound I’ve ever seen, like someone has just hacked away at his leg with a serrated knife then messily stitched it up with string. One flap of skin stretches over the other and will often bleed. Every morning I check on his leg to see how much blood has soaked through the bandage in the night. As my stay grows longer, the less blood there is. It’s a like a visual barometer of healing, his body is slowly making do with the new system. It’s comforting, as although I can’t see my healing, I know my body is doing the same.

I slowly and deliberately move the angle of my bed up a degree almost daily, being able to see slightly more of the ward around me as I do. Every day I can move my feet a little more and arch my back a little higher off the bed. It’s progress, I can feel my body changing and it gives me a little more strength, and hope, day by day.

Although the ward and my body are constantly changing, two things remain stubbornly constant. The old curmudgeon opposite me with his portraits and reading chair and his hairy tempered friend who is in the adjoining room just outside of my view. Both are mobile, and both are just as grumpy and horrible as the other. They aren’t allowed to leave the orthopaedic ward but can roam some of the hallways with their wheelchairs. At least twice a day they yell for the other one, “Let’s take a look around!” meeting in front of my bed in their wheelchairs and wheeling off down the ward, usually brought back fifteen minutes later by security for smoking in the toilets. That’s all they ever do. They never learn their lesson. They’re above everyone else in their minds and push the nursing staff around and bully them. Smoke sometimes wafts from the toilet next to my bed and one of them will inevitably come out snickering and winking at me. I guess they figure they’re old enough to do what they want and won’t be told what to do by some young, inexperienced nurses.

However, there is one nurse they don’t mess with, in fact nobody messes with her. Everyone calls her Nana and she comes in the early evening and stays until lights out. Technically she isn’t a nurse at all anymore, she’s well passed retirement and comes in to help change sheets, chat, feed patients and generally help the understaffed nursing team. She’s a short, plump Jamaican woman who always wears netting around her sizeable afro and moves as slow as a tortoise. She must be in her late seventies but her mere presence demands respect, she has seen and heard it all. Her eyes are kind and forgiving, her laugh bellows down the ward so everyone knows she’s here. But don’t dare cross her or blaspheme the Lord, as she has no problem slapping or talking down anyone she deems unworthy. But if you are respectful and kind, she will open her heart to you. She prays for everyone on the ward and will hug each of us as she makes her way down the beds. She’s gentle and concerned; the fact that we are strangers makes no real difference to her. It’s like she can sense sadness, fear and loneliness and talk you through it. Some days she spends an hour with me, others 10 minutes. It all depends on who needs the most care that day in her eyes. I still don’t know her real name or much about her, just Nana. She’s the wards paternal grandmother and a welcome sight for everyone.

Chapter 31

My Dad is calling, and I pick up.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hi, Tim. How are you feeling?”

“Okay, I guess. Just worn out.”

“Well we’ve been going back and forth with your travel insurance company and they’ve finally agreed to pay for your flight home. There was a problem with a clause in the contract concerning drugs and alcohol that they were determined to fight against. But eventually they had to give in as your blood was never tested for drugs when you arrived at the hospital, so they can’t legally confirm that you had any in your system. So that means they have to pay.”

“Wait, what? I didn’t even know this was going on. I’m going home? How? I can’t even get out of bed.” By this point I knew I couldn’t stay in London, but I didn’t know leaving would happen so soon. It’s taken me weeks of stubborn defiance but eventually the walls have crumbled around me. The thought of leaving what I had started makes me feel like a failure. Returning to New Zealand like this makes me wish at times that I had died when I fell. It depresses me immensely just thinking about it. Panic attacks now rise and fall every couple of days at the mere thought or utterance of my return home. But I know this isn’t where I belong anymore. I need my family and friends at home for support.

“Well you’ll be taken on a bed throughout the flight with two nurses who will accompany you. The flight is tomorrow night. Then they’ll transport you to Auckland hospital where we’ll meet you.”

“Tomorrow!? What about my clothes and my medications, my computer and passport? I’m not ready, I have to say bye to friends.”

“Everything will be taken care of by the nurses who will fly with you. Say goodbye to anyone you need to. You need to come home, there is no other option this is the flight booked by travel insurance.”

“Okay.” We talk a little more about logistics and what has been happening, then we say goodbye and hang up the phone. I lay my head back in my pillow and tears well up in my eyes. As one drifts down my cheek I wipe it away and pick up my phone again. I text everyone I know and tell them I’m going home, tonight is my final night in London.

Chapter 32

Georgia heads to the hospital straight after work and says goodbye first. She has graciously washed my soiled clothes and is returning them for my journey. We chat for a bit, she eats some of my hospital food (which she loves for some strange reason) and I thank her for all her support. It’s a dry thank you and a dry goodbye, there’s nothing I can really put into words at this point to show how much her help, support and understanding means to me. Nothing can. I hope she understands that fact. She leaves as we have always left each other, wondering when we’ll see each other again, and if so, where and under what circumstances.

About an hour after Georgia left the boys come. James, Tim, Akash and John, carrying a plastic bag full of beers. I crack up laughing and pop one. They pull up next to me and laugh and joke about how crazy this whole situation has been. We look around for nurses, cheers to surviving and my trip home the next day. It’s the first drop of alcohol I’ve had in six weeks and its taste feels like I’m normal again, drinking with the lads. As we sip and reminisce I’m ever aware of the ticking clock and its countdown to visiting hours being over. It makes me afraid, afraid to be alone again. But almost instantaneously it brings me back, once again, to the idea of impermanence. All good things and bad will always come to an end. I’m content in that fact now and breathe the slightest sigh of relief in knowing that this end can only morph into the next beginning. It’s the one true constant in this world and an immensely reassuring thing. I’m humbled once more and laugh until I feel like I can’t breathe one more second.

I’m happy.

Part 3.

Chapter 33

I’m lying on my parent’s couch, our cat Daisy firmly ensconced lengthwise in the small crest between my body and the couches cushions. She purrs softly in her warmth as winter winds and frozen rain lash against the window. I look down at my glass of wine; it haunts me once more. I’m still drunk and sick. It’s 3pm and I want to smash that f*****g glass into little bits. I slide another morphine pill into my mouth, not quite sure of what number I’m on, and wash it down with a swig of the vile liquid, hoping one more pill will do the trick. I let out a sigh; I know it’s time. I begin planning how I’m going to commit suicide that night.

It’s been a long time coming. The darkness provides no light at the end of its long, whispering tunnel. It had petered out in a soft whimper weeks before and has never shone since. This is now the only path I can take, and I know how to do it. It’s now only a matter of having the courage. I know some will see it as cowardly, but these are not people who have sunk to the very bottom, where there is no light above, chained and weighed down by muddied sharp rocks, drowning and gasping for one more breath. You tell me I’m a coward? Then I wish all of this horror upon you.

I want to cry, to do something or at least feel something strong enough to break me out of this course of action. Anything. But all that’s left is a huge lump in my throat, a lump that I can never swallow down no matter how hard I try. Larry has been removed and his scars are the only remnants he leaves behind of his proud past. He now lies next to my bed, just pieces of scrap metal with no real worth anymore.

My only true confidants are intoxicants, once again. They understand the darkness and numb it for me with no judgment. My other friends have lives, jobs and important social events to attend to. All of that is just drivel in my eyes. Luke is my only real contact, but I haven’t ventured passed my gate in weeks. I have tried, but I f*****g hate what lies beyond it. Swarms of the hopelessly deluded I call them, ‘happy’ people going about their day. They’re so self-involved and apathetic to the misery that lies beyond their latte’s and marketing quotas; thousands of vicious acts taking place in every corner of the world, every day. “How sad,” they say, until they change the channel or flip the page to something more palatable than a suicide bombing.

I belong here, behind the garage, the farthest point I can live from the white picket fence at the front of the property. I spend most days watching documentaries or reading articles, over and over and over again until I can’t sleep without brutal, violent dreams filling my subconscious. Most mornings the ground will be awash with water and sticky patches of dried wine, all results of the previous nights’ kicking, punching and thrashing about in the dark; a reoccurring, imagined, fight for my life.

The anxiety bursts through me like electricity at the opening of my eyelids each morning, crippling me with fear and a loss of breath. I scramble for the morphine bottle and Lorazepam to quell my nerves. As the anxiety withdraws sadness inevitably takes its place, growing steadily worse throughout the day. I find scraps of alcohol, mostly wine, throughout the house or have Luke bring me some when he comes over, which I drink steadily throughout the day, adding morphine at intervals giving me slow, steady glances of hope. It’s all a façade, I know, but it keeps me alive one more day. But today I’ve had enough.

Chapter 34

I get up off the sofa, being careful not to wake my serene sleeping companion. I hobble on my one crutch from the house to my bedroom, in track-pants, a t-shirt and no shoes. My room is about as far as I can make it most days without stumbling around like a haggard drunk in the winter weather. I keep the bottle of pills in my pocket and carry the wine in my free hand. I’ve positioned a folding chair in the middle of the empty garage while my parents are at work, placed near enough to its open door that I can feel wisps of rain on my bare feet, but just far enough away that I won’t get drenched. I light a cigarette and stare at the back of my parent’s house through the downpour. I sit silently and watch, sipping wine and ashing cigarettes into the paint bucket I have found under the old workbench. I stay here until the pain of my pelvis becomes too much, and only then move to the comfort of my bed. There’s something about this area around the back of the house that makes me feel safe. Old memories of growing up and playing here as a child in my sandpit and tree-house make me know I was always loved and protected. It gives me warmth whilst I’m shivering from the cold. It’s a nice place to say goodbye.

As the day grows darker, I lie watching the ceiling while I drink. I fall in and out of small dozes, only becoming cognisant as my parents arrive home and stop in to say hello to see how I am. I hide the bottle and act as if everything is okay. They know I’m depressed and have tried to help me the best way they can, with a psychiatrist and psychologist to get me through. I love them for that, but it simply is not enough anymore. I keep my true feelings and proposed plans deeply hidden from everyone. I have put them through enough and will soon rid them of my dead weight.

I’m frustratingly contemplating what is about to happen for hours. Weighing every thought and prospect of my actions aftermath. I love my family, my friends and animals so dearly and I know how much pain this will cause them. But I don’t love any part of my life anymore. I’m selfish. I always have been. I stare at my watch as each second ticks closer to the time. I’m so intoxicated by this point the smallest thing can consume my attention for minutes. I wait until 11pm and begin gathering every type of pill I can find, from morphine to Prozac to Lorazepam to Ibuprofen, and dump them all on the bed. I stare at them intently, knowing that once I have swallowed this colourful assortment, they will go to work shutting down my body bit by bit until there is nothing left functioning.

My hands shake as I pick up the first clump of pills. I take a deep breath, put as many as I can in my mouth, fill it with wine and start swallowing. It takes longer than I thought and far more wine than I can drink in one go, but I keep shoving them into my mouth until there’s none left. I finish the last mouthful of wine and lay the glass on the ground, my eyes welling up with tears. I put my head on the pillow, get under the duvet and turn off the light. I message Luke, reminding him to play ‘Highway to hell’ at my funeral. He messages back laughing, not knowing of my intentions. It’s a nice ending. I close my eyes while listening to the rain hitting the roof and wait to die.

Chapter 35

I wake up suddenly, gasping, trying to catch an ounce of air. Vomit and bile have filled my throat and mouth and cover my pillow. I try to swallow it back down while I limp as fast as I can to the toilet. Everything comes up in a flood of brown liquid. My body can’t expel my stomach contents fast enough. It keeps coming as I try to catch my breath between each convulsion. I can see whole pills floating amongst the dark brown slush, others semi-digested. After a few minutes the convulsions slow, but my stomach and throat burn with pain. Once the convulsions stop I fall back onto the bathroom floor, barely able to keep my head up. I close my eyes for a brief second then everything goes black.

When I open my eyes in the morning I’m still on the bathroom floor, my throat burning, stomach on fire and pelvis in unbearable pain. I don’t know what has happened or where I am. I climb up to the basin and turn on the faucet. I can’t drink the water fast enough. I drink and drink until my stomach is full. Limping slowly over to my bed, I throw my pillow on the ground and pass out again.

When I come to the second time, it’s late afternoon. My whole body is writhing in pain, but I can’t bring myself to take another pill. It makes me sick, just the thought of it. I get up out of bed and look at the aftermath. It smells like it looks and the vomit has dried to a crust everywhere. My parents couldn’t have seen this as they would have awoken me instantly. I have to clean it up before my parents come home. I wash the sheets, spray everything down, mop and shower all through unspeakable pain. But this is my penance, for my failure. I climb back into bed with a large plastic bottle of water I use each night and have to take two morphine tablets and my psych meds. It hurts swallowing them down as my throat is so swollen, but the pain is just too much now.

I’m scared. Scared of what I’ve done. I need help.

I have no idea if I will do it again, but I don’t want to come close to it. I ring my psychiatrist’s office and make an appointment for the next day. I need clarity as to how I got to this point and how to get passed it.

I have to be brutally honest.

Chapter 36

The next day I hobble into a taxi to my first appointment with my psychiatrist. I let most of it out, crying most of the time. She’s a very empathetic, caring soul who has gone through depression herself. She ups some of my dosages and adds a new anti-depressant to my regimen. I’m to see her once a week to track my progress and she gives me her cell phone number in case of an emergency.

My next appointment is with my psychologist, who is luckily in the same building. He’s a straightforward guy who tells me with no uncertainty that he knows the right path forward but will drop me in a second if I don’t follow it strictly. He knows he can make me better, but I have to place all my trust in him. He has an odd faith in me, which I latch onto immediately. I tell him about what had happened. It feels unimaginably cathartic to let it out to a stranger who is ethically and legally obliged to keep it a secret. Except, as I forgot, in the case of whether I would again try to hurt myself, or others. In this case, he offers a mandatory proposition: I’m to see him three times a week, check in with him daily through email and he asks my permission to call my parents. Not to tell them of my attempt, but to ask them to take all medication out of my room, hide it, and give me my prescribed amount daily. He also will ask them to hide all alcohol and check my room for it. Otherwise he will have to admit me to hospital.

I reluctantly agree.

I’m also told I have to go to my physical therapy gym three times a week and exercise for an hour each time with the advice I had been given by my physical therapist. These were all non-negotiable.

Once again, I agree.

He then asks me one of the hardest questions I’ve ever had to answer: When was the last time you were truly happy and how did you end up at this point today?

“Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever been truly happy,” I answer.

“That’s not good enough,” he counters. “To feel this depressed means there was a point in which there was an opposite, otherwise this would have been your entire life and you would have tried to commit suicide long ago,” he says bluntly. I curl my face at his retort, knowing I had been out-manoeuvred.

“Off the top of my head? Probably the night I left the hospital in London and was having sneaky beers in my cubicle with my friends. It was just before I went on an absolutely bizarre plane ride home. But since landing back in Auckland it’s kind of been a gradual decline. I was depressed before I left for London, but somehow falling off that building and breaking my pelvis jolted me back into some kind of normality. Once that was gone, I felt nothing again.”

“Tell me about that night, what was so special about it?” he asks.

“My friends who had been with me from my accident and throughout my hospital stay had brought in some beers for my last night in the hospital, before I left to fly back to Auckland the next day. It was different than anything we had done hundreds of times before… it made me feel normal again, happy, I guess.”

“Why was this different?”

“Context. They had helped me through a really rough time and there was a sense of some type of closure. Plus, we were drinking in a hospital which was funny.”

“Closure of what exactly?”

“My time in London, that I was feeling okay mentally and was healing well. I felt like I was moving forward from the past.”

“Can I ask how much morphine you were on?”

“I don’t know the exact dosage, but it was a lot.”

“How much are you on now?”

“Eight pills a day. That’s what I’m supposed to be on. But I take twelve to sixteen I’d say.”

“How do you keep up with that many pills and your prescriptions?”

“I call and say I’m in more pain, and they usually supply me more for that month. I take that prescription to a different pharmacy so they both think I’m on a lower dose.”

“That’s drug seeking behaviour. Do you believe you’re addicted?”

“Yes. How can you not be when you’ve been on morphine every day for five months?”

“Do you want to keep feeling this depressed?”

“Obviously not.”

“Well addiction to opioids and your subsequent drinking with them only worsens your condition. Do you want to come off them?”

“Yes and no. I feel pain when I’m not on them but it’s mostly in my head at this point.” I don’t know why I’m saying this or being so honest, I love and need morphine, but somewhere deep down a compulsion is telling me the right way.

“Is it okay if I call your doctor and tell him about the addiction so he can help you come off them?”

“I dunno. That scares the s**t outta me. I don’t know if I’m ready. I need them. What if my pain gets worse? What if I go through withdrawal?”

“These are questions your doctor can answer. But I think it’s best for your mental health moving forward that we get you off intoxicants, including alcohol.” I sigh and look at my feet for a while, mulling over in my head what was more important to me.

“Okay,” I say reluctantly.

“I’m afraid our time is up, Tim.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Can you write down your parents and doctors numbers for me? I’ll call them right after this.” As I write them down I know I only have about half an hour to get home and hoard enough morphine pills as I can. Alcohol will be difficult, but I can find that more easily.

“Okay, book a time for Wednesday with Aileen at the front desk. Then book out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the next two months.”

“Okay,” I say, feeling depleted and almost defeated. I make my appointments then shuffle out the front door and call a cab. I have a special cab coupon card that comes with my disability benefit. However, it’s only with one cab company so it sometimes takes longer than expected. I’m anxious to get home before anyone else can find and take away my morphine.

When I finally arrived home my Mum’s car is in the driveway, she’s home for lunch, which she does some days. I’m not sure if she knows yet or not. I open the front door and walk to the kitchen where she’s making lunch.

“I just got a call from your psychologist,” she says. The blood in my face drains instantly. “He said that you wanted me to take your medicines and have me ration them out for you daily, why’s that?” she asks.

“It’s just a precaution. I’m taking so many meds lately I don’t want to confuse them or take too many of the wrong ones.”

“Fair enough. Let’s go get them then.” F**k. I‘m too late. I haven’t hidden any of them they’re all in my bookcase next to my bed. If she finds one, she finds them all. I show her where they are, in a big tupperware container and she takes them.

“I’ll check the dosages and leave them on the table before I go to work in the morning. Sound good? I’m also moving the wine and other alcohol. I know it’s been hard on you, but this is a good thing.”

“Sure.” This all sounds f*****g horrible actually. The morphine I’m on now is diminishing rapidly and I only have two doses left for the day, or a total of four measly tablets. That’s not enough to sustain me. Not even close. I lie down on my bed and watch Law & Order, trying to take my mind off of morphine. But as each episode comes to a close, my body aches just a little more for those tiny blue pills. Wine would help immensely, but I have no way of getting it. I’m f*****g petrified at the thought of having nothing to use.

Chapter 37

As I lie in bed listening to the rain pitter-patter on the roof, I think back to my flight home and its absurdity; it reminds me of a Seinfeld episode. It helps to keep the negative thoughts at bay.

I was lying in my hospital bed, waiting anxiously for what was about to come. I knew scant details and was unprepared, trying desperately to muster some confidence. As the paramedics arrived and surrounded my bed I knew there was no turning back. The nurses had packed all my belongings, I had been washed and given my medications and a large dose of morphine. I would be meeting the nurses who would be accompanying me on the flight at Heathrow. The ambulance officers lifted me onto their stretcher using sheets, then began to strap my body, tightening me in place. One of the officers, a portly man with a ginger moustache and deep London accent, said “Are we ready, mate?”

“I guess so.” I shyly waved goodbye to the nurses, thanked them once more, and was wheeled down the ward, passing every bed and every person who I knew were there, but had never been able to see before from my viewpoint. Some looked at me with a strange bewilderment; others didn’t care or even look up. We began threading through the hallways which were small and unable to fit two beds passing each other. We got stuck in traffic and time simultaneously. I pulled my phone from my small bag I had hanging off the stretcher and began recording from my point of view. I knew I’d never be able to see this again, so I’d capture it for posterities sake. We waited patiently in line until the elevator’s giant door opened, and I was pushed into the atrium of the hospital, an overwhelmingly large meeting and waiting area with trees, natural light and expansive spaces. The roof was made of glass and it felt like I was in a ginormous glasshouse. It was breathtaking in its scope compared to the small rooms I had occupied for the previous six weeks.

“It’s quite something, innit?” the paramedic said.

“Wow, it really is.” I couldn’t help but notice the difference between the facade of the hospital and its guts, but I was impressed nonetheless.

They pushed me through the main hospital entrance and outside where it was cold and raining, the air invigorating and crisp against my face. I filled my lungs with as much of it as possible. I hadn’t been outside for six weeks, the only light coming from fluorescent bulbs and the stale air reconstituted through air conditioners. This was pure, and all mine.

The paramedics lifted my stretcher into the awaiting ambulance and locked it in. One drove and the other stayed in the back with me. I drifted in and out of sleep as we weaved our way through London traffic, catching small glimpses of people on the street or black cabs passing by while I was lucid. As we neared Heathrow I was awoken by the roar of jets above. Lights filled the ambulance and people whirred by on the sidewalks. We kept driving until everything grew quiet and eventually no people were around, just empty streets, dark and devoid of anything. Shipping containers and trucks began to pop up around the sides of the ambulances windows. We came to an abrupt stop, and the doors to the ambulance swung open. It was dark outside and still raining, but huge fluorescent lights lit the entire background filled with shipping containers and ginormous cranes moving them around. A man jumped into the back and asked for my passport. The ambulance officer gave it to him and he left with it.

It was then that I was introduced to my two companions for the flight home, Steve and Uban. Steve was white and from Sussex, brilliantly British. Uban was a second-generation Sudanese immigrant with a solid South London accent. Both were nurses and did this for a living, travelling the world with sick patients. What a job I thought.

“So how does this all work?” I asked.

“Well, we’re taking you through security now then we’ve got a bed waiting for on the plane to transport you back to New Zealand,” Steve said.

“Wow, first class,” I joked. The security guard came back with my passport then asked to pad me down. He was soaked from the rain and in a hurry. Everyone was except for me. The open doors let the wind bring some of the rain into the ambulance, it flurried around, some landing gently on my face.

“I bet you’ll be glad to be heading into summer, away from this shite,” the security guard said as he padded me down. He pulled the sheet that was covering me, revealing Larry.

“F**k, would you look at that? That’s some piece of hardware you’ve got there.”

“Yeah, it’s different alright.” I was half anxious, half perplexed by the whole situation. He padded me down and looked around the stretcher, then gave his okay.

“Well, best of luck buddy.”

“Thanks.” Uban quickly covered me up in a blanket then the ambulance officers strapped me back in.

“Don’t worry, Tim. You’ll be just fine. We’ll look after you,” Uban said gently. He had big pink lips and chubby cheeks, his eyes were kind and his eye lashes were longer than any I had seen on a man before. He had a calming way about him, he made me feel a little more at ease.

“We’ve done this hundreds of times, Tim, you’re in good hands,” Steve chimed in. He was readying his medical bag and checking my catheter. He then unhooked my catheter drip bag and placed it between my legs. It was still as orange as fanta.

“Alright, let’s go.” The ambulance officer closed the doors and we began driving, through large barb-wired gates, then darkness, until the vehicles interior lit up again with light and I could see the huge underbelly of a jumbo jet appear beside me.

“Are we on the tarmac?” I asked.

“Sure are. We’re heading to your plane. You’ll be first on.”

We sped past rows of planes from all sorts of different countries; Air France, Air Canada, Air China. All lit up in a magnificent glow as we peered through the wind-swept rainy windows at these monstrous pieces of machinery. After coming to a slow stop, the doors opened once again and everybody, except me, got out. The ambulance slowly manoeuvred backwards into a position where I could see about ten people and a large container. The ambulance officers jumped in the back, unhooked me from the vehicle and pulled me out, landing smack dab in the middle of an icy shower. I looked up and after wiping my eyes from the rain I saw something that historically had always meant a lot to me; the koru that adorns every Air New Zealand aeroplane tail. I turned my phone to it to capture it before it disappeared. Since I was a child flying back and forth from America, that tail meant something when I saw it through the airport window. Some nostalgic idea of home. It was part of my countries heritage and part of my heritage, we were intertwined. For the first time since leaving New Zealand I felt absolutely sure I was heading in the right direction.

The container before me was at the back of the jumbo jet and was used to load food and beverages aboard it. They pushed me into its belly, loaded with about ten other people, all saying hello and how lucky I was in tandem, then the motor started, and we began to rise, eventually making it to the back door of the plane where I was greeted by that indistinguishable accent from the deep south.

“Mr. Hagan, welcome aboard, it’s so great to have you,” one of the attendants said.

“Thanks, it’s really nice to be here.” I was at the very backend of the plane as they moved me into the main cabin. I couldn’t be with the normal passengers, could I? How does that work? Don’t they have a special area for the invalids?

It turned out no. They pushed me a few feet up the aisle until I lay next to a makeshift bed to my right. They had taken seats out of the plane and installed a bed there. The ambulance officers unstrapped me from my stretcher and everyone helped lift me to my new resting place. The ambulance officers left out the back door and I was left with Steve, Uban and two flight attendants. They once again strapped me onto the bed and organised my catheter, their medical bags and equipment and where they would be sitting, just to my left in the economy cabin. A makeshift curtain could be closed around me for privacy, but it had to be open while boarding, take-off and landing took place.

“Everything okay, Tim?” Steve asked.

“Yeah, I think so. I’m just in some pain and it’s hard to get comfortable.” He helped me with pillows and put some on each side of my pelvis for extra cushioning. He then reached into his medical bag and unwrapped a syringe of morphine, jotting down the time in his notebook. I opened wide and swallowed it, making sure I once again got every last drop by rummaging around in my mouth with my tongue.

“Every two hours we’ll wake you and give you more so you’re comfortable throughout the whole flight.”

“Okay, thank you.” Uban took my catheter drip bag from between my legs, changed it then hung the new one on the left side of my bed, where they (and everyone else in the cabin mind you) could see and empty it throughout the flight. Uban carried it to the bathroom and released its contents into the toilet.

“There,” he said with a big smile on his face, “we’re all ready to go.”

The cabin crew called the front and within a few minutes passengers started dripping in. Everyone (and I mean everyone) stared at me. A baby stopped crying and just stared. One person bumped into the person ahead of them because they were staring, and once everyone began to be seated, they just kept staring. One woman in particular looked almost horrified at my sight, like I had Ebola or something. I turned away and looked out the window. It was still raining, and bags were being piled into the planes underbelly. I looked at the strange tent that Larry made under the white sheets, it looked even more pronounced as the straps tightened around it. It kind of looked like I had a pretty hefty boner, I thought. Holy s**t, do these people think I have a raging boner going on under these sheets? Is that why they’re all staring? F*****g hell. Not only was my orange discharge visible to the passengers surrounding me, they may now also believe I’m either turned on by my predicament or some type of serial offender being transferred home. I had no idea. I took a deep breath and just smiled, waved to the small child, then fell asleep.

Most of the flight was a comatosed blur, 95% of which was slept through. Every two hours my curtains would be opened, and I would swallow the next round of morphine, then pass out again. My laxatives had been stopped the day before and I had eaten minimal amounts of food the day of flying so I wouldn’t have to take a s**t in front of a cabin full of terrified strangers.

After making a short layover in Hong Kong the cabin began filling up again. Steve and Uban made sure I was doped up for the remaining portion of the flight, leaving no room for me to get any more uncomfortable after the already laborious 18 hours of flying.

Chapter 38

My body spasmed and my head jolted into the side window as we touched down. I looked around at a darkened cabin.

“Everything okay, Tim?” Steve asked.

“Yeah, have we landed?”

“Sure have. Welcome home.”

“Yeah…” My speech trailed off into a long sigh as my mind wandered. Home. It felt strange to hear it. It’s a relative thought, tied to so many things. I was born and raised in New Zealand, my friends and family are here, and I do consider it my home, but in a strange, distant way by that point. ‘Home’ held a lot of negativity, a lot of pain. I left New Zealand with the naive hope of finding something out there; humanity in all earths cultures, a newfound trust in the human condition. I wanted to forge new, deep and meaningful friendships with people from strange and distant lands that could give me faith that there is an inherent morality that all people share. That the world is not all suffering and heartache. Travel was going to be my new home, something that would unburden me of this unwanted dark cloak that hung itself so heavily around my shoulders. 

But I had completed none of that. All I had managed to do was dig myself deeper into a hole, deeper into my addictions and self-delusions and ultimately deeper into my depression. I’ve always been good at dreaming, but horrible at executing. My self-doubt crippling me the second I try. My fear of failure is so all-consuming in everything I do I barely want to try to take that first step. ‘If you don’t try, you can’t fail’ has always been my mantra, and it had once again been proven right. I had lasted two horrible, dreary winter weeks in London and failed once more. Embarrassingly so.

The passengers slowly filtered out, blurry eyed and tired. They still stared, but less emphatically. They just wanted to get the hell off the plane. As the last few petered out, ambulance officers entered the back of the plane. I was given my last dose of morphine in preparation for my ride to Auckland Hospital.

“Hey, Tim. Welcome home mate. Jeez I heard about your accident, I bet you’re happy you’re still here.”

“Sure am, it’s good to be home.” This facade of pre-determined answers had been on high rotation over the past six weeks, and I had a feeling that it would only get worse. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure if I was happy to be here, whether that meant alive or back in New Zealand. I wasn’t sure of much at that point.

They pulled the stretcher next to my make-shift bed and gathered around me to hoist me over. Once re-strapped to the new stretcher I was again taken out the back of the plane and put in the food storage hoist truck, lowered slowly to the ground then pushed outside. The sun blinded me straight away and the heat was intense. I had forgotten it was summer. As the sunlight touched my skin I could already feel it burning. I took a deep breath and could taste the fresh air. It was warm and delicate, the breeze captured with it hints of the ocean which I had missed so much. It was raw and earthy, and I felt connected to it. I was on solid ground.

We arrived at the hospital and they carted me through the back entryway with Steve and Uban in tow. After signing me in we waited in the corridor until they could take me to my new bed. An hour or so went passed when I heard a familiar voice. It was unmistakably Mum’s. She rounded the corner with Dad and they let out huge smiles, as did I. It was incredibly emotional to see them, I immediately knew I was in the right place to get better, all I had needed was to see their faces and feel the warmth of their obvious joy that their son was alive and at home. It beamed off them. We hugged and thanked the nurses, Steve and Uban. They were heading to South America in a couple of days to bring a British boy home who had broken his back.

“What an odd career,” Mum quipped. It was like I had never left.

An orderly came and pushed my bed through the hallways, up the elevator, into the new orthopaedic ward. I was put into a single room, overlooking the carpark and part of the medical school across the road. My best friend Luke and his girlfriend Zoe were doing their PhD’s there, so it felt comforting to know they were close by. I was transferred to my new bed; it had white sheets, a white blanket, white side bars and didn’t move around like my previous mattress. Everything was sparse and mundane, but to look outside and see deep, bright blue skies uncluttered with pesky clouds and a huge, melting molten sun beaming its searing rays through the window uplifted my spirit and let me know I was truly back in the homeland.

That day friends and family filtered in and out, all with the same questions, the same line, “You’re so lucky to be alive,” the same fascination with Larry and me with the same facade, one I had been perfecting for weeks now. It was nice to see everyone, but it was tiring, trying to keep up. My sister and her partner Scott came in the early evening, then left with my parents. They would be back tomorrow. I lay my head back into my pillow, exhausted.

Chapter 39

My mind is now in a mad rush, trying to remember everything that has happened since the accident. I need to store it all somewhere, for posterities sake. I grab my laptop and open a blank word document. The cursor sits there, dashing, waiting for something, some kind of input. I don’t know where to start. I look to my left and see my claw, a small device I had been given by the hospital staff in London that was about a metre long with a hand grip and trigger at one end and a closing claw at the other, so I was able to pick things up from my immediate surroundings. It takes me back to my first night in Auckland hospital and what a nightmare it became.

 

I start to write.

I was now in my new room at Auckland hospital. The first day had grown dark and I could see some of the cities lights coating the night sky from my window. I used the claw to grab the buzzer that had fallen to the floor. It took the nurse around twenty minutes to get to my room. Everything seemed slower there for some reason. The nurse seemed perturbed by my interference with his working schedule. He was an incredibly effeminate Maori man, tall and thin with heavy blue nail polish and his hair in a tight bun atop his head. He wore a net around it to keep it firmly in place.

“Hi, can I help you?” What a welcome I thought. No name, no indication of where I was or how things worked.

“Ahh, yeah. Could I get some pain medicine please?” My whole lower body was aching and felt swollen and sharp pains were now spreading down my right leg. “And could I get someone to change my dressings?” Larry had withstood the long flight home and the many twists and turns he had taken to keep my body aligned, but the aftermath of such upheaval had left my bandages soaked in yellow and red ooze, even though they had been changed throughout the flight. He looked down at Larry with a scrunched brow and confused look on his face.

“Wow, I’ve never seen anything like that,what is that?” he asked.

“What?” I snapped. “Isn’t all of this in my paperwork?” I was now genuinely concerned that no one had any f*****g clue what was going on with me.

“Yes, we’re just going through that now and will be briefed soon by the doctor on duty tonight. In the meantime, let me check your pain medications and I’ll get someone to change those bandages.”

He left abruptly as Luke and Zoe came through the door.

“Sup bro! Jesus, what the f**k have you done now?” Luke said laughing. I started laughing just at the sight of that smarmy mother-fuckers face.

“Just living life on the edge bro.”

“Edge of a building apparently.” We both cracked up and it was like nothing had happened from the time I last saw him until that moment. I was glad to be home if it meant I could see him again.

“Hi Tim!!!” Zoe blurted out in her sarcastic tone as she knew that kind of feigned happiness annoyed the f**k out of me.

“Hey Zoe,” I said as I squinted wryly to show my displeasure. We all hugged, and they made themselves at home. It felt strangely like I was finally in the right place at the right time. I felt happy. About ten minutes into our conversation Vikram walked in, a friend of all of ours who was a resident doctor at the hospital.

“HOLY S**T,” he proclaimed loudly, his eyes wide and his words bursting with excitement. “I was going down my list of patients for tonight and saw your name. Sooo… it looks like I’m your doctor for tonight. What the f**k.” We all started laughing and I was in shock. Vikram was a good friend and we had all done and seen some f*****g weird s**t together, so it was strange to have him literally be in charge of all of my care that night. He’s also younger than me. What the f**k alright.

“Ok, then as my doctor can you get me some damned morphine and clean these f*****g bandages?”

“Haha yeah, the nurse came and asked me about that. Pain meds are on the way and I’ll get the nurse to come and clean up the bandages. Let’s have a look?” I pulled up my gown so it was just above Larry and the sheet was just below, covering my junk.

“This is Larry, in all his magnificence,” I said.

“Larry?” Luke asked.

“Yeah it’s a mixture of Luke and Barry haha. You’re inside me now bro.”

“That’s f*****g creepy dude,” as Luke began laughing.

“I’ve never seen a pelvis fixed like this before, we still don’t use this method yet, it’s really new,” Dr. Vikram duly noted. He pulled up the bandages, “Huh,” he said, “interesting.”

“Interesting? Don’t you guys all keep up with this s**t, didn’t you see my notes?”

“Yup and gone over your MRI and X-rays. I’m surprised you survived. I saw about seven fractures throughout your pelvis. If you had done that here, you’d probably never be able to walk again as we’d have to put you in a cast. But ‘Larry’ let’s your body move more naturally, so you’ve got a way better chance. Everything’s pretty much back in place now, also thanks two the two screws, we’ll just have to see how it heals.” I had never even really thought about the walking part, I was just trying to get through the lying-completely-still-for-six-weeks part. I had just always assumed that I would walk again, maybe a little differently, but still walk. To hear that that may never have happened, and I’d be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life shocked me.

“S**t, really?”

“Welcome to the New Zealand healthcare system Timmy,” Luke said sarcastically.

“I guess I was in the right place at the right time to fall off a building,” I said.

“King’s Cross is known internationally for their pelvic unit, so technically, yeah,” Vikram said.

“Anyway, I’ve got to do the rounds, the nurse will be in soo… and here he is. Just on time.”

“I have your pain medication here, Tim,” the nurse said. He had a small plastic cup with two blue pills in it.

“Pills?” I said looking at Vikram. “I’ve been using oral syringes.”

“Yeah we don’t do that in New Zealand. Don’t worry, it’s the same dosage of morphine, taken every four hours.”

“Man, I liked the boysenberry flavour and quick release though,” I sighed.

“Haha, yeah, but these are longer lasting and will keep your pain in check. Anyway, buzz the nurse if you need anything and I’ll swing by later to check up on you.”

“Cool, thanks man.” I swallowed the pills and lay back into my pillow.

“We gotta head too,” Luke said. “We’ll come by in the morning with some coffee.”

“Sounds good. Strong stuff too, not this weak bullshit they have in hospitals. I also don’t think I could drink another cup of tea again in my life.”

“The British and their tea haha. Will do. See you in the morning.”

I lay my head back in the pillow and watched the lights of Auckland flicker in the distance. I knew I had entered a new phase, a phase of change and hard work ahead. But I was desperate to walk, to get out of bed. My legs were becoming emaciated and red from inaction and I just wanted to be able to move about freely again. It gave me a goal, something to work for, something I had lost somewhere along the way. I knew I could push myself.

I awoke in the night with an extreme stinging pain in my penis and intense pressure. I turned the light on above my bed and saw that my dressings had been changed. I pulled down the sheet to look at my dick. It was swollen and red and my bladder was completely full. It was pushing against my pelvis again and the pain was unbearable. The catheter tube was also full of orange urine. I buzzed the nurse. No response. I buzzed and buzzed until after twenty minutes he came in. His eyes immediately widened, “Oh my god!” he yelled. He was looking down at my catheter bag. I pulled myself over so I could look down the side of the bed. The bag was completely full, about to burst. It was pushing urine back into my bladder.

He ran over and uncapped the bag, releasing its contents all over the floor. He came running with towels and started to try to stem the flow that was now almost reaching the door. He had no gloves on and was panicking, I would have felt sorry for him if he wasn’t such an inept nurse who should have been checking my bag regularly. As he scrambled on the floor and began picking up the orange-soaked towels and dumping them in the trash, I just put my head into the back of my pillow and laughed. This wasn’t even close to being the strangest thing that had happened to me over the past six weeks, and this was f*****g strange. He washed his hands and called for an orderly to mop up the rest.

“I’m so sorry Mr. Hagan, I’ll be right back with a new bag.”

“Could you also bring me my pain meds?”

“Of course.”

Chapter 40

The next morning, they pulled my catheter out as there was a risk of infection. I could say the exhumation of the barbed-like tube buried deep inside my bladder was painful, but compared to other pains I’d experienced over the past month or so it was minimal. Like a hot knife cutting through your urethra.

Grit and bear.

Grit and bear.

It was my new mantra whenever I experienced pain. It helped me focus that raw sensation elsewhere. A type of unpoetic meditation.

Things always move fast in a hospital in the morning. Shifts rotate from night to day, the more experienced medical staff come through to do their rounds, followed by red-eyed student lackeys eagerly in tow. They grab your chart, puff their chest, ask a couple of questions then hand the rest over to the medical students, who ask painfully obvious questions, scraped straight from the lines of the latest textbook they were reading late into the previous night. I always felt sorry for them, but they chose their path. That morning there was an especially eager young Asian woman answering and asking questions, interjecting while I tried to speak. I told her to wait and listen, that’s the best way to learn from a patient. Besides, I liked the guy half hidden behind the blue curtain, paying attention, not really writing notes but rolling his eyes every time this woman spoke. She was obviously the star of the class, but he was more my type. Quiet, modest, logical. I winked at him when he glanced my way and he smiled. Hopefully that brightened his morning.

Next came the pain team, some of my favourite people. They were the ones controlling how much morphine I could get. It was incredibly important to give the idea that I was in more pain than I actually was. This would usually cover me for the times when the pain would be intense, while other times I had minimal pain at all. It rounded out evenly, but the precise measurement had to be severe enough to warrant the current dosage I was on, yet low enough so they knew I wasn’t full of s**t.

“On a scale of 1-10, ten being the worst pain you’ve ever felt, where would you be?” I tended to go with a 7, sometimes an 8 to let them know some days were worse. This kept them satisfied and me pain free for the most part.

Next was a surprise and something I didn’t see coming. A woman knocked on the door, in a white doctors’ coat, pen and paper at the ready. She was followed by a familiar face, a small, ginger lad called Paul who I knew through Vikram and had met at a couple of parties, no doubt inebriated. I had nicknamed him Doogie Howser at one point as he looked remarkably similar in hair style, stature and demeanour as the young prodigy.

“DOOGIE HOWSER!” I yelled as he walked in. “How’s it going, man?”

“Ahh, no, Mr. Hagan this is my psychiatric resident Paul who will be joining us today, is that okay with you?” Ahh, the psychiatric evaluation, volume two.

“Oh, no, I know Paul, it’s a dumb nickname I gave him.”

“Oh, I see. Well do you mind if he observes and asks you some questions?”

“Sure.” By this point I couldn’t believe that I was being treated by a second person I knew, especially now that they both knew everything about my psychiatric and medical history. New Zealand is a small place at the best of times, but this was exceptional.

“I’m going to let him go through the questions and I’ll be supervising, is that okay,” she asked.

“No problem. Don’t you have my previous psych consult from London?” I said.

“We do, but we like to do our own and evaluate from there.”

“Sure, shoot.”

“Hey, Tim,” Paul said. It was all so formal and awkward, but it somehow gave brevity to the situation. “Umm, so I see you’re on some psychiatric medications, can you tell me what they’re for?”

“Yeah, um, I have depression, anxiety and OCD.”

“Ok, cool. Do you feel depressed now or in the past, say, six months?” Cool? Interesting choice of words, Doogie.

“Now? No. I’m too high on morphine to feel any kind of emotion really. In the past six months though? Yes.”

“Did that have anything to do with your fall? Were you experiencing any suicidal thoughts?” For some reason his questions seemed gentle, like a friend opening up to another friend. It made me more honest.

“I have had suicidal thoughts, but it had nothing to do with my fall. I slipped, purely an accident. Prior to that I had been thinking about suicide or hurting myself, more like ideations than actually planning to do anything, I just wanted to stop feeling that way. But on the night, I was on a lot of drugs and alcohol and I just lost my balance.”

“Okay, good. Would you say you have a problem with alcohol or drugs?”

“Drugs? No. Alcohol, yeah, maybe. Don’t all New Zealanders?” I laughed.

“Haha, probably true. But would you say you use it as a way to self-medicate, to feel better?”

“Yeah, definitely.”

“Well, that’s something we can help you with if you want. We’ll leave some pamphlets with you and check up on you in a few days.”

“Okay, sure. Thanks.” They left the room and I lay there for a while. That was the second honest portrayal of something close to what I had been going through. The only other real person who knew it all was a prostitute in Melbourne. Paul was in good company.

Chapter 41

The next day I head to my therapist appointment, arriving at 11am, hobbling out of my special taxi. He greets me with a look of surprise.

“You look different today, Tim. Almost beaming.”

“Really? I don’t notice anything.”

“Anything different?”

“Not really. Well, I guess I started some writing last night about the accident and what’s happened since. Little bits and pieces. It’s cathartic I suppose.”

“That’s great! What have you been writing about?”

“Just some time in Auckland hospital when I first got there. It reminds me of how far I’ve actually come to be honest.”

“Well you have come a long way, Tim. Don’t let a few bumps in the road take you off track.”

“It’s just that I feel like I’ve gone backwards in a lot of ways. Even farther than before the accident. It makes me feel ashamed. I never want to be in that position again.”

“We won’t let that happen, Tim. We have a solid plan moving forward, you just have to focus on what kind of future you want for yourself.”

“Sometimes I don’t feel like I even deserve a future. There’s plenty of people who struggle just to survive, I didn’t even want that.”

“You have an illness. Just like if you had a cancer. You can’t blame yourself. Do you want to be depressed?”

“No.”

“Exactly. It’s not a choice. I’ve worked with a lot of people who are in similar situations to you, it’s not just you. It happens across all races, all genders. Each one of them have come through to see the other side, a more positive side.”

“How long does it take?”

“It depends on the work you put in. Are you prepared to work?”

“Yes. I’m scared, but yes.”

“Good. Then we’ll work together. Now, how did it go with your Mum and the medications?”

“It was fine. She doesn’t suspect anything. It’s been difficult with coming down on the meds though. I feel sick and shaky. Is that from the meds?”

“Could be. You’ve been on them a long time now. Your body will adjust. Try not to focus too much on that. Let’s set some goals instead. Have you been going to rehabilitation?”

“Not much recently. I haven’t had the will.”

“What’s changed?”

“Just depression. Drinking. Pills. You name it.”

“But you were doing so well for a period there. What helped then?”

“A drive to walk. I was sick and tired of lying in a bed. I had such a great need to move, to really work.”

“Tell me about that.” I begin telling him bits and pieces, scattered thoughts that pop into my head. I can’t get them out fast enough. “You sound excited. Would that be accurate?”

“Yeah, I guess so. It just takes me back. It makes me want for that time, that drive, again.”

“I want you to go home after this and write down these thoughts. Anything. There doesn’t have to be any logical pattern, just get it all down. Then let’s talk about it on Friday.”

“Okay, sounds good.” I head to my awaiting taxi, like a fine Lord of the Manor, on my way to my next therapy, this time physical. It was at Laura Fergusson Rehabilitation in Greenlane, a place I have gotten to know well over the previous few months.

TBC…