When my time in Baltimore was up and it was time to return to the UK, my brother and I flew back to be home for the Christmas period. I slept for the entire flight and this was in no way because we had boarded the flight with rum and Coke in order to avoid paying in-flight booze prices.
I needed to point out again that despite all of the things that I was experiencing, I still had the words from my private health appointment ringing in my ears and that this was "all in my head." I struggled to coordinate my fingers well enough to button up my jeans or take anything out of my pocket and needed to pull gloves on with my teeth, but this was just a phase and I needn’t be concerned. Yes, using a knife and fork was starting to get out of hand and resembled a scene from an infant school dining room, but if I could just get past this mental wall, I'd be fine.
The tiredness that I had experienced in the USA didn't improve upon getting back to the UK either. As a casual smoker of cannabis, I put this tiredness down to being under the influence and the fact that smoking alleviated some of my physical symptoms was simply a bonus. My alarm bells, which up until this point had ranged from low to medium, became deafening when I went to drive my car for the first time since getting back. I had to wear gloves as the engine vibrations from the car were driving my hands crazy and I was unable to change gear because I couldn’t grip the knob without my hand slipping. I went to visit a friend and we would regularly play console computer games, but the problem was, I couldn’t feel my fingers and had no idea whether I had pressed a button and couldn’t hold the controller properly. Hindsight is a useless tool and knowing what I know now, I'd have never driven in that condition. On my way home from this visit, I struggled to change gear with my left hand and had to stay in third as using my right to make all changes, whilst successful, was wholly inappropriate. This was to be my last journey as a driver of a manual car; it was the day before Christmas Eve.
For Christmas Eve, my annual visit to the pub was upon me and this year would bring about one of the most terrifying situations that I've been in. You can keep any of your near-death experiences to yourself because this was far worse.
After being in the pub for about an hour, the rather normal circumstance of needing to visit the lavatory was upon me. I rose from the table and managed to navigate my way to the target destination OK and without incident. It was once I got into the toilet that the terror started. I wasn't desperately in need of the toilet, but after being physically unable to undo the buttons on my jeans, terror kicked in and with terror, comes one of the body's natural responses. To pee.
I engaged in an unwinnable battle with the buttons of my jeans for what seemed like an age, all the while picturing the scene of walking through the crowded pub, sporting the latest Levi 501 'Has he just pissed himself?' jeans. I didn’t know what I was going to do and was on the verge of resigning myself to the fact that I would either have to let it go or have to ask somebody else for help. I was 25 years old and the prospect of asking a random stranger in the gents, “Excuse me, but could you please undo my trousers,” was not one that filled me with glee. Fortunately, I managed to secure a breakthrough and realised that the top button was all I needed and the rest could go hang. Using a combination of the knuckles of my left hand and my right wrist, I managed to get the top button undone. Bear in mind that this was not as simple as it sounds as whilst trying to perform this procedure, I was now doing the tap dance jig that sometimes accompanies the need to urinate. I hooked my thumbs into the side pockets, pulled down and the path to my salvation was laid out in the form of an accessible Armitage Shanks toilet.
Upon completion of my duties, I elected not to bother with any attempt to do up the top button and instead used the fact that my jumper could hide this and made my way back to the table. Excuses were made, best wishes were given and I arranged my exit from the pub and my lift home.
The rest of Christmas, that is allegedly earmarked as one to be jolly, was a washout. When a child receives a sellotape-sealed and carefully wrapped gift, they sometimes need help in getting their way through the paper in order to expose the present that is hidden within. I wasn’t able to open a single gift without assistance and there was something quite humbling and upsetting that I couldn’t perform this previously simple task. The loss of dexterity in my hands, increasing balance problems and the intense pain in my neck made it difficult to find a position that was in any way comfortable to be in. I spent Boxing Day in the A&E department of my local hospital to be told that I had a disc problem in my neck and that diazepam should sort me out until I saw a specialist.
The diagnostic test that led to this conclusion should have been followed by a visit from a counsellor or, at the very least, I should have asked if I needed to speak to a professional and show them on the teddy where the bad lady touched me. How was I to know that an exploratory phalange up the jacksie would help the doctor to know if my spine was damaged?
Following the advice of Dr Handsy, I made an appointment with my GP which I managed to get for after New Year, and the signs didn't look good when I asked her if she'd had a good Christmas. "Not really," she replied flatly and went through some cursory tests involving her trying to pull a piece of paper from between my fingers before agreeing to refer me to a neurologist after I shared the information that I had been given by Johns Hopkins Hospital. The fact that I could barely hold my neck up during the consultation due to the pain didn't make much difference either. When I asked what I could get for the pain, I was told that I didn't need strong painkillers for it because paracetamol and ibuprofen would do the trick. It did not and besides, cannabis seemed to be giving me relief from the pain and I was OK with that.
Things continued to deteriorate and I regularly fell over whilst inside the house and had to be helped to my feet. Any attempt to get an item from the fridge, for example, was met with a number of problems:
- Opening the door in the first place
- Assuming the door opening attempt was successful, taking anything out of the fridge wasn’t guaranteed.
- Whilst closing the door was easy, falling onto the floor and getting back up again, was not.
On January 12th, things took a turn as, after watching the hedonistic "Madagascar" on DVD, I went to stand up but the only problem was that my legs had other ideas. They collapsed from under me and this made me perform a rather ungraceful face-dive back into the chair. For love nor money, I couldn’t get up under my own steam and a trip back to the A&E department was the only course of action.
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