My Year Off Read Online Free

still drifting in and out of consciousness, was a kind of weird exhilaration.
Yes!
I had survived. I was not yet an ex-parrot. Lying naked under a pink blanket in the intensive care unit, wired up to the monitors, I was aware of being in the antechamber to the grave and even now, months later, I can still recall the eerie fascination of this experience and of having, by the greatest good fortune, returned to tell the tale. A sober assessment of my situation in the grim aftermath of what I was learning to call ‘my stroke’ soon tempered this mad euphoria. If I had known then what I soon came to discover about what the doctors were now referring to as ‘your stroke’, my relief might have been mixed with terror as well as gratitude.
    Next to cardiac disease and cancer, stroke is the most common cause of death in the Western world and, oddly, a word that in medical circles is rarely attached to either a definite or an indefinite article. This fell nounis also a term so commonly misapplied that, for very many people, it lacks a lethal connotation. Of those who survive the initial ‘insult’, about half will be left with permanent severe disability. The physical consequence of stroke is a horrifying catalogue of damage that includes personality changes, impaired sensation, paralysis, incontinence, visual or language problems, deafness, blindness, seizures, and even swallowing difficulties, the distressing manifestations of what the textbooks describe as ‘neurological deficits’. Approximately one third of those who suffer a stroke will die, often from a second or third subsequent assault on the neurological system.
    I did not die, of course — and I was never in any pain — but, physically speaking, I’d been poleaxed. My left leg was immobilized and my left arm hung from its socket like a dead rabbit; the left side of my face, which drooped badly for about a week, felt frozen, as if Mr Glynn had just given it a massive Novocaine injection. I could not stand upright; my speech was slurred; to cope with my incontinence, my penis was attached to a Convene, a condom-like device that drained my urine into a plastic bag; every few hours a team of three nurses would turn me over in bed, as if I was a slow-cooking roast. In place of pain, there was an hallucinatory sense of detachment, and I was also oppressed with an overwhelming fatigue. The smallest thing left me wanting to lie down and go to sleep; the muscles on my left side were so weak that to sit in a chair — which I wasn’t able to do, even with three nurses to help me, for some days — was exhausting. I was, besides, terribly confused about what had happened, confused and stunned, though unimpaired, intellectually: my memory seemed to be functioning just fine and I had no difficulty in recognizing people whocame to see me, though I noticed that it sometimes took me a few moments to recall their names. On the other hand, I still have no recollection of where University College Hospital actually is, or how I got there, though I can recall the room and the cramped, sultry high summer atmosphere.
    Of all the people who were so kind to me in those first hours, there was one nurse I came to think of as my guardian angel, a graduate trainee — I think — from Oxford with beautiful corn-coloured hair, a lovely smile and the most gentle manner of any nurse I’d experienced then or subsequently. ‘What’s your name?’ I mumbled through my frozen jaw, as she bent over my bed. ‘Whicker,’ replied the angel. Curious, I asked how she spelled that, and was told that ‘Wicce’ was a traditional Anglo-Saxon name, a tiny spark of English history which amid the bleeps and wires of twentieth-century medicine I found strangely comforting. After I was moved from University College Hospital I never saw Wicce St Clair Hawkins again, but for her sweetness towards me in those first few dreadful hours of consciousness in hospital, with the dawning recognition of profound