Back From Beyond (Back Injuries)

Member Name: repairmanjack

Product:	Back Injuries
Date:	05/10/02 (257 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Of the condition... none, Of the op... maybe an exorcism of demons for yours truly

Disadvantages: Probably going to be attacked as "not an op", A life is a terrible thing to waste

Now this is something I've been wrestling with for a while. How to write about something that was the biggest part of my life for five long years. That's how long it took me to come to terms with my condition, Chronic Disc Generation Disease, and its most terrible symptom: unable to sit up or walk for eighteen months... learning to walk for the following three and a half years.

I began to write about this a while ago, a factual catalogue of some very bitter experiences... and I found I couldn't do it. Too close to the bone. What I did discover, over time, was a way of writing around it. To put fact into a fictionalised framework. Keep the facts, but write about them from another's angle. Change the name of the victim, too.

Not sure how this is going to be accepted, but I've decided to publish the following op in a narrative voice, instead of my usual reportage. If you don't like it, fine... I'm not really expecting you to. If the subject matter offends, then, once again, my apologies.

The tale of my woe, below, becomes the story of Jack Hall. It was the most honest way I could do it.

Rate as you like, and, as always, comments appreciated.

Regards, Jason.

***

Imagine losing everything. Imagine you’re lying on a bed and you can’t get up, and right above your head, just out of reach, is a shelf with your whole life on it. You can’t get up and get it; wrap yourself up in it like a security blanket, much as you‘d like to. You can’t call anyone to come and fetch it down for you ‘cause there’s no-one to call. The sick thing is, you can still see it. Just. It hangs over the edge of the shelf, like its threatening to tip itself off and land back in your lap. But of course it doesn’t. Your life doesn’t exist to you anymore. You can see it, you can smell it when you try real hard, and you‘ll always remember it. But you canR
17;t reach it. Its a museum piece and the ropes are up. Ancient history. Do not handle the exhibit.

Welcome to the bottom of the heap.

Not nice down here, is it? You can’t see very far, the air doesn’t taste all that sweet. I fell off my perch a year ago. It was nice up there - oh, sure, it wasn’t too far to fall - but I had a good foothold on a job I liked doing, a car, house, I was three steps shy of getting engaged. I liked it. Might have been a little dull for some, but I like dull - or at least, I used to. Dull has taken on a whole new meaning in the past few months.

Take today. Physiotherapy session number eight-hundred and three, or whatever we’re up to now. I run through these party games like there’s a point to it all. Everyday the same. I come in the same time, I go out the same time, I speak to the same people. I see the same miserable faces, and I feel the same pain. Like the song goes: its all just a case of his-tor-ey repeating. Just me and a large-chested Asian woman I suspect is Joseph Mengler in disguise.

Left hand, right leg.

Boy, those acts of God really stick it in and break it off, don’t they? One minute you’re in a car bound for a club, the next minute you’re on a gurney in an ambulance holding a one-way ticket to Palookaville. I say minute, figuratively of course. They told me I was in the car forty-five before help came. Just me hanging by my collarbone next to a piece of hamburger that used to look like my friend Will.

Right hand, left leg.

Usual routine: sit me on the bike and bugger off for a coffee. But they don’t come back. Like everything else they vanish to that little shelf above the bed you can’t reach and you can’t fetch anything down from. Well the routine’s as natural to me as breathing now, so these days I just hop off the bike, do my stretches (sometimes they’re just an excus
e for me to lie down on the job, but that’s between you and me). Then I wander over here to the wall-bars. Just me and the old Jacob’s ladder. You can hear ‘em out back, the physiotherapists. Talking about what videos they rented over the weekend, who’s got a date, who wants one. Last week they let one arthritic old boy tumble off an exercise bike while they were fighting over the last of the biscuits. If ever a group of people got money under false pretences its the physios in this place claiming an honest day’s wage.

Ah, Christ! What do they wipe these things down with grease or somethin‘?

And to think these are the party years! Two years into my twenties, I’m supposed to be invincible, right? If I’m gonna drop down dead its supposed to be in a nightclub, not on the way to the damn place. Chewin’ down “E”s like they’re Smarties, with my pals. You’re supposed to do all the stupid drug stuff, walk around in a daze until you hit twenty-five, then wake up as a responsible adult wondering where the last five years have gone, and if there’s any secret ways to reclaim them.

But me? Oh, no. They’ve had me on drugs so messed up I couldn’t take a dump for twenty-days straight. And let me tell you now, when that bough breaks you’re stuck up the tree all day. It was night-time before I came out of the bog, and I only went back in to flush the rest of them tablets out to sea. Of course, if I’d been thinking right I could have sold them to Jimmy Clarke, the guy who lives downstairs from me. He’ll throw anything down his neck on a Saturday night out. Mind you, his arse doesn’t need to get any tighter.

“Left leg, Mr Hall.” Boy, I can’t get used to being “Mr Hall”. I hear “mister” and I turn ‘round thinking my old man’s walked into the room. Heather always calls me &
#8220;mister” now. I was having a bad one some months ago and snapped because she kept mispronouncing my name. Why is it foreigners have such a problem with “J”s, anyway? Seems like the further south or east you go the more phlegm you’re gonna be wearing when someone hollers your name. Anyway, for about the first couple months of the treatment, Heather kept calling me “Dack Hall“. Always Dack Hall, too, never just “Dack” - and she had a knack of making it sound like an insult, which didn’t help my mood much.

Never did like Jack anyway. Little too common for me. Too working class, salt of the earth, boy. Working class? There’s a joke. I ain’t even that now, and there’s people keen to rub it in. You know what they call people like me now? I mean the official name for us, not the clever little bites of abuse folk like to spit at one another. The government refer to us as “underclass”.

I mean: how insulting is that? What? “Work-shy scum” considered not politically correct enough anymore? Underclass? Why not just brand us all with zeroes and march us into the shower stalls, you bastards!

Oh, I’m sorry, was I raving? Side-effect of the medication. Actually, that’s not quite true, but its nice to know you’re considered blameless and irresponsible just because you’ve got a prescription these days. You want someone killed? I guarantee I could get away with it with a note from my doctor.

Ah, yes: doctors. Boy, there’s a portrait of competence. You know they misread my x-rays three times before deciding I hadn’t broke my back. I crushed two discs down in the lumbar region, that’s what they realised once they’d got hold of a guy who didn’t need to wear bottle-bottom horn-rims. Well, that and I have a transitional vertebrae and a spina-bifada occulta in the left side of the sacrum if you
want to get technical. If you’re sympathetic I guess its because all medical words sound like they’re supposed to be depressing, not because you know what the hell I just said. Be honest, I’ve been looking at the charts and walking ‘round - when I can - like Frankenstein and I still can’t get anyone to tell me what it all means.

My surgeon’s a real prince. His wife was killed in a car accident about fifteen years ago, and he grew into the biggest arsehole you’ll ever want to meet. He hates people like me, and that’s no lie. Despises us. I don’t know whether its because we survived and his old lady didn’t, or whether we have the nerve to complain about things like chronic pain or shout that we sometimes wish we were dead. They say self-pity’s only an ugly thing in other people. We fell out royally after I refused to let him fuse the base of my spine together. Twenty percent change of success, right? Only if it fails you’re running around on wheels for the rest of your life. No second chances. You know what his exact words were: “Well, we’ll try the procedure and see what happens”. In a flying pig’s eye we will! Sorry pal, but I like a little more science in my science if its all the same to you. I guess I took him away from the golf-course for too long because he practically beat me into submission with a bad mood that day. It was after that that a nurse explained about his wife and all, like that was supposed to make it all right. I know they say laughter is supposed to be the best medicine, but I didn’t realise it meant ‘cause all the doctors in the country aren’t worth a pound of rat-droppings. I mean, honestly.

And you want to know what really pisses me off about this? I used to be the fittest guy out of anyone I ever knew. Used to run two miles a night: now it takes me a night to walk two hundred yards. Used to be a karate blac
k-belt, can you believe that? These hands and feet of mine used to be able to separate branches from tree-trunks; split bricks in two. I was tough, built. Hell, you should’ve the dent my forehead put in the dash of the Fiesta. There’s an advert for buying British.

Mentioned I was thinking of getting engaged one day, didn’t I? That’s out the window. Sarah didn’t exactly hang around when she heard the good news about me. I guess she figured she didn’t fancy tending a vegetable patch for the rest of her life. We’d only been going out eighteen months before the accident. It ain’t long, I’ll give you that, but when you find someone these days you want to do your best to hang on to them. Its hard now, man. Hell, harder still for some of us. I don’t think she waited more than two weeks before telling me we were over. Well, “telling me“, is a polite way of describing it. I got “Dear John”-ed in a text message on my mobile. Two-hundred squat, black sarcastic characters on an inch wide screen telling me she needed “personal space”. A nurse even had to wheel me out the front doors of the hospital ‘cause you can’t put a phone on in the wards. I wouldn’t have minded, but it was only three months short of my birthday. I mean, how cold-hearted is that?

Left hand, right - ow! - leg.

I heard stories about my friend Will, in the weeks after the accident. People said we hit that tree so hard that his head was off when the ambulance-men found us. Found it in the back seat, or a quarter-mile away depending on who you ask. Well, no-one asks me, I’ll tell you that. Truth is, I wish his head had been off. I mean, obviously I wish he was never in the car, but I mean more than that, too. His head stayed in that same spot it was supposed to - his neck was broke, sure, but it didn’t break off - and he just calmly sat next to me, stupid g
rin on his face, ‘cause the smash had pushed his jaw round funny, waiting with me for help to arrive.

Tell you one thing though, and this I can’t figure. They never did find Will’s jacket. I swear he was wearing it when we set off and I swear they had to cut the seatbelt to drag his body out the window - but something in or around that accident stole his clothes and his wallet before help arrived. Its that that keeps me awake more than anything else these days. Well... that mostly.

Where are you Heather?

I started the hydrotherapy - that’s what the “physically disadvantaged” have to call swimming these days - about a month ago. Get this: I explain to my genius therapist that I’d been doing the swimming exercises in a leisure-centre pool (cuts don’t allow for a private one) fifteen miles out from my home town. She says: “What, Mr Hall? You swam fifteen miles today!” I’m telling you: any schmuck with four limbs and a double-digit IQ can get a job in this department.

My first day here, that was a peach. You know how they give a dolly to a kid and say “Can you show me where your uncle touched you”? Well they’ve got something like that for the cripples too. Its an outline of a human body, front and back on a piece of A4. They hand you a pencil and say, “Can you draw on here where you’re getting the pain?” I said: “Lady, I’m getting pain pretty much everywhere”. She said, “No, you have to be more specific than that.” So I coloured the damn thing in.

The MRI scan - there’s a fun way to spend a Wednesday. Like being buried alive and having the gravediggers bang the shovels on the lid of the coffin. They tell you to bring in a favourite CD to listen to because the noise is that loud. Thing is, the stereo-system they got is so old it doesn’t sound like your album anyway, and they
have to play it so loud to drown the noise it causes you as much pain as the accident. Jesus, what those headphones did to my Stereophonics CD: I’ve heard cats drown with more harmony than that. And you can’t move while you‘re in there, did I tell you that? An inch, or they have to do it all over again.
Right hand, left leg.

Left hand, right leg.

I was watching an old movie on Four last night. It was that old that Brando still looked slim in it. Black and white. Something about a waterfront. Anyway, there’s this line in it, see, Brando speaks it to some guy playing his brother: “I coulda had class; I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody; instead of the bum which is what I am.” I think I might have laughed and cried over that line. That’s it, you see. That’s me in a nutshell. Will used to have a saying to describe things when they got bad: He’d say, “tits up in a ditch”. Always made me laugh when he said it. Now I reckon they oughta have put it on his gravestone.

Right hand, left leg.

Rod Steiger. It was Rod Steiger playing the brother.

Want to know what the biggest laugh I had this week was? It was over a tin of beans. Tuesday morning I’m popping open a can to do some lunch with, I upend it into a bowl... and there’s not a single frigging bean in it. Swear to God, empty. Nice to know God can dump on you in little ways too, isn’t it? Hell, I nearly broke a rib laughing over that. Laughed tears into my eyes for the first time since I can remember. If that ain’t the best analogy of my life I’ve ever heard, I don’t know what is. Jack Hall’s life is an empty tin of beans. No substance, just sauce.

Its in moments like that you know if you’re going to be okay or not. If you can laugh at it, you’ll be fine. If you can’t stop laughing at it...well, they got drugs to so
rt that out too.

I still hear from Will, you know. No, I’m not losing my mind right along with my body. Thing is, he’s in every one of my favourite songs, for a start. It was him that turned me onto the Indie scene in the first place. Him that got me Kelly Jones autograph that time at the festival. All our old haunts are exactly that: our old haunts. I’ve known Will for as long as I’ve known people. Born in the same hospital, just a week apart. Our mothers were childhood friends, only Shirley, his mother, moved to marry and didn’t come back to North Walsham for eight years. Ended up three doors down from my mum and dad, by coincidence, so we were always supposed to be pals. Least, that’s what we said. Its usually the wall-bars that get me thinking of him, when I get to thinking of him in here. Takes me back to primary-school playground. We had this knackered old climbing frame in the front of the schoolyard; looked like it was cobbled together from old crashed spitfires, or something.

Christ, my arms ache! How come there’s fifteen wall-bars between the floor and ceiling of this place but there’s only three steps to get to heaven, huh, Will?
We used to hang off that rusty piece of garbage, just by our arms, and have contests to see who could hold on the longest. Will was always stronger than me as a kid, and I was always a little heavier, so it was pretty uneven. But Will was a good-guy, better than I would have been. Sometimes he’d pretend to slip, lose his grip or something, and then he’d run off to do his forfeit.

Sometimes I’ll catch myself doing it up here. I’ll step back off the lower rungs and just hang for a while. Sometimes Heather sticks her head out the door to make sure I’m not lying in a heap at the bottom of the thing, or she’ll shout some attempt at English at me that sounds like, “Okey-cokey, Mr Hall!” But its when she
doesn’t come back I realise I’m not alone. I feel that extra weight roundabout the tenth rung, as Will grabs a hold and starts trying to win me a forfeit.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand its someone who doesn’t know when to quit. Give it up, bud. You ain’t here anymore, don’t you know that? When you’re dead, you’re frigging dead.
How do you like it, Will, you never have said? Do you get to thinking about it much when you’re sitting on your cloud? Clear road, clear night, and a clear head. Never even touched a drop on account of your diabetes, did you? Poor sod didn’t know what he was missing. See all those cheery Christmas drink-driving campaigns now starting up on TV? Well drinking saved my life that night. If I wasn’t pissed it might have been me in the driver’s seat, and old Will on the wall-bars here. And you know what? Sometimes I think that would be better. Although I’m not sure for which of us.

Left hand, right leg, touch the ceiling and head for home.

Hell, you can drink and drive; just make sure you don’t have any ice with it.

That was a year ago. I came past the tree about two months back. Not by choice, I promise you. We ended up being diverted - ‘cause of another accident, would you believe - so we had to take the only other route to the hospital. The tree’s doing well. I don’t know why, but I kinda assumed someone would have done the decent thing and taken a bloody great axe to it. Still, if we couldn’t fell it with a car, I figure no-one wants to make that kind of effort manually. The bark’s pretty much grown back on it and the grass around its covered up our tracks. But I guess that’s the way of all things, isn’t it? They grow, they heal, they grow back. Even I’m getting better, I guess. Last month I started playing guitar again for the first time - now I can mo
ve all my fingers again. Simple chords, Dylan numbers mostly, though I’ll probably never get back good enough to finger-pick solos. But we grow, we heal. We’ll see.

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