Читать книгу The World I Fell Out Of онлайн

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In my ward there were six beds and slowly I began to find out about the people around me. Next to me was Karen, who was the same age as me. She was a fall statistic. An innocuous tumble in her house had mysteriously paralysed her: only when she was X-rayed did she find out that she had undiagnosed arthritic deterioration in her neck which, in a stroke of appalling bad luck, had pierced her spinal column. Her injury was at a roughly similar level to mine, but I was the luckier: she had less movement in her arms than me and her fingers were permanently bent shut. If she envied me, it never showed. She never knew, either, how much I envied her calmness and realism: while I was gung-ho to fight my way back to total fitness through blood, sweat and tears, her ambitions were simply to be able to hold a mug, feed herself, and apply make-up. Guess who was the wiser?

With us in the room were two teenagers, one who had dived into the shallow end of a swimming pool on holiday, the other who had her back broken in a car accident. For months, lying listening to those kids learning their new realities, hearing them sobbing behind the thin curtains, or being taught how to catheterise themselves, or sitting their national school exams with an overwhelmed-looking adjudicator, was a profound lesson in how fortunate I was to have lived a lot of life before this happened. Later I shared a room with another little girl, and felt silent anger flare when Snapdragon, a senior nurse, insisted that her teddy bear was an infection control risk. Normally the bear would have had to go but, announced Snapdragon, glowing with the warmth of her own magnanimity, she’d make an exception as long he was kept wrapped up in a sealed plastic bag. Teddy sat there on the bedside cabinet, asphyxiated, head forced sideways, nose crushed against the plastic, pleading black button eyes, until the child went home.