Читать книгу The World I Fell Out Of онлайн

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In the far corner of the room was a mysterious patient who never got up: she was ensconced in a vast, high, warm sand bed, the size of a car, which shifted and vibrated constantly to heal long-term pressure sores. The bed, with its noise and warmth, had a strong presence of its own. Its occupant, an older woman, did not interact with us. Apparently her spinal injury was not new, but she had been unable to look after her skin for some years, and had developed a sore so bad she had been brought back in. Plates. The warnings resonated.

As a rule, the higher the neck injury, the more one’s hands were impacted. So every morning at 11 a.m., after our previous joyous two hours on shower chairs, us high spinal cord injury patients – the young, the old, the sporty; you might call us an elite of misfortune – congregated in the manner of elderly tortoises around the hand therapy table in our wheelchairs. Most of us wore the same severely restrictive collars, making us even more tortoise-like, so we greeted each other without full eye contact, nodding and squinting at midair, and then taking our places, waiting for our pots of hand putty to arrive. It resembled an early learning centre, but we were far more placid than toddlers. Left in peace long enough we would start to snooze, our heads drooping onto our collars.