Читать книгу The World I Fell Out Of онлайн

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My hands were more damaged than I liked to admit. Both were very numb. The left, in the beginning, badly swollen, flopped heavy and useless on the end of my wrist. I clocked myself in the face with it several times. My right, although fairly normal-looking, with a relative range of movement, had almost no power at all. My grip was gone. But the hand therapists, positive, cheery people, kept at us. The nicest times were when they took our hands and smoothed and massaged them within their own, so warm and active and normal. Leslie the senior therapist would take my hands, grotesquely white and crusty with dead skin, and soak them in a basin of warm water for ten minutes, and then scour off vast amounts of lizard-like scales with a coarse NHS towel. The result was extraordinary – the palms and the fingers felt liberated and free to move again. Then there were more tasks to fulfil: Connect4 to complete, tiny plastic cones to be lifted onto other cones; hoops to be taken off one peg and placed upon another. One fiendish challenge was a tall wooden stick, a tree with pegs instead of branches, upon which we were to hook discs with corresponding peg-sized holes – the sort of thing a bright three-year-old would manage in seconds. Actually, a two-year-old. First we had to reach up and hang the pegs on the top branches. Then, try and lift them off. Trying to balance my torso, extend my arms above my shoulders and grip, simultaneously, took me to my physical limits. If I managed, I was left exhausted but ridiculously pleased with myself. I saw the same sense of elation on the faces of my fellow patients. This was like climbing Everest for us.