My Year Off by Robert McCrum Read Free Book Online Page B

French or German, you will have no doubt that he follows your meaning. The trouble is that however hard you try you will not be able to understand a single word he is saying … It is more than five years since my husband, a Renaissance historian, lost his language following a stroke.’
    Lying in the National Hospital, of course, I was ignorant of these statistics and these kinds of affliction, but I could not escape the wholly unscientific sensation that while some irrepressible quirk in my bloodline had dumped me in this predicament, at the same time some peculiar longevity-gene had saved me from its direst outcome.

[5]
My New Life
1–5 August
    We defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.
    William Shakespeare,
Hamlet
, Act V, scene ii
    Of all my conscious moments at the National Hospital, the nights were the worst. Night is when the patient imagines dying. It was at these moments that I was most acutely conscious of the stark truth that everyone faces in hospital: no amount of loving care and attention (and I was greatly blessed in this) can disguise the fact that a dramatic illness emphasizes our solitude and isolation. We came into the world alone and, no matter what prudent provision we make for the future, we shall leave it alone. As Pozzo says in
Waiting For Godot
, ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.’ If I had a headache at night — like the harbinger of the stroke itself — my first thought was: I’ll be dead in the morning; I’ll never see Sarah again.
    In fact, she would appear at my bedside, with unfailing good humour and a cheery, clarion ‘Good morning!’ at about eight o’clock, immediately after the hospital breakfast (coffee, a choice of sausage or bacon, juice, and cold toast, accompanied inevitably by a tiny plastic cup of Lactulose, a sickly sweet laxative), bringing fresh clothes, the day’s post and the British newspapers, her addiction. Then I would be wheeled off by one of the nurses to have a bath. This was a laborious and exhausting process during which I tried to forget that the nurses were literally manhandling me, moving me in and out of a wheelchair specially designed for use in the bathroom, levering me into the bath and then washing me all over. There’s no place for privacy in hospital.
    Sarah’s presence, and her optimism, soon chased away the demons of the night, and we quickly evolved a visiting routine in which her role was to control the flow of visitors and quiz the doctors about my progress and my likely recovery. As an American, Sarah was used to a level of information and medical advice that British doctors, who seem to cherish the mystery of their profession, still find slightly unnerving.
    My doctor, Andrew Lees, an elegant, soft-spoken neurologist of great natural warmth and wisdom, advised me to think of the bleed in my head as a kind of bruise; over time the scavenging macrophage cells would literally eat up the damage to the cerebral tissue, leaving that part of my brain permanently disabled. I could see for myself what he was talking about. An early MRI scan located the bleed, a menacing black blot, deep in the brain at what the medical report said was ‘the proximal right middle cerebral artery at its trifurcation’. Over time, the sinister stain would shrink and fade, but, despite this brilliant pictorial representation, I am, evennow, two years later, no nearer an absolutely reliable explanation of why that bleed occurred in the first place.
    It is the special peculiarity of the affliction called ‘stroke’ that its dynamics remain mysterious. The absence of an explanation for such a thunderbolt enhances the sense the stroke-sufferer has of being a victim of