Restoration needed

‘Do you have any allergies?’ I was asked.

‘No’.

‘Are you taking any regular medication?’

‘No’.

‘No?’

‘No’.

As for my name and date of birth, I was asked to repeat them three times as I passed from ward to holding bay and then to theatre. I awoke wanting to vomit but my stomach was empty. At the sight of my right hand, I re-closed my eyes and drifted back into a morphine-induced dream.

‘There’s a spider in my eye’, I said to my daughter, as I drifted in and out of sleep.

She remained at my side until I regained my senses and, when I did, she listened patiently as I began to query the nurse about what had happened in those missing hours. How long was the operation? At what time did I come out of theatre? How long was I in the recovery room? The nurse, who had come to check my oxygen levels, frowned and scurried off to find out the answers.

And so began the most painful weeks of my hitherto, relatively pain-free life. Naively, I had agreed to the removal of a small bone in my right wrist to relieve arthritis but nerve damage had left my thumb sore and the plaster cast was digging into my skin. I felt manacled with spiked barbs. Once home, I lay with my arm resting on a pillow. This was my ‘middle passage’. Could I survive it? What fate awaited me at the end of the journey? Would I turn from a healthy 70 something into a dependent 95 year old? It coincided with the hottest days of the year and the elastic stockings, worn to prevent a DVT, had caused a reaction. I was allergic after all; allergic to rubber and I had the raised yellow blisters of hives as witness. The stockings had to go and I had to start walking.

Gone was my daily routine of fast-track walking round the park. Now, I walked slowly, guardedly, afraid of falling. In the relative cool of early morning and in the late afternoon, I wandered about observing things and there was plenty of time to stop and talk. Balfour Beatty had been allocated the job of renovating a former school quite close to my home. Yellow-jacketed men were moving about and one was digging post-holes for a screen to encircle the whole site. His work progressed slowly, so we had exchanged greetings several times before I announced,

‘There is a forlorn and neglected chair, left outside in the rain. It should be rescued’.

Since this was quite a departure from ‘Lovely day, how are you doing?’ he was, at first, nonplussed. However, his boss appeared and I was obliged to repeat.

‘There is a nice looking chair behind one of the classrooms. It is outside and exposed to the elements. It might be broken but if not, you should bring it in’.

‘Well, everything is going on the skip’, he replied. ‘Do you want it?’

It was my turn to be taken aback. If all is going on the skip, why not? I thought, vaguely aware that I hadn’t thought this through.

‘Come back in ten minutes’, the boss suggested.

I didn’t; I had walked enough but a few days later, I went that way again. The chair, still visible, was where I had first seen it. Must be broken, I thought. By this time, the wooden posts were cemented in and asbestos-coloured sheets were being attached. The site was becoming a grey fortress but the boss and others were outside the main gate.

‘Hello’, he said. ‘I checked the chair and it is good’.

‘But still outside’, I replied cheekily.

‘I will go and get it for you. Where are you going? How long will you be?’

‘I am going to LIDL to buy just two things’.

At which they all burst out laughing.

‘Since when has a woman gone to the shop to buy just two things?’

‘I will be back soon’, I protested.

Tomatoes and avocadoes didn’t make my bag heavy. I slung it from the elbow of my right hand. This meant my left hand was free to grabble with the chair, though I was already having misgivings. When I returned, a Travis Perkins lorry was unloading, so I slipped past as invisibly as I could.

A few days later, en-route to buy those delicious, purple tomatoes from LIDL, I saw that the grey screen was being painted purple. Yes, purple. Good Heavens! I thought, why paint and why purple? He was supervising the colour-wash and wanted to know where I had been.

‘I came looking for you’, he said. ‘I brought the chair, knocked on a few doors and asked if they knew a lady with a broken arm, but no-one did’.

I had to laugh. This was London; most of my neighbours were perfect strangers and I hadn’t told anyone that I was going into hospital. At the same time, I was touched. This was unexpected kindness. I proceeded to LIDL to purchase nuts and granola and then, despite my protest, he carried the chair and walked with me back home. Perhaps it is the Yorkshire in me that causes my conversations to be punctuated by the sharp and the staccato. As he, the chair and I progressed slowly along in the sunshine, I found myself asking,

‘Do you know from which African country your ancestors were taken?’

Research into the slave trade has been my interest for quite a while and forms the backdrop to a story that still simmers on the back-burner. He didn’t know. However, he told me about his slave grandmother, who lived to be 100 and I told him about the Slave Trade Database, available on the internet, which lists all the ships that carried slaves from their particular point of embarkation to their subsequent destination in America or the West Indies. Thus, after a short and pleasant walk, I became the owner of scuffed and well-used Ercol dining chair, delivered by a middle-aged Jamaican with wise and kindly eyes. Balfour Beatty should be proud.

Walking was a good distraction but it only took up a small part of every day. The normal opiate of day-time television was never going to help, except that the Commonwealth Games made a timely intervention. I watched the men’s squash in amazement. The gold medal winner had come through the foggy haze of an anaesthetic just five weeks previously. The woman who came second in the 800 metres had been vomiting the night before. I knew something of those feelings and I marvelled. The first-leg runner in the Jamaican men’s relay heat had suffered a muscle tear but kept on running so his team could qualify (in so doing, he gave the rest of us the joy of watching the ‘Man Himself’ eventually gaining gold in his inimitable style). A muscle tear is like a knife stab that shocks the whole body, we were told authoritatively by Michael Johnson. I knew that too. Every so often, I would get a series of sweeping stabbing pains, like childbirth contractions, flowing down my arm. What were they? What was wrong? The neurons in my brain jangled cyclically with pessimism. I hacked at my plaster shackle with toe-nail clippers and pulled off the bandaging as far as I could.

Seventeen days after the operation, I went back to the hospital for a wound check.

‘Hello’, my surgeon beamed. ‘How are you?’

‘Miserable! Miserable! Miserable! And don’t touch my thumb, it hurts too much!

He didn’t stop smiling but calmly cut through the bandages, which secured the half plaster, to expose the dressing. It was bigger than I had expected. He pulled it off in a firm and rapid manner, I dared not look.

‘Can I see now?’ I asked, shaking inside.

His voice was firm and confident, so I looked.

How white, how thin, how crinkled it was. The dressing had been tight, too tight, but the wound had healed leaving three black dots defining the stitch sites.

‘We will put on another, lighter plaster this time and you can choose the colour’.

‘Oh! Purple then’, I declared euphorically.

PURPLE! Where had that come from? Much to my surprise, purple it was. I had no idea that fibre-glass casts came in rainbow colours. Later that afternoon, I walked home from King’s feeling infinitely better. I had twenty-eight days before final freedom, before I got my right arm back. It would be challenging but optimism was flowing and I felt that I could make it.

Having only one working hand imposes a variety of problems, finger nails, for example. I visited the local nail parlour, a new experience, but the Chinese proprietor had very little English. My nails were cut and manicured in solemn silence. Colour would be a crazy departure from the norm, I thought, and lime-green would go well with the purple. Despite a broad range of colours, there was no lime-green. Yellow then, I decided, but in the green spectrum. She applied the toxic yellow twice and it turned out to be that ‘in-your-face’ fluorescent yellow of building worker’s jackets. My limb had become very Balfour Beatty.

The manicurist broke her silence: ‘You, no pay’… ‘Next time’… There was no arguing with that.

Optimism is a very fragile thing. It soars and sweeps, it flits and fades. So when the spiky, purple cast began to push its barbs through the underlying stockinet, it felt like a sleeve of wire-wool. I took my toe clippers and eyed up the purple bands. However, it would have been a monumental task for my aching left hand, so I gave up the idea of combat and sunk into despair again.

The world news was suitably grim; fighting in Gaza between implacable enemies and the Grim Reaper stalking through West Africa and, maybe, through the rest of the world. I wasn’t in the mood to re-visit the horrors of the First World War but as the hour approached when Britain entered the war, one hundred years ago, I thought of my grandmother. She lost her brother and his body was not returned. Her husband survived but was a changed man. My abiding memory comes from the day when my grandfather eventually died. I remained at home with Grandma while my parents went to the funeral. I was ten and her only grandchild. She cried, saying over and over, ‘I have lost my right arm’. I only barely understood the metaphor and I sat by her side in shocked silence feeling wholly inadequate.

Now, I do understand. My husband has been my metaphorical right arm for the past several weeks. He has admirably cooked, washed, shopped and put up with my despair. Getting through the pain and the loss of control has been unexpectedly hard. I have failed. I would never have survived the trenches or the telegrams of the Great War. I could never have been a great athlete and I certainly couldn’t have lived in a war zone.

It was Karen Blixen who said, ‘If you have a tragedy, then write about it’. When I write/type, with my left hand, the scratching ceases, the throbbing thumb becomes still. I don’t know if my right hand will ever be normal again. I don’t know if I will be able to renovate property as I have done in the past. I don’t know if I will have any further outlet for creativity but should the outcome be positive, then I know that, first up, is the small matter of a certain chair, which, like me, still remains in need of restoration.