Groaning, I lowered myself carefully into the bath, taking heed not to get the hot water anywhere near my bandaged shoulder, then I soaped the new body wonderingly, surprised that it felt as if it belonged to me. Picking up the shampoo, I began to wash my blonde hair until a stinging sensation reminded me about Lauren’s head burns. Would I feel such discomfort if this was just a dream, I asked myself with a grimace? I felt so real. Surely this wasn’t simply some medicine-induced hallucination?
I rinsed my hair with great difficulty using a plastic container that Nurse Sally had given me. I had to tilt my head awkwardly to one side so the water wouldn’t run down onto the bandage. When I returned to the side ward, wearing one of Lauren’s clean nighties with a towel wrapped turban-like round my wet hair, I climbed back into bed and closed my eyes, exhausted.
Despite my tiredness, I knew I had to methodically process all the information I had if I wasn’t going to go stark raving mad. I knew I had been given painkilling drugs, but couldn’t believe they were strong enough to have caused me to conjure up a whole new identity for myself. There was no floaty haziness to what I was experiencing, it was just too real, too solid, and so I felt I must try to put these strange events in order.
Fact: I had been struck by the lightning at around two on Saturday afternoon. I didn’t yet know much about the details of Lauren’s strike except that it appeared to have been more violent than mine, and she seemed to be more badly injured than I was. We had both been unconscious for the remainder of Saturday and into Sunday morning. Lauren had suffered a cardiac arrest, but apparently I had not.
Lauren had woken up first, or rather I had woken up in her body. But she had slept again since then, and I was still here. I glanced at the newspaper Grant had brought in along with the photo album. It was Monday’s paper, with a piece about the royal family on the front page. I pushed it away bad-temperedly. If I was really here, then the obvious question had to be, where was Lauren now? I knew she wasn’t in my body, because I’d woken up there too, although if my suspicions were right, what appeared to be night here was day there, and vice versa.
My first inclination was that I should ask Dr Shakir about what might have happened. Perhaps this sort of thing had been documented before about victims of lightning strikes. I recalled reading an article once, about how a lightning-strike victim had tried to kill herself after being struck. She’d been reported as saying she couldn’t live with herself after the incident, that she’d felt differently about everything. She’d even been afraid to leave her own house.
I lay and chewed my lip pensively. Could she have experienced something similar to what I was going through now? Could she have come back into a stranger’s body?
On second thoughts, telling anyone about what was happening was probably not such a good idea. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my days locked in a lunatic asylum, that was for sure. I imagined myself trying to explain that I was trapped in the wrong body, and how the medical profession would react to such a confession.
Sitting up, I towel-dried my hair, shaking out the damp locks and turning to rummage in my locker for Lauren’s hairbrush. No, I thought as I stroked the brush carefully through my hair, I would have to be much subtler in my quest for an answer to my present predicament.
An hour later a porter came with a wheelchair and took me for a head MRI scan, and I’d not been back on the ward more than ten minutes when Dr Shakir himself came to see me. He perched on the side of the bed and asked how I was feeling.
‘I still feel rather…unsettled,’ I told him carefully.
He nodded, patting my hand in a fatherly fashion. ‘You have been through a great deal, Lauren,’ he said. ‘When part of your memories are lost, your identity seems lost with it. It’s quite understandable you should be feeling disorientated.’
‘Is it usual for patients to lose all their memories?’
He hesitated and I guessed he didn’t really want to confound me with the hard medical facts, but then he continued hesitantly, ‘Well, it’s more usual for victims of lightning strikes to suffer anterograde amnesia, losing memories of the incident and suffering problems with memory afterwards. In your case you seem to be experiencing retrograde amnesia, a loss of memories before the incident.’
I thought about what he said, but I still had more questions for him.
‘I think it would help if you could answer some questions I have been worrying about,’ I said carefully.
He nodded, smiling benignly at me.
‘When I suffered the cardiac arrest, how long was I “dead” for?’
He looked taken aback by the bluntness of my question, but answered anyway.
‘We were working on you for almost forty minutes from the time you came in to when we got a sinus rhythm going. I believe the ambulance crew had been doing CPR for at least twenty minutes before that.’
‘Is it unusual for someone to be “gone” for that long and have no serious after-effects?’
He smiled rather patronisingly before answering. ‘I don’t think you need to worry about that, Lauren. Apart from the memory loss, you seem to be recovering well.’
‘But is it unusual?’ I persisted, wanting desperately to know if this body should clinically be dead.
He shook his head. ‘People respond differently. I suppose, to be frank, I was a little concerned there may have been some brain damage after so long without oxygen to the brain, but as soon as you came round my doubts were allayed.’
‘When you were working on me,’ I continued, ‘did you contemplate giving up on me?’
Dr Shakir fidgeted uncomfortably and refused to meet my gaze. Instead of answering immediately he got up, lifted my notes from the foot of my bed and began leafing through them.
‘At one point,’ he said quietly. ‘I confess I thought we were struggling to resuscitate you in vain. I contemplated “calling it”. I thought you might be too badly injured to survive. But then I heard your children outside the emergency room crying for you, begging us to save their mother. One of the little boys was chanting, “Mummy, come back; Mummy, come back!” We shocked you one last time, and here you are.’
Indeed, I thought wryly. Here I was. But not Lauren. Not the children’s mother.
He put down the notes and smiled at me, less disconcerted now that I wasn’t asking awkward questions and forcing him to justify his actions, which, let’s face it, could have gone badly wrong if Lauren had woken up brain-damaged and needing permanent care. How would Grant and the children have coped then? I wondered. From what I had seen so far, Lauren was the strong one, the one who held that fragile family together. The knowledge transfixed me. Could I possibly step into her shoes? Was I strong enough? Did I even want to try?
I shook my head, realising that I was straying into padded-cell territory again. Thinking too deeply at this point wouldn’t help anyone, least of all me.
I decided to return to trying to understand the medical possibilities instead.
‘Dr Shakir?’ I asked, in what I perceived to be a deceptively innocent voice—Lauren’s voice, not mine, I had realised, as I was using her vocal cords and facial bone structure. ‘When you came to see me yesterday you’d looked up some stuff about lightning strikes?’
‘Yes,’ he said, his eyes narrowing with just a smidgen of suspicion.
‘Did you find anything about victims having new memories? Or people recollecting events they couldn’t account for?’