He looked pityingly at me, across our different worlds.
‘Stealing cars.’
I found him fascinating. He told me the best makes to steal and how easy it was. He said it had been fun for a while but then it got boring and he didn’t like being on the streets, so he would steal a car deliberately to get caught, knowing it meant a warm bed and hot food. I always feared he would take his own life when he left the unit, but in fact, with proper care in place for him and a new sense of being valued, he forged a career online.
Joker had about a year’s seniority on Kindle, another of my contemporaries, a brilliant schoolboy whose parents’ car had skidded on black ice. Kindle did his Highers, the Scottish equivalent of A levels, in the unit and went on to Oxbridge. He carried a tablet in his sweatshirt, and read compulsively, even on the standing frames. Both young men broke my heart: just boys at the start of their adult lives, making the best of the cards they had been dealt, from different ends of the pack.
And so we gathered every weekday morning round the white melamine tables, and while those with no movement in their hands were put into arm slings, those of us with semi-viable hands had to start on our own personal lumps of hard, blue putty. This was our warm-up kit – we must mould and squeeze and grip and shape the putty, flatten and separate it into tiny balls and roll it into long sausages, all the while strengthening and suppling our hands. Cars droned past on the arterial city road outside, and the wider world was turning, but in our bewildering new pre-school this was the only task which must concern us. Here I was, I reflected, former mistress of my universe, member of the chattering classes, mover, shaker and regularly responsible for editing a national newspaper, here I was struggling to cope with playdough. It required astounding effort. At the end of the exercise you returned the putty to a big round ball, which you pressed into the table with the heel of your hand. Then you sat and panted for five minutes, wiped out by the effort required.
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.
My frequent challenge was a game for children aged five plus using a pair of tweezers to lift tiny coloured balls of plastic, 1970s love beads, and place them on equally tiny pegs. With enough concentration, to my amazement, the thumb and middle finger of my right found the infinitesimal amount of squeeze needed to do this. I even managed a few with my left hand as well. I glowed with the achievement.
My distorted hands in leather pushing gloves. This is after the swelling went down. My fingers soon froze in this shape.
Frequently we had FES – functional electrical stimulation. Electrodes on our wrists, wired to a battery unit, sent pulses which made our fingers lift and straighten. And strengthen. The electric pulses replicated the nerves which had been destroyed. The effects were remarkable. Leslie fantasised about putting newly spinally injured people in all-over FES suits, to kick-start everything. She focused heavily on making my left wrist flex upwards. This, I was to learn, was critical to my future.
Oxbow the ecologist had been cycling to work when his front wheel hit a pothole and he broke his neck. He could hardly move anything; his elbows were supported in slings in hand therapy so that he could try and regain a scintilla of shoulder action and be able to work the joystick of a power wheelchair. Barnaby was an older man, a former ship’s officer, desperate only to learn to feed himself so he didn’t impose on his elderly wife. He had fallen at home. He would sit, his forearms in yet another kind of sling, waving with a spoon at a bowlful of apple segments. Occasionally he hooked one and got it as far as his mouth, and his face cracked open with satisfaction as he munched.
Stoical the businessman, who had slipped on ice crossing a supermarket car park and suffered cervical damage, had, like all of us, numb fingers. But his numbness was combined with painful hypersensitivity in his fingertips. Every single session he sat, like a man on a lifelong mission, methodically scouring away at them with gentle sandpaper, desensitising them. I envied him his calm.
Priceless was an older, educated woman, a tourist, who had fallen and damaged her neck after drinking a glass or three of wine. She could still walk and her injuries, compared to the rest of us, were about as bad as a summer cold, but she was oblivious to this. Her lack of self-awareness, common tact even, was breathtaking. Viewed through her eyes, her plight was monstrous – her holiday had been ruined and her elegant handwriting was affected. She demanded the hand therapists help her restore it; she complained loudly about the nurses on the ward who refused to help her wash and dress, the state of the food, and the fact she was in pain. She was one of the very few patients who didn’t either touch or amuse me; it took me several years to understand the truth that she embodied. Everyone’s handicap is relative. We are all entitled to our own perspective on how badly we are injured. What seemed trivial to some was life-changing to others, and vice versa. The ownership of that grief belonged entirely to her; that was her right. Its impact upon her was not for others to judge. At the time, though, I just wanted to tell her to open her eyes and look around at the rest of us. And if I’m honest, I still experience a similar stir of exasperation when I am corralled by some old dear who wants to tell me how bad her sciatica is. I have learnt to smile and nod, detach myself from judgement.
After a couple of weeks, the intensive hand therapy began to reap rewards. My left hand became less stone-like, and the thumb and fingers were starting to wiggle. The wrist grew strong enough to prevent it flopping. My right hand was definitely more powerful and I could grasp an old-fashioned phone receiver, something I couldn’t have done a fortnight ago. Dave and I managed our first telephone conversation, home to hospital, which made both our hearts sing. Eventually, in hand therapy, I even managed to open an envelope, a major victory. To do this, I had learnt how to use my teeth, my invaluable third hand from now.
Afternoon gym was also becoming less unfamiliar. I was starting to recognise faces and understand the rhythm of therapy. The gym was two large spaces linked by a glass divide, and equipped with about ten pale blue physiotherapy plinths, which raised and lowered electronically. To a layman’s eyes, the landscape was hard to interpret, more like a medieval torture chamber than anything. There were standing frames and tilt tables beribboned with heavy-duty Velcro straps to bring paralysed people upright, jutting pulleys for carrying arm and leg slings, hooks hanging from mesh cages suspended over more plinths, two sets of parallel bars, a conveyor-belted machine with robot legs and a harness suspended over it, and various arm and chest weight machines. Plus, splendidly, like a piece of modern art, half a car – a Fiat cut off in front of the windscreen, which was attached nose-in to the glass partition. That was for the future, for those of us who were able. We could learn to transfer into driver or passenger seats, practising for a life outside.
Everywhere I looked, I saw devices I could not understand but was desperate