It
has now been a fortnight since I came out of my rather unexpected stay in
hospital. During that time I have been
subjected (is that the right word I wonder?) to enforced (yes it is!) idleness. Bodily idleness that is, where I have been
encouraged to sit in my armchair and rest.
Going up stairs has to be done three at a time and then a pause and then
the next three. The third floor of the
house has been deemed out of bounds and so has going outside. Though I did, but that was only to let the
doctor in, so I don’t think it counts as an official act of disobedience.
During this period I have also been wearing
‘pressure stockings’ where the impossibility of my getting the damn things on,
has been the daily task of Toni – after which he usually needs a sustain cup of
coffee to get him back to normal.
Also
during this period I have been injecting myself twice daily with Clexane –
which I suspect is just a fancy name for some form of rat poison that is being
used to thin my blood.
Today the stockings don’t have to be
worn. I can begin to walk about a little
more and I can start looking forward to a real walk to sit on a bench by the
sea – which I haven’t seen for a fortnight.
My diet has been reasonably
exemplary and, to be truthful, I am getting just a tiny bit stir-crazy.
Not that I have been staring blankly
at the wall during this period, I have been busy. Busy is a sedentary way.
During my time in hospital I was
never far from my trusty notebook in which, each day, I write thoughts banal
and halfway original in the hope that some of them might be the basis for a
poem in the future.
As I had never stayed in hospital
before, I reasoned that it had to be the stuff of some sort of writing and I
therefore wrote daily about what was happening and tried to sketch out my
feelings and observations.
Reading over my notes and responses,
the one thing that leaps out from the pages is not my fear about what was
happening to me, but rather the composition of the meals that the hospital
offered. Each lunch and dinner is
lovingly and compulsively detailed together with my evaluation, reflecting
perhaps a natural obsession for those caught up in the institution of healing!
Obviously, I do also comment on how
I was living and what was done to me: the blood tests, the scans, the daily
routines of blood pressure, temperature etc., the injections and drips, the
oxygen masks, the smocks, the toilets, the showers, the structure of the day,
the different people who came in and out of the ward. It was all new, and at the same time, from
past visits, from television shows, documentaries, friends’ explanations, and
general knowledge, quite old as well.
The key difference was that I was the patient rather than the observer;
the person things were happening to rather than the general landscape of
‘other’.
As I began to work through my
notebook I discovered some aspects that suggested poems at once, but there were
other areas of experience that seemed to be better suited to prose, so I worked
on the basis that what I was going to produce would be better suited to a
mixture rather than being a ‘pure’ chapbook of poetry. I also did some ‘drawings’/doodles while I
was in hospital and, if I ever find a way of getting them from my reMarkable electronic
tablet and into my computer I will be adding those to the mix!
The working title of the chapbook is
“A Point of Blue”, a reference to one of the completed poems based on the scrap
of sky that I could see from my bedside chair alongside bed 13.2 next to the
window in the ward, but I also like the ambiguity that the title holds as well. An uninspiring view
that ironically inspired me to write!
I have a draft of the book that is
almost ready: I have one more prose piece to write and get the ‘drawings’ in
place and it will be ready for publication.
I also have a photo of me resplendent in smock and oxygen mask that I
will consider for the dedication page perhaps!
Now to make publication a reality!
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