\nNo, I’m not dead yet, just been preoccupied. A short recap: the operation that took place on the 22nd of December was succesful and I’ve been out of hospital since Christmas Day. Looking back my recuperation happened incredibly fast, but at the time it felt like an eternity, those few days in hospital. I now understand from firsthand experience what S. has said so often: that being in hospital is hellish, no matter how good the staff. You become just a cog in a huge machine and have to adapt to its routines, no matter how annoying. You can’t sleep properly, have to fit yourself to the times the nursing staff does their things and you constantly have to tell new people the same things. Awful. Understandable, but awful.\n<\/p>\n
\nSince then it’s gone up and down. The first week home I seemed to get better easily, my scars not bothering me much and my family being a great support, both emotionally and for more practical matters. But over the new year I got an infection, the wound reopend and I’ve spent most of last week being in pain everytime I coughed, sneezed or laughed. The worst part of it was the semifever I had, putting me in an altered state of consciousness where I couldn’t concentrate on anything more complex than daytime tv and worse, all sorts of background details became embodied with too much significance. It’s horrible to notice the awful background music on most Discovery documentaries..\n<\/p>\n
\nMeanwhile and more distressingly, S. hasn’t been doing too well either. After the operation and with her regular medication list slashed to the bone, she had a backlash that took her a week to recover from and then she ran into what the doctors think was a nasty side effect of one of the immunosuppressant drugs, which led to her having spent last week in intensive care, stuck with a breathing tube because she couldn’t breathe properly on her own. Fortunately, she has recuperated enough now that she can go back to a “normal” ward to recover properly. Somewhat of an intense time, as you can image.\n<\/p>\n
\nBut we’re still lucky. We’re both on the mend and within a couple of months or so we’ll both be as healthy or better as we were before the operation (it has to be better in S.’s case, otherwise it was all a bit pointless. Coincidently this weekend I’ve read two articles of people less lucky than us. Tony Judt, historian and political commentator, was diagnosed in 2008 with Lou Gehrig’s disease, which left him a quadriplegic. In his own words, he became “a bunch of dead muscles thinking<\/a>“:\n<\/p>\n \nThe disease ravaged Judt with astonishing speed. By December he had lost the use of his hands. By March he was in a wheelchair. By May he was wearing the “silly-looking facial tubing” as he puts it, because his diaphragm muscles were no longer strong enough to effect the bellows motion that induces breathing.\n<\/p>\n \nHe gives me a little display. “So I want to move my right arm but nothing happens,” he says, with the only visible sign a slight flexing of his right bicep. Then he tries to move his legs and I can see a tiny spasm in both thighs.\n<\/p>\n \n“The leg you will see twitching and that’s about it. That takes a huge amount of effort because from the body’s point of view it’s as if I’ve just kicked my leg up five times.”\n<\/p>\n \nThe suddenness of the catastrophe would leave many people paralysed not just physically but emotionally. Judt has responded differently. He has embarked on a fascinating, albeit involuntary, intellectual journey \u2013 a forced march of the mind.\n<\/p>\n \n“I was forced to think very hard about what it meant to be me, what it means to be a person who is only a brain. Pascal’s ‘thinking reed’ really does capture it, because I’m just a bunch of dead muscles thinking.”\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n