The frustration I feel…
I’ve never felt so impotent, so useless.
Read: Colby is a sack of bones.
Useless bones, broken bones - bones that don’t fit any more. Some of my bones have disappeared. Some were surgically removed, some were ripped from me in the violence that turned me into this vacant pile of undead flesh that can never scream again.
I wonder what happened to my lower legs.
I don’t mean this as a question to explain why the appendages were no longer attached to the rest of my body - I know what caused that. I know why I am a double amputee - I want to know what happened to them after they were removed from their host.
Where are my legs?
The left one was torn off by the destructive power of shredded metal and heat…that much I do know. I vaguely remember the agony and incredulity of this in some dark recess of my mind. This is a place that harbours all manner of real and imagined horrors - just lately the real ones have been shocking the hell out of me. And, in my current state, it’s the only place I have been able to visit to escape the reality of my predicament.
My right leg was so badly messed up that amputation in the hospital was the only option - even I could have told the doctors that, when I saw the mangled meat that used to be my legs.
So? Where are they?
If I had a gall stone removed, they’d give it to me in a little jar as a keepsake of the evolving rock that had grown within me over time. But I have no such souvenir of my severed legs.
No toe on a key ring.
No metatarsal bottle opener.
No chopsticks buffed out of my fibulae.
I would have loved a fridge magnet made out of a fragment of patella forever encased in amber, stuck onto a magnet and then placed on the refrigerator to hold down my bills.
But nothing…bupkiss.
I sat up in the bed, hospital white surrounds me. I came up with a name for this colour: “Institution White.” I’m going to contact Dulux and get that patented.
The white is punctuated with machinery - plugs and clips in the walls are linked to a variety of digital monitors with orange leads that laconically link life to the living; and the barely living. I used to be one of those - the barely living that is. I struggled with the demons that threatened to take me away so that I could return to this realm as the remnants of Colby Surat.
In my head, those dark places hold the key and the reason why it was that I fought so hard to come back. From what I can recall, the urge to simply give up and take the one-way voyage that presented itself to me was very strong indeed. But I resisted - maybe I had glimpsed what lay ahead and that was enough to convince me to keep fighting?
If so, how bad must it have been if it was worse than this?
This “life” I have isn’t a life any more.
Read: Colby is a skin full of useless neurons and synapses - misfiring where they shouldn’t, firing where they can’t.
Phantom pain - that’s what they call it. When an amputee feels an itch on a severed limb, that’s called phantom pain. A sensation in a part of the body that has been removed can also be caused by spinal injury. Well, I am lucky because I have both of those causes and that would explain why there is a tickle in my feet that I can’t scratch.
Where are my fucking legs?
All I want to have is those useless smashed fetlocks back in my possession so I can scratch the arch of each foot. Ever had a scratch you can’t reach? Yeah? Well, multiply that my 1000 and that’s how it felt.
((Severed foot + annoying itch) x 2) x 1000 = me.
Read: Colby is less than he should be.
My eyes took several days to adapt to this place and the sights I have seen. My mind took longer to adjust to what it processed. Even though I knew that my legs were gone from above the knee, it still took some time for my mind to get used to seeing me sit up in bed without the two long lumps under the covers stretch away from my body. For ages I sat there looking at stumpy protuberances that ended abruptly after leading away from my withered torso.
Abbreviated ambulation - that was my future.
My stumps are regularly tended to and I feel sorry for the young nursing student who, a few days ago, removed the staples from the wounds after four weeks. The seepage has all but ceased, but when the kid removed the metal clamps that helped hold my flesh together as it knitted, some fluid was inevitable.
I could see him feel sorry for me.
I felt sorry for him.
Two saps feeling sorry for each other when I was certain both of us detested this. We both wished we were somewhere else, that this was happening to someone else.
At least, I knew I did.
Physical injuries heal, mental ones do not.
Not ever.
There is no “closure”.
There is no means for me to escape other than within myself, to parts of my mind that normally I would never visit. These are the recesses that store bad dreams or traumatic details - the memory mechanisms that mask reality to protect the rest of me from the truth. Everyone has these things and few ever have the opportunity to dig around in there like I do.
It helps me form my theory about coma patients.
There are comas that are short term - man-made ones that are usually described as “induced comas”. This is the state of unconsciousness that is used to protect the rest of the body from stress and improve rehabilitation in the short term. Sports injuries, a fight in a nightclub, sometimes a heart attack…these are the comas that are just like a long sleep. These are good comas.
I am talking about bad comas.
Naughty comas that do not allow the sufferer to awaken.
There is a reason why these comas last for months, or years. The mind is away, it’s not there anymore. It visits the dark recesses within itself, reliving the trauma that lead to the situation in the first place. It learns the real truth. Not the abbreviated, adulterated, edited, condensed, abridged version of the truth that consciousness has the temerity to perpetrate as reality. It learns the “director’s cut” version of the truth. Unedited, unadulterated, full-scale, high-impact, no holds barred.
And it doesn’t like what it sees.
It tries to comprehend the horror of the past and the pain of the future. Some minds desperately want to comprehend this trauma but cannot do so - these are the hopeless cases. These are the ones that are destined to remain in comas forever - or at least until someone turns off the machines. Then there are the minds that don’t want to wake up - they don’t want to drag this knowledge into the conscious realm because they know the impact of this experience.
These are the comas that are the real concern. The recalcitrant coma - the difficult, stubborn, anti-authoritarian coma that simply snubs its virtual nose at medicine and refuses to wake up.
It is also an altruistic coma - protecting its owner from more pain.
Unfortunately, I’m not so lucky.
In my case, my mind saw the impact of metal on metal. It saw glass slashing, plastic ripping, bones breaking, skin tearing. It saw pain and suffering. It saw misfiring nerves, severed fibres that cannot grow back - synapses too large to bridge. It saw a future where I was a veritable vegetable, where I could comprehend but not reply. My mind went into the dark places of itself and still decided that this was better than dying.
And that was why I sit in this hospital bed desperately needing to scratch an itch that doesn’t exist.
My speech hasn’t returned and I was told it isn’t likely to either. “Aphasia,” they call it.
“Temporary”, they say.
“Possibly treatable”, they tell me.
It has been several months yet the progress has been non-existent. I can hear and understand them perfectly well even though they think I can’t. There are doctors and nurses, surgeons and neurosurgeons, all manically discussing whether or not this Aphasia includes an inability to comprehend and understand - or is it simply affecting my articulation?
Or is it sim
ply trauma-induced Aphasia that will dissipate over time as the memory fades and recedes.
Let me tell you now…the memory never recedes.
There’s no “closure”.
Time does not heal all wounds.
Read: Colby is scarred for life.
They think I would get better over the passage of time because I would start to forget the trauma - the desecration of my body. They think that I just need time to recuperate and recover from the physical injuries and that time, coupled with the increasing physical health, would help reduce the memories of that fateful day.
They are full of shit.
Yet I have no means to tell them this.
Inside I am screaming at them, denouncing each rubbish theory as the biggest load of crap I’d ever heard. Their hubris, their arrogance…it drips off their white coats and aesthetically draped stethoscopes like molasses. It sticks to everything they touch and it makes me sick. They couldn’t be told. I have no means of communication, no way of telling them.
Until last week.
Now therapy is more interesting.
Casualty of Life
As I typed away, I consumed more than the prescribed amount of Panadol. I followed through with some Nurofen and topped off my recovery with two glasses of Berocca. But the only effective hangover cure was time.
As my head thumped away, the pulsing of my cranial blood vessels were like a receding drum beat on a long fade-out. My fingers typed furiously, unaware of the world around me. The pain in my skull, caused by alcohol poisoning and increasing blood pressure, niggled and nipped at me, biting into my receptors but my masking drugs fought it away. It was sub-conscious – free-falling in a way. I had no idea if this purging of thought was even going to be any good, or if it would even be accepted. I had no goal, no plan, no idea of how this book was going to end – or even how it would start really.
Once I understood that, then I could accept it.
Maybe it was a metaphor for life?
Life…now there’s a concept.
My instinctual malaise crept in again, hindering and hounding me. It was what held me back on so many occasions and now it was having another crack at me. Sowing the seeds of doubt, of criticism, of negativity.
It was at moments like these that my wife would rescue me. Tina would prop me up when I was a flagging, flaccid remnant of a once proud pennant of ability. She provided the wind that billows my sails, drove me on, made the whole journey worthwhile.
I shuddered at the thought of that never happening again.
Terror.
Thinking about this threatened to derail me into despair – I had to try. I owed it to her. The lost time, the memories encased within an impenetrable prison, they usually followed such thoughts. I wasn’t sure if I was escaping anything at all.
I re-read the Chapter from Colby’s point of view, changing very little. I noticed the similarities with him and me – an emotional cripple writing as a physical cripple. Both of us victims of accidents.
Both of us casualties of life.
I looked at my watch and realized I was late for the meeting with Adrian. He was used to my tardiness, accepted this as part of the enigma that I unconsciously espoused and overtly detested – yet another reason for my loathing. I kidded myself with an approximate rendition of suitable attire and grooming and then set off, knowing that I would be almost an hour late.