Falling Down.

Some time ago – I’m not great with the chronology on this one – and I’m at the bottom of my stairs like a discarded crushed cigarette packet.

I’m not sure which way up I am. Or what time of day it is. Or even what day it is. Or how long I have been there.

Attempting to move, I howl in agony. Genuine agony, not that ‘ouch, that hurts’ nonsense but the proper stuff.

To be honest it’s a bit blank for a while after that, but after some time it occurs to me that I need to be lying flat somewhere. Looking-back on it I know that only my most essential lizard-brain is working at this point and calling Accident and Emergency wouldn’t have even crossed my mind, although it should have.

Besides, finding my mobile phone would have been mentally and physically impossible at that point. Looking back.

I remember the ordeal of trying to get up the stairs to the safety of my bed. THE BED IS ALWAYS SAFE.

My right hand is fucked, I can’t put any weight on it and can’t move the fingers. My left arm is fucked from the shoulder down to the elbow. I can’t even move it. My lower-back is not doing so well. Using my legs alone I push my body back up the stairs, using my head to drag myself up each stair.

I’ve no idea how long it takes, howling in pain with each stair.

It’s blank for a while again, but I do remember being in the safety of my bed at some point, spitting-out teeth fragments.

Probably – at a guess – twenty-four hours later and I can’t move. I can’t even roll-over the pain is so bad.

Pieces come back. Some time ago I had successfully walked to the top of my stairs – which shouldn’t be a cause for celebration but you’d be surprised – and realised that everything was going wrong. It’s the only way to describe it. I remember that.

Some unspecified time later I remember realising it was about to happen and desperately flailing to grab the banister in time. Obviously I didn’t make it.

I know I went backwards down a flight of stairs with every muscle in my body in seizure and incapable of preventing it.

Forty-eight hours later – another guess – and I can roll over in bed; it causes agony but I can do it. I can’t sit-up. Try doing it without the use of your arms when your lower-back is screaming in pain. Try it.

Thirty-six hours later and I’ve made a cup of tea that I need both hands to lift. Another day after that I’ve managed to have a shower and get dressed. I have to move my left arm with my upper-right arm but I can do it. Another day after that and I leave the house and buy some food like a normal person.

And now. Some time after all of this. The bruises are fluorescent yellow and deep purple – they look like badly executed tattoos and cover the bulk of my upper-body. Everything still hurts but in a sensible manner. My lower-teeth are more jagged than previously but they never looked great anyway. I know it’d taken place in the morning and I was heading upstairs after breakfast to have a shower and get dressed.

At some point before all this I know I’d gotten tired of measuring-out my life in medication (T.S. Eliot reference if anyone wants it) and ‘being sensible’. I’d grown tired of feeling defined by anything, stopped worrying about when or what I ate, how much or how little I exercised or slept, what I did or didn’t drink (and how much or little) and the fucking massive orange tablets. So I’d stopped.

I’m a father of two. Yes – I know.

Anyway. As anyone who has ever read this appalling blog will be aware, I’m not much for this sort of thing but I think next week or some day this week is Epilepsy Awareness month or week or something. I don’t know. Google it – I’m not your Dad. 

Unfinished Business.

“I am absurdly masculine” I think to myself, despite all physical evidence to the contrary.

I have just fixed my shower all by myself and am feeling very impressive, despite the whole process involving little more than unscrewing a knackered shower-head and screwing a new-one in it’s place. In my defence I had to figure-out this solution, source the replacement, successfully and correctly purchase the new shower-head without looking like a complete buffoon and then faff about fixing-it up.

Such things are not my forte.

But now it’s fixed, after my spending nearly two months showering under a lacklustre stream of kitten piss because I couldn’t be chewed to do anything more about it. I’d have just had baths but I’m not allowed for fear I may die doing so (a real thing) so I had little choice.

Additionally I finished re-reading Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. I started it again to help me sleep, realised it really wasn’t very good but couldn’t give-up. But I slept.

This reduces my pile of reading material to Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell (terrible TERRIBLE author but signed by my grandmother and given to me by my mother who adores it) and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler.

I finished watching - after several months – the fourth series of Homeland on VHS of all things (it still works for recording stuff), and adored the final episode. As a result found myself briefly falling-in love with the actress Claire Danes. This vanished very quickly when I realised I was actually in love with her character Carrie Mathison which is a VERY BAD THING.

This also wore off.

And also a lady with whom I’d become very fond of informs me she’d fallen-in love with someone else. I have mixed-feelings but am pleased for her.

My love of 1990s television show Moonlighting remained undiminished despite my inability to watch the final two episodes of the two-series box-set my mother bought me for Christmas two years ago. Oh it was just too good. I’ve not watched it yet.     

Additional to all of this I finally sort-out the SCART sockets/leads round the back of my telly/VCR/DVD/Freeview box.

An odd week.

I Go To An Optician.

A small woman I do not know pushes her knee between my thighs and moves her face closer to mine. I can feel the jets of breath from her nostrils upon my face.

I’m unsure when I have last felt so awkward, unhappy and anxious to be somewhere else.

“Is this any better?” She asks.

It’s really not.

I have not visited an optician in nine years. My existing spectacles have one arm and the lenses routinely fall-out. It has become a Sisyphian task to keep them assembled long enough to watch thirty-minutes of television. Something I rarely do anyway but it’s not the point.

People being close to me, touching me or having their face near mine is not a favourite. My own mother, after the death of her father - my grandfather (obviously) - has recently become a ‘hugger’ after thirty-nine years of perfectly comfortable physical and emotional distance.

That’s bad enough. But this unknown young lady putting her fingers behind my ears and breathing her lunch in my face is intolerable.

“Any better?” She asks again.

I resolve to say ‘yes’ to anything she ever asks so I no longer need to be near her.

“How’s this?”

“How’s this”?  It’s like this : I’m in a distressingly unfamiliar situation, I’m about to be robbed of my routine short-sightedness which has been a source of comfort as I’ve not been able to see anything that may trouble me whilst enjoying the subconscious effect of not being able to see anyone too far away – as a result one’s brain assumes no-one can see you, it’s like having a superpower  - and I’m jittery and just want to be on my own.

I say none of this.

Three days later I have an uncomfortable pair of spectacles for the first time in years.

And realise I am due a haircut. Will this hell ever end?