“Well, this is it, Ad,” my dad said as we stood in the dawn light before the giant automatic doors of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, the yellowish light of its interior menacing now that the time had come. “You gonna be okay?”
“Hah,” I smiled, nervous, shifting my feet. “Not really up to me, is it?”
“True enough, but are you going to be okay alone?”
Honestly, I didn't know, but what choice did I have? It was the height of the Covid pandemic, it wasn't like I could either go forward with physical support or not have the operation. Surgery was still around thirty hours away. That's a lot of time to sit and think. And worry. “Yeah, dad. I've got this.”
He knew I was lying, and he hugged me. I entered.
Ten minutes later saw me before a nurse.
I'd entered a little dazed and was asked all the perfunctory Covid questions. Had any symptons? Cough? Fever? Wiped your ass with tissue paper on a roll used by the same person that knows someone who has a friend whose wife has or had Covid?
After answering no to all of them, I'm passed forward to this woman. “Cubicle three, please. Pop in there and someone will be in to see you shortly,” she said, barely looking up from her clipboard. It's easy to see that as rude or dismissive, but honestly, I was glad to be ignored; I didn't want anyone else to see how afraid I really was.
The cubicle was tiny. Little more than a curtained off corner of an already cramped room. It housed a bed and one chair, the curtains swarmed them, like an aggressive braying mob with pitchforks, and here I was stepping into the middle. I sat in the chair and pulled out my book. I can't remember what I was reading because I didn't actually read it. My eyes read the words but they didn't go in, they just whizzed right past, off into the ether, and I thought about death. Forty-five minutes went by and then a young man came in, a handsome man, around thirty.
"Adam,” he smiled, offering a hand. “How are you feeling?”
I took his hand and shook, “I'm okay, Mr...”
“Nankivell,” he smiled.
I knew him, or at least of him. He'd been mentioned multiple times in pre-surgery meetings and such. “Ah, Mr Nankivell. I've heard your name.”
“I'm Richard Irving's second. I'll be assisting in the surgery.” I remember his smile falling away then. “You're in good hands with Richard. He's done this sort of thing many, many times. I can see you're worried, I completely understand. But you're in good hands.”
I was worried, and in truth, his words helped. I'd met Richard Irving, and yeah, he certainly seemed capable. Incredibly professional.
Mr Nankivell had me weighed, measured, and changed into my gown mere minutes later, and then he dropped a bomb on me.
“Okay, so, get on the bed and we will take you up and prep you for Stage One. I'll need you to sign this, to acknowledge you know the risk of having an endovascular embolisation.”
A what? I asked myself. He must have noticed I hadn't got a fuckin' clue because he then questioned it. “Has no-one spoken to you about this?”
“No.”
“Great. Endovascular embolisation is where we inject little bubbled into your veins and feed them towards the tumour, blocking the bloodflow to it, meaning we can then excise the tumour easier. We can get the bloodflow down to around five percent. There are risks of clots, though.”
“Oh. Sounds dangerous.”
“I'm not going to lie to you, it can be. The waiver form is because it's risky, but despite the numbers, I've never had a patient not fully recover. I've not heard of anyone not recovering, and with our area of expertise, we see a lot of people.”
“It's fine,” I sigh, looking at the firm. Ten to twelve percent chance I don't wake up, and they're doing it now. Fuck. I sign it.
I'm on the bed, being fed through corridors like a pill in your throat. I'm lost by the number of them, left and right, and I can feel people looking at me. I see pity. They can obviously see my nerves. They sit me in the corridor outside the room and leave me there, and I quickly send some text messages relating that, shit, I'm going in for something now. Yes, they'll put me out for a few hours. Yes, there's risk.
This may all seem like an overreaction, and to be honest, of course it is. These people know what they're doing. They do these things as easily as I put on a suit in the morning. But that feeling, knowing you're going under the knife, knowing the risks involved; it's scary. I had one chance to message my family to say I loved them and if I didn't wake up... but I didn't because I couldn't admit to them something bad might happen, or that I wouldn't see them again, wouldn't speak to them again. I was more worried about coming out of the surgery feeling embarrassed that I'd said those things to them than I was of dying and never saying I loved people. Fuckin' stupid, huh?
They took me in about two minutes later, stripped me of my phone and put it in a locker. What'll happen to it if I die, I thought. It'll buzz, messages of loss and whatever will just air to the darkness, unread, unreadable, locked away.
The room was huge, and the machine they were putting me under was like something out of a sci-fi movie. It looked like it could read my mind, or it might speak to me, or something.
The machine broke.
During the tests it stopped working. I guess that's why they do tests, and I'm guessing that's why ten to twelve percent die. Imagine it, you've got bubbles heading to your head and heart and boom, the machine controlling them dies. Fuckin, game over, man. Game over.
Two hours I waited for them to get the other machine over. Two hours in a giant room with no one else, just a big, dead robot. Like a scene from Transformers. I was directly facing it, too. Why do they need such a big machine to put bubbles in me?
A couple of the technicians meant to be assisting with the embolisation came back and just hung out with me. One, an expert from the Czech Republic, the other an expert from Hong Kong. Shamefully, I don't remember their names.
When they finally got the machine going, I was so bored I just wanted to go to sleep anyway, and so they measured me up for the tube they had to put into me. They wanted to put it in my hand to lower the distance the bubbles had to travel, lowering the risk, but the vein was too small and so they had to go through my groin.
I was out like a light. I don't remember a think after they put the mask over my face. I was down and out.
Some seven hours later I awoke on a ward, shivering despite the heated blanket and bed. Immediately a nurse came over to me calling for the doctor. I don't remember their names. Fuck, I don't even remember their faces. I remember a lot of blonde hair and endless white. I remember the vacant bed opposite me. I remember the cold. The doctor seemed mighty happy to see me awake.
Turns out that they'd had some problems getting the bubbles through some particularly tight spots, and had spent several hours trying to force them through, nearly killing me but eventually getting it done. I looked down at my nails and they were blue, so were my lips. I was so cold.
Later that afternoon they moved me to my own room. I lay there, and honestly, I was pretty high. There was a Bible next to the bed in a plastic sleeve hanging from the chest of drawers which now housed my phone, my clothes, and my laptop. Bibles in hospitals? I thought that sort of thing was reserved for motels in the southern U.S. States. What the fuck do I know, huh? I rolled over to get it, and honestly, the pain that ripped through my dick right then was far from divine. Catheter. Fuck.
God, I know we haven't seen eye-to-eye all these years, you fuckin' asshole, but that was a real fuckin' evil prank right there, buddy. Real fuckin' evil.
I was so out of it that I didn't even check my phone. I read the Bible and passed out.
The next morning I felt pretty fresh.
I would have hopped out of bed had I not had a thick plastic tube chafing the inside of my cock, but there we go. I ate my cereal, drank my orange juice, and the tube came in handy. See, when you have surgery, they bung you up. You don't take a shit for days – I think I was like ten days. It was horrible. But pissing? Every ten minutes, easy. Especially with the amount of orange juice I was on.
I replied to all my messages, posted some updates on social media, and chilled. I had no nerves. The scary part was over, except for the nine-to-twelve-hour surgery I was about to endure. I didn't care. I think, on that day, I felt something missing in my life. Love. Yeah, I had family who loved me, and friends sending me messages, but there was no one waiting for me at the end of it. No one I was going home to. No one I wanted to be with.
Now me, I'm usually a loner, especially since the whole losing Katie thing, but right in that moment I saw the value in it. I had no driving force of I must get back to this person because I love them or anything. I had no love, no lovely butterflies. All the butterflies in me were just fear. I hated it, right then and there. It was my own fault, I guess – I'd shut myself away and reject my feelings for anyone.
It would have been nice in that moment, though, to have someone worried about me that I was romantically involved with. It made me think of all the time that I'd missed, all the years spent not loving someone. It sucked. Just to be able to say I love you, baby. Can't wait to get home to you.
But I didn't have that.
Surgery happened so fast I woke up and asked when I was having surgery.
Not even joking. One minute I'm just chillin' reading a book, the next minute I'm being dragged off to a room where a very smart-dressed woman is relaying information so fast I don't hear it. About ten seconds later, here comes the mask, and bam, I'm out again.
This time I woke back in my room, alone. I thought I'd just fallen asleep and hadn't had the surgery yet. I pressed the buzzer for the nurse, and a small indian man came in. To this day one of the nicest men I've ever met. He was hilarious throughout my stay. He insisted on calling me Mister Adam the whole time, and he had the highest pitched voice I've ever heard on a man. He told (squeaked at) me that I'd had it, it had been very successful, and that Mr Nankivell would see me in the morning.
He did, told me the surgery had been a success, and now it was just to wait to see whether my motor skills would come back completely. I know he was saying this, but I wasn't listening; I was high as a kite and his blue and white tie was dancing for me.
The days became a blur of bizarre dreams and unrealities that were real. I was drugged the whole time because of the high doses of antibiotics running through me. The pain was immense (especially when I forgot the catheter) so they dosed me often.
The dreams were incredibly intense. I dreamed I was a marine in the Space Corps, we'd been on Mars, and had been attacked by huge, six-legged aliens with gaping maws, and tri-pointed faces like some breeds of wildflowers. I could even see the refraction of things in the visor of my space helmet. I watched people die. I sat in a cave and pep-talked myself into going back out.
The dream faded. The cards shuffled.
I dreamt about so many things. The weird thing about being that high is that you can't imagine what you want to, even when awake. I toyed with this a lot. Usually, you can think of a flower and see a flower in your mind. You can picture having coffee with a friend and you'll imagine having coffee with a friend, regardless of whether the surrounding image has been a real place in your life or not. Well, when you're that high; you get what you're fuckin' given, okay? Whatever creates that peripheral coffee shop you were at with your friend? Well, it's running the show now, and that's all there is to it. I tried imagining things and couldn't, and instead my brain would show me something else. I imagined a flower and saw severed hands and feet in buckets, a room strewn with broken glass. I imagined skating, I saw hordes of people at mass protests in the dark. I imagined being out with friends, I saw warfare, chaos, destruction, death. I imagined being with someone, in love; I saw myself alone, old, trying to get my age-worn digits used to playing a new game. Alone. Always fuckin' alone. Always the way.
But one night I had a dream about my friend Callum, and I remember it vividly to this day. Callum is a friend of mine (I refuse to say “was”) who took his own life at the beginning of last year. He'd woke up for work one day, fed the cat, and hung himself in the part next door. He was a reclusive type; quiet, funny, extremely strange. We'd play cards, shoot the shit. He was incredibly filthy minded.
Once, when I was suicidal, he said that if I killed myself, he'd do a eulogy at my funeral and he'd call me a prick whilst doing it, turn to my coffin, and stick his fingers up at me. Turns out I did it at his. Everyone laughed, so that's good.
I dreamt I was running away from something, or somethings. I sprinted down the street, shadows of people chasing me. I dip into an alleyway and then into a doorway. I close the door behind me and bolt it, lean against it gaining my breath. After a while I turn and face the corridor, and I walk towards another door. It's dark in here. Creepy. I get to the second door and it's a large open room, warehouse-like, a light streams down from a large window up top, lighting a large square portion of the floor. The dream feels real. I'm aware here. Lucid. Something within me knows something here isn't as it should be. I walk towards that light, but something in me won't let me obstruct it or break the beautiful square on the floor.
“Hey, Wrust.”
I jump. I wasn't aware until now but there was no sound whatsoever. No pursuers hammering the door or shouting, no birds, nothing. I whirl and it's Callum. Same old Callum. Scruffy bastard in faded jeans and a leather jacket. “Fuck, Cal. What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here, Wrust?” He smirks. “It's beautiful, y'know.”
“What is?”
“It. You'll see someday."
He paces the floor, his hand held out towards the cascading light. When his hand touches it, I could swear it fades away. “Are my mum and brother okay?”
“They're doing better, Cal. They miss you.” What the fuck is going on.
“I fed the cat, did they tell you?” He kneels and holds his hand out, making a come here gesture to the light as if there's a cat in it. He smiles. I nod. “Tell them I'm sorry.”
“I will, Cal.”
He rose and walked to me, faced me, and placed one hand on my shoulder. “Don't make the same mistakes I did, brother. I know you think about doing what I did every single day. Stop living your life alone. Stop being afraid.”
He walks past me towards the door I came through. “Hey,” I call to him as he goes to leave. “Next time, bring a deck of cards and some beer.”
“Don't worry, we'll play again.” And as he reaches the door he stops. “Did they... did they tell you how they found me?”
I nod.
“I wasn't trying to commit suicide, y'know. Just a little asphyxi-”
If you knew Cal, you'd know this is a distinct possibility. “Don't lie to me, Cal. Seriously?”
He grinned over his shoulder. “You'll never know now, will you?”
And he left me there, standing near the light, looking at the door he'd left through, wondering what the fuck had just happened to me.
“You can't just leave me with that!” I laugh.
The fucker did, though. He never could let me have the last laugh. I turned and sighed into the cascading moonlight. I rolled my eyes. “Don't live your life alone. Stop being afraid. Easy.”
I stepped into the light and the dream ended.
I don't want to live my life alone, and I don't want to be afraid, but when you feel more lonely when you're with people, and when the people you fall in love with are out of reach, what do you do?
You don't give in.