Give Me a Minute, I’m Fine

Part one of putting my head back together

Jason asked me to smile. Apparently, one side of my face wasn’t joining in. My left side wasn’t doing much either. I’d been to the toilet and was having to help that side of my body move, which, even through the fog, struck me as not particularly good.

My response to the suggestion of an ambulance was, naturally, “No, no, no. I’m fine. Give me a minute.”

Jason, thankfully, did not give me a minute. He called for help.

This was my second stroke in roughly six months. That is a sentence I can write now, sitting at home on the boat, with considerably more understanding than I had while it was happening. At the time, I was sleepy, slurring my words and entirely unconvinced that we needed to make a fuss.

I’d already had a stroke. I was recovering from it, thanks. Surely somebody could check the records and see that this particular adventure had already been dealt with.

The night itself comes back in fragments. We’d been watching a horror film about a group of women trapped in a cave with something unpleasant. Aliens, demons, underground things with a taste for people—I couldn’t tell you precisely. There was a great deal of screaming.

“Oh, shut up and die quietly,” was my sympathetic contribution from the comfort of the boat.

Later, when Jason was checking me over, I could still hear those women screaming in my muddled head. Somewhere between the film, sleep and whatever was happening inside my brain, the boundaries had become rather unreliable. I remember being irritated by the noise. I remember my body not cooperating. I remember wanting everyone to let me have a moment to sort myself out.

Fortunately, the people around me were taking rather more notice of my face and speech than I was.

Getting someone off a narrowboat adds a layer of logistics to an emergency. I remember the ambulance women seeming nervous about the water and the gap between the boat and the bank. To me, it was a tiny gap. We didn’t even need a gangplank there.

“It’s all right,” I was trying to tell them.

I was apparently having a stroke, but I still felt somebody ought to reassure the visitors about the canal.

Then there were firefighters. I think there were two burly ones, although the details are hazy. More people arriving to get me safely off my own boat, while I remained convinced I could manage perfectly well if they would just let me.

“Look, I can do this.”

They weren’t having it. They were responsible for me now, and letting me fall into the canal would have been a poor start. I understand that. At the time, it was annoying. This was my home, my familiar little crossing, and suddenly other people were deciding how I was allowed to move through it.

My left side wasn’t responding properly, admittedly. Everybody checking me seemed fairly convinced there was a problem. I was beginning to accept that they might have a point.

After that, the journey breaks into pieces.

I don’t remember much of the ambulance ride. I remember being sick. I remember talk of a CT scan, and then the familiar warmth of contrast dye travelling through me: that peculiar sensation that makes you think you’ve wet yourself.

Some part of my brain recognised it.

Ah. A scan. We’ve done this before.

Then my stomach objected, and the lovely meal Jason had cooked came back up. That was thoroughly unpleasant. Whatever else my memory has misplaced, it has retained that particular indignity quite clearly.

There are fragments involving an anaesthetist. An operation. Something I wanted to say no to.

“No, thanks. I’m fine.”

I keep coming back to that response. How certain I was that I could explain the situation away, if only people would listen. I’d had a stroke six months ago. I was recovering. There had clearly been some administrative misunderstanding.

There hadn’t.

I learned afterwards that a clot was blocking a major artery on the right side of my brain. The scans had found it. I was taken to Bristol, where they performed a mechanical thrombectomy to remove it.

Those words are neat and clinical. They sit obediently on a discharge summary. Reading them later was quite another experience.

At the time, I remember sickness, confusion and scraps of conversation. I cannot give you a clean account of being moved from one place