Autumn

This is the “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” according to Keats’ rather optimistic poem. For me, it is different but, perhaps, also contains the seeds of growth. My son’s seventh birthday is imminent; I ought to say ‘close at hand’ but, for me, it has a poignancy that moans beneath the preparations with a jagged insistence that I cannot ignore.

Those who say, “But look at what you have got – a healthy, gorgeous boy” underestimate the post-traumatic power of the process by which he came in to the world. My waters didn’t break properly on Bonfire Night, which was a Thursday in 2010, and I sat and lay on towels to absorb the steady drip of not-quite-wee-wee for approximately 16 hours awaiting the onset of established labour. When this failed to occur, my son’s father and I went to the hospital, which admitted us in order to observe the state of play. I must have been hooked up to a monitor for another ten or so hours – it seemed, when the decision to induce labour was finally made.

As a first-time parent, I lacked the courage to trust my gut and demand a C-section when the machine’s readings revealed that, with every contraction – barely discernible squeezing sensations inside me – Daniel’s heart rate dipped. I was coming up to three years brain-injured in a traffic collision and under a psychiatric and a neurological team, loosely speaking. They actually did very little except see me a couple of times a month and check that my memory and emotional state were stable. They were; loosely speaking.

The phenomenon of fatigue after a traumatic brain injury is off the scale, and also extremely bizarre: I knew, a few months after the injury, that I was unable to monitor my tiredness levels. I therefore took to my bicycle with tremendous gusto, because the macho part of me (I am part bloke, but more of that later) decided that, if three racing mopeds couldn’t knock me off the planet when I weighed eight stone soaking wet, then I was going to increase my strength and stamina. I took an odd pride in my survival, which resulted in my adoption of a ‘super-cyclist’ ego, aided and abetted by a six-month ban on driving just in case I developed epilepsy.

By about a year after the accident, I believed myself indefatigable in the saddle and, on the one-year anniversary of a coma, I was cycling up to Wimbledon Common and then to Battersea to catch an AA meeting because, well – I was bored. The realisation of the actual tiredness came later, and might even have been exacerbated by the ways in which I delayed its conscious onset. A couple of years after the injury I was cycling here and there and behaving like a drunk person because I smoked and swore and berated other people to such a degree that a lot of people distanced themselves. This demeanour is part of the after-effects of a brain injury; but the super-cycling created the illusion that I was absolutely fine, even if I couldn’t process an emotion for toffee.

And thus did I get into a relationship with someone with whom I was incompatible; thus did I fail to bail out of it when that fact became clear because, brain-injured, I dared not trust my gut, and thus did a little miracle happen after a box of chocolates one Valentine’s Day and some frilly underwear. Having eaten the chocolates compulsively, my mind turned to burning off the calories, and so I donned the lingerie and got some exercise.

One week less than nine months later, the medics induced labour in an already tired brain-injured woman. The next nine or ten hours comes in flashes: rocking, seated on an exercise ball, clinging to it like a long-lost love, sitting up, projectile-vomiting and screaming very loudly for an epidural. The doctor telling me to arch my back, like a cat, and then commending me on the success and it not hurting. Me saying, “I need to rest, I need to rest” and the midwife telling me to lie down, get some sleep. Dozing, with a carwash roller compressing upwards, through my lungs and ribcage. Awakening or semi-dreaming. “You’re dilated … Let’s have this baby”. Me crying, clinging to the back of the bed-chair crapping everywhere. Trying to make it to the toilet with liquid legs. The staff saying that I had to put the monitor back on. Me collapsed against side of the now lower stretcher bed as if in prayer, my forehead touching coarse sheets and hearing, “He’s in distress”. Me lying down. Me shutting down.

Suddenly everything was hazy and in tunnel-vision. I was somewhere inside my body but detached, ready to shut down completely, fade away. Whatever was happening at the lower end of the body from which I floated, distant, I barely knew. Ceilings, lights, babyfather in scrubs, a body being poked. “Can you feel that? … You need to speak”. Hearing a voice – mine – from far away, saying, “I’m having a fucking nervous breakdown” (she sounded flat). A green curtain.

Lying there.

The ceiling and the lights and the green curtain go fuzzy; I am drifting away from the curve of the earth down below, suspended. Waiting … I am somewhere very far deep down inside a shell, tucked away somewhere and I am not coming out. It is safe here. My son’s Dad fades in through the fuzz at the corner of my vision and smiles. “Oh, he’s beautiful”. I don’t understand. A voice (mine) says, “Is he going to be alright?” They don’t know but they hope so, say voices under green and white caps. Something stirs inside me and I ask again, “Will he be alright?” A little of the fuzz clears and a green-uniformed person appears, holding something tiny wrapped in a towel. Dark hair and gunmetal-grey-blue eyes. Blinking. Someone holds the bundle nearer and I say, “I love you.” The bundle is carried away – to Special Care, they say. The fuzz closes over me again.

A bed in a darkened room. I think I manage to phone my Dad. I think he says, “You had us worried” and then the cool, calm dark of sleep again.

The next morning I awaken in a ward. There is hustle and bustle. I lie there. A nurse says, “They’re bringing him to you now” and a trolley with a transparent plastic open-topped box containing a tiny towelling bundle is wheeled to my bedside. I am terrified; he is going to be okay but I have nearly killed him.