Chapter 6 Dangerously Healthy by Malcolm Birkenshaw

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Chapter 6.

`Morning, Mister Mytholmroyd,' sang the sweet siren song of
suffering when, yet again, I was woken by a nurse. She had arrived
like the khamsin, that warm wind which blows with predictable
regularity in Egypt. She was also warm to the touch and, like the
searing desert air, cheerfully intent upon doing me grievous bodily
harm.

`Someone took a sample yesterday,' I protested, hiding my arm,
suggesting that she check with central records. `Besides, I'm not
supposed to be here, the specialist said I was going home
yesterday.'

`There's not just me,' she cheerfully rolled up my sleeve,
uncovered the kidney dish containing another damned hypodermic,
`We'll be coming back for more.'

`More!' I complained, when "We" finally arrived. "We" was not
that pretty young thing but a medieval vampire with bloodstained
white coat, evidence of having feasted upon earlier victims, her
array of syringes ranging from prick size to elephantine. `One or
two tests!' I protested. `No wonder my wife wanted my clothes.
They won't fit by the time you've finished emptying my arm.'

`Stop complaining.'

`A castaway, marooned in a hospital I'll be, having been sucked
away into your statistical system.'

No sooner was I left alone and, `Mytholmroyd,' barked a porter,
before I had chance to inspect the damage she had done.
`Mytholmroyd,' he repeated, with hands on hips, as though claiming
the ward doorway, scanning our faces, sadistically exploiting the
silence. I happened upon a subterfuge, intending to send him away,
but that would only make things worse, delay my discharge, so I
nodded.

`Right,' he storm-trooped his theatre trolley towards me, with
steel-tipped boots clicking over the polished floor and halted at
the records by the foot of my bed. `You got any special medical
equipment?' he recited a list without waiting for answers, jacking
up my bed onto its wheels before steering me out of the ward,
leaving his trolley behind. `Those your own teeth.'

Phew, what a relief, I was only going for an X-ray. Hurrah,
hurrah, that was soon over, but why was I being dashed towards the
operating theatres? No, thank goodness, steel-heels was changing
direction whilst running his finger down a list of instructions
before stopping dead, swivelling my bed ninety degrees, then ramming
it through twin plastic doors, each with a little round window. `Why
are we here?' I found the courage to ask, everything being so small
and narrow. Whilst my head was being X-rayed he must have taken a
vow of silence because he merely ticked his list and departed.

Unsupervised, now free to raise my head, looking for clues, I
attempted to hazard a guess. No instruments, that's a relief;
although its walls, green tiled, looked antiseptically ominous.

Time went, passed, and came again; only threatened by
footsteps, sometimes pausing, never entering. Then it dawned, one
test they could do in a room this size was a lumbar puncture and
draw fluid from my spine. This is where I escape. Damn, nowhere
to hide, and on the cusp of my exit a nurse arrived with a trainee
in tow. `Back onto here, please, Mister Mytholmroyd,' she patted
the examination couch, like training a dog whilst checking the
records. `Multiple sclerosis,` she read, looked up, panicked, and
hurried to give me a lift, supposing I should be unable to manage.
Blast, why did I agree to hospital in the first place? Was I always
to be treated as an invalid for the rest of my life? `Onto your
side, please,' she pressed me into the foetal position.

Left with no alternative I gazed at the green tiles, ceiling to
floor, floor to ceiling. There was a sparrow wiping its beak
against the treatment room's high window. Lucky sod, free amongst a
world of noise whilst in here it was wall-to-wall silence, the nurse
expecting a doctor, with her pretence at being casual to keep the
patient at ease, not knowing that I knew what she knew. More staff
arrived, moving silently. I tried to guess at numbers from the
hushed rattle of instruments behind me. This was no joke, keeping
me waiting whilst an audience was ushered in just to watch my lumbar
being punctured. There was so much bloody secrecy, as though they
were keeping me docile like a cow in an abattoir. Then a nurse moved
into vision. Different one, standing before me, something to look
at besides those winter-green tiles.

She smiled, sweetly, suggested I take hold of her hand,
whilst I feigned innocence before asking, `Why?'

`Well,.... you know,' she coloured, finding herself faced
with the quandary of having an uncomforted patient about to have a
needle stuck into his spine and not being permitted to tell him.

`Not now. Later,... perhaps, at the pictures,' I smiled, as
though attempting a seduction, `When there's not so many people
standing behind me.'

How did he know? the thought flashed through her eyes, whilst
the doctor, out of sight, was losing his patience. `Please remain
still, Mister Mythomthloyd,' he implored in an Indian accent. His
fingers searched my spine, locating the vertebrae. `Just a small
prick.'

`I've heard that one before.'

`You vill hardly notice it at all,' he continued disjointedly
whilst he concentrated his attention upon my spine.

Even the nurse felt the tension, having no hand to hold, as the
needle felt its way in. I joked about the quantity of fluid being
taken to deflect from the dull pain of a spike being forced steadily
into the trunk of a tree under local anaesthesia. `I can feel my
brain shrinking, doctor.'

Somewhere someone bit back a snigger.

`Oh, no, no, no, Mister Mythomthloyd. Definitely not. The
volume of spinal fluid I am taking vill definitely have little
effect not upon the size of your brain, whatsoever.'

`Oh, aye. Well how much longer are you going to take?' I
whispered, `My voice is disappearing.'

More stifled sniggers.

Eventually he finished. The audience gathered around him as he
held up his syringe to daylight and showed them what once had been
me. I was ignored. Sod this, I left for my bed in the corridor,
but not before turning to declare in the doorway, `Where do I get
paid? This is a theatre, so I expect to receive Equity rates.'

Uncontrolled giggling.

`Oh, no, no, no. Ve definitely pay nothing at all, definitely
not.'

`Score: hospital four, Mytholmroyd four,' I turned my back
again as he struggled to establish the group's decorum.

`Get this patient into that bed,' barked a sister in full flow
to the auxiliary who was lolling over my pillows. She had come to
find their missing patient, dinner having been served, the space
left by my bed making the ward untidy again.

After the meal I dozed and started to count the number of
occasions when having a good time coincided with an improvement. I
got to fourteen when something disturbed me. It was Lena, pulling a
chair to my bedside. `There are enquiries to purchase your
business,' she glowed, unable to hold back her joy, adding almost as
an afterthought, `The children are well.' She also had messages from
friends. `And they're letting you go home tomorrow, so I'll have a
word with sister before I leave.'

Because she thought my face was less drawn she was also full of
hope in the medical field, confident that it was not multiple
sclerosis. Ten minutes later, after speaking to sister, she went
home demoralised, her plans in disarray, to spend that evening
touring friends, not knowing what to do next, complaining, `If only
he'd remained in teaching we'd have had a pension.'

Such thoughts had never entered my mind. Never mind the money,
what about my blasted legs.... I was more concerned with beating the
disease and getting a different job. Things didn't seem so bad, now
that I knew what had been troubling me all these past thirty years.
Whilst in hospital I had worked out what to do, what to avoid, so I
was going to stop the disease in its tracks.

As I drifted during that evening my mind went back a few weeks
to Easter. Claire was away on a school exchange in France when,
without warning, Lena took a week's holiday, her destination secret.
But it must have been planned in advance because, `I'm coming back,'
I had heard her whisper to John in his room before she left, not
giving us chance to scramble out of our beds before she was gone.

John, finding just the two of us suddenly alone, must have felt
lost. That in itself I found stressful. I did my best to occupy
him, staying at home, neglecting work, taking him to a football
match in the kind of cold which bleaches bones. We never got there,
had a puncture, jammed in traffic, all on top of seven days being
starved of exercise. Was it this culmination of every condition
upon which M.S. thrives that resulted in me ending up in hospital,
no longer able to disguise the disease?

`She's gone to sort herself out,' I had convinced myself,
whilst wondering whether her flirtations were more than just that?
Was she in Scarborough, with that divorced man who sowed the seeds
of doubt where none existed? No, not with him, his former wife was
her best friend. Questions and doubts continued to pop up for each
day she was missing, persuasions hung like the leaden skies of
this cold, cold Easter.

I turned over to sleep, for the last night in hospital,
finalising plans to put the ill wind of my diagnosis to good use.
`Sod it.' The green eye sitting snug on my shoulder had whispered an
answer and that broken chain of conclusions suddenly joined up.
`It's that bloody divorced Vincent, they'll have been staying at the
St. Lucifer hotel.'

Read the following chapters that tell of how Martin "cured" his M.S. and climbed mountains by the following year.

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