Last week I attended the funeral of a friend from the spinal unit. We were contemporaries in so many ways. We were the same age, we had our accidents within a week of each other, we lay in adjacent beds for months and we were injured at about the same cervical level.
Karen was a lovely woman –– calm, funny and shrewd. Alive to the dark humour of our situation and the daily soap opera of the ward. She was wise and witty and observant. Being paralysed anywhere isn’t a walk in the park, but in a Glasgow hospital laughs are never far away. Karen had an appreciation of the ridiculous and an ever ready chortle.
She was also one of the bravest people. She never regained much independence. All spinal injuries are similar but subtly different. Her level of function was such that she had to learn to feed herself. One big ambition, which she achieved, was to be able to put on her own mascara again.
From close quarters she had to watch me recover enough to regain something amounting to semi-independence. Yet nothing made her bitter. Her acceptance of her situation was humbling. While I howled at the moon, irrationally determined not to accept paralysis, Karen was peaceful and logical, disinclined to show despair –– or none that I ever saw. I think her faith helped, and I envied her.
During lockdown, she helped me with a programme I made for Radio 4, when I interviewed five of my fellow inmates from the spinal unit ten years previously. She was, as she ever was, wryly resigned to the fact she could do very little for herself, that she could not even go and hide in a corner and cry. She recalled the rich comedy of life inside the unit. I had forgotten what a hoot she was.
Advertisement
I saw her for lunch in the summer of 2022 and thought how well she looked. We talked of another reunion last year, but I never got round to organising it. I thought we had years yet.
Her death, after some weeks spent in hospital, has devastated her loving family. I will miss that quiet, amused life force, a shared history forged in trauma that no one else can understand. I must also acknowledge a profoundly selfish sense of shock as my fragile assumptions about the future crumbled.
The same week, I heard that another of the five who took part in the programme had died. And that a third had had a heart attack. At that point I hid away for quite a long time, trying to quell the fear, the feeling that things were lurching beyond my control, that I too could die tomorrow.
I try not to think about it, but when you have a high-level spinal injury, you are always aware, at some unconscious level or another, that the four horsemen of the apocalypse are there, the faint sound of their hooves on the road behind you, trailing you, waiting until you succumb to one of them.
These are customised horsemen. There’s Skin, mounted on a skittish black thoroughbred, pulling to go faster. Bladder is riding a red chestnut, halfway to a warhorse, slower, heavier. Bowels is on a white cob, a sullen and uncomfortable animal. And the fourth horseman, the pale rider on the pale pony? He’s the sweeper. He’s Everything Else. He scurries along at the back, fastidious, picking off anyone who dodges the scythes of the first three.
Advertisement
Which one will get me? Probably the one on the scabby pony. I am even capable of trying to plea bargain with a higher power I don’t believe in. Just let me get to 70, please, and I’ll be ever so grateful.
Another friend with a spinal injury is the last one alive from her ward, 20 years on. You just have to not drown while you’re swimming through the grief, she says. Keep breathing.
Like most people, when I was healthy, I happily wrapped myself in expectations. You assume you will live at least as long as your parents, that you will remain happy and active until at some great age you will slip away in your sleep, brains and joints fully intact. But there are no guarantees. Time must always be regarded as scarce.
@Mel_ReidTimes
Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her neck and back in a riding accident in April 2010
