It is extraordinary how spending the best part of a year out of the world affects you. Like a wide-eyed toddler, or a prisoner out on probation, or a psychiatric patient training for freedom, I am escorted on my first trip to the city centre shops by a long-suffering sister-in-law. Wow, how fast people move. I am transfixed by how beautifully their legs work, how easily their hips flex. And how busy and noisy the shops are.
I visit my bank, where it is difficult to talk to the teller over an eye-level counter; and I feel buffeted and pressured by the big queue behind me. I used to be one of you, I want to turn and tell them: just a few months ago, forever in a rush, groaning inwardly when a wheelchair held me up. The bank teller is polite, but I feel a nuisance. Yes, I want to transfer some funds into a foreign bank account. No, I’m not a money launderer; I just love my niece. And yes, that is the correct account number; it’s simply that my handwriting is seriously compromised. BUT MY BRAIN IS OK, OK? I am trembling with exhaustion by the time I leave.
And there’s something else deeply disturbing. Cup cakes. Sometimes you need to be incarcerated before you notice cultural shifts and thus it is apparent that in my absence cup cakes have taken over the world. Books on how to make them, holders in which to bake them, greetings cards and posters and little girls’ T-shirts displaying them, shelves in Sainsbury’s and Starbucks groaning with the things. There was not a corner we turned without being faced with cup cakes as a commodity in some form or another.
Are they a symbol of the collapse of feminism? Where does it come from, this fashion for silly, overdressed American baking? Sex and the City movies? I don’t know and I don’t care. All that is clear, to this visitor from another planet, is that women, already shackled with the expectation of looking perfect, must also accessorise their kitchens and their children’s play dates with catwalk buns. Is the snidey “She buys her cupcakes” the new century’s whispered equivalent of “He had to buy his own furniture”? Well, sorry, but I can spot a gin trap for women when I see one; and God save us from a future generation of neurotic little girls reared on the belief that sexy cakes, along with seven-inch heels and 17 shades of lipstick, constitute being a successful woman.
And yet. And yet. Even as I write this, I am aware of the crushing self-righteousness that disability could bring: the sense that the world should stop spinning because I can no longer keep up. That all things silly or frivolous have no right to exist. Do I want to become a grumpy old woman, hair-shirted, embittered by envy and exclusion?
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Quite simply, I have a choice. Be upset at this sense of dislocation from ordinary life, or get motivated and cope. Eat cup cakes, even. It is a topical issue. My mind is now becoming focused on the transition from hospital to home, as this is my last week as an inpatient in the spinal unit. An entirely new reality beckons, one where I am not constantly surrounded by nurses and doctors and therapists to hold my hand and catch me when I fall. I will be a stranger in a strange but achingly familiar country, but one where life is lived differently to before.
By turns I feel happy, relieved, sad and scared at the prospect of going home. I am frustrated that my walking has not improved quite as much as I had hoped before I leave (no surprises there, then). I haven’t managed my ultimate goal of getting onto crutches or an ordinary Zimmer; my hips are too wobbly, my hands too sore. Nor have I managed to complete a circuit of the gym on the gutter frame, the tall walker upon which I rest my forearms. I am simply not yet strong enough to go any distance greater than about 25 steps. Endurance, rather than actual stepping ability, remains my problem. Too much weight is still being carried through my arms; my shoulders ache like a decrepit fast bowler’s. So I leave, if not with a whimper, then certainly not with the bang I’d hoped for.
On the sunny side, there are distinctly positive signs of continuing progress. Since Christmas I have been lucky enough to have dozens of sessions on the Lokomat. My final one is triumphant. Susan asks the computer to transfer more and more weight away from the hoist onto my own legs. By the end of my 25-minute stint, for the first time, my legs are bearing two thirds of my own weight as I walk, and that’s without putting my hands on the parallel bars.
Interestingly, too, it seems as if my eye/brain connection is slowly relearning where to place my feet. Where once my legs scissored helplessly in front of each other, now I can look down and direct them with my eyes to step forwards and apart, so my heels do not catch. The feet are lifting clear of the ground in recognisable steps. Susan actually used the word “brilliant” to describe my action this week, like I was a champion setter at Crufts or something, and I will store and cherish the compliment for the bad times. As the hours to my departure tick by, she and I eye each other warily, like an undemonstrative but devoted married couple about to be separated for the first time in 25 years. “No getting emotional, now,” I warn, with tears pricking my eyes. “Of course not,” she says. “It’s not like I’ve devoted hundreds of hours to you or anything.”
A small group of us inmates huddle briefly in the coffee bar after gym, kindred spirits bonded by our conviction that if you think positive, you can change your world. We talk about my departure, comforting each other about the long game we are in. “Let’s have this conversation in five years’ time,” I say. And we will. We will. We might even let Susan join in.