HALFLING: A FAREWELL TO LEGS

I’ll be writing about my collapse, surgery and subsequent life in a wheelchair, by turns hilarious and horrific, and the attitude of society towards the disabled - not quite humans, but ‘Halflings’.

Waking up in Brighton's Royal Sussex County Hospital emergency room last month feeling fresh as a daisy after swallowing 28 Zopiclone a few hours earlier - even as I felt ashamed at wasting the time of the hard-pressed NHS staff who treated me with such courtesy and care - a tiny part of me couldn’t help reflecting on my truly epic capacity for drugs. I gave up cocaine a decade ago, but for thirty years I took enough of the stuff to stun the entire Colombian armed forces. I suppose it’s just one of those things that never leaves you - like riding a bike, or herpes.

How did I get here? By ambulance, sirens blaring. But also because I’d been taken to this very hospital five months earlier on a night in December, Christmas lights twinkling, when I could no longer walk, only crawl. I would leave here on a stretcher, bound for rehab, with very little chance of ever walking again. Once a tall, swaggering show-off, I am now a 'Halfling' - only half a person. People address my husband, not me; talk about being cut down to size. That this has happened to tall, swaggering, swashbuckling me in particular is a delicious irony; I often ‘looked down’ on people and used to occasionally pat short friends on the head. It does seem like some sort of lesson.

‘Would you like to talk to one of our mental health team?’ a young woman asks me.

‘Will it make me walk again?’ I snap ungraciously.

‘It might help you come to terms with…’

‘If it won’t make me walk again, there’s no point,’ I point out.

I’m being beastly, but I’m also correct. By trying to end my life - after an extremely good innings, having had enough fun, love and money to fill nine lifetimes - I’m reacting in a very straightforward, un-mental way to having my capacity to be a fully-realised human being snatched away from me at the age of 65. I’m grieving the death of my old self the way one would grieve the loss of a loved one - and my goodness, I loved myself very much indeed - and am moving in a very predictable way through the fabled Seven Stages of Grief. I’ve done Shock, Denial, Anger, Bargaining and I think I’m probably on Depression right now. When I took those sleeping pills - a month’s supply, handed over in all innocence by the rehabilitation centre when they discharged me - I sincerely wanted to be done with my half-life as a Halfling.

As a little girl, my favourite book had been Valley Of The Dolls by Jacqueline Susann; when I was asked to write an introduction to a new edition of it in 2003 it was the absolute distillation of what I dreamed success as a writer would look like. The introduction ended:

‘If the tragic outcomes of various hedonisms are sometimes piled on with a trowel, it still retains its power and a strange sort of accidental integrity. Despite nearly 40 years of repeated attempts to castrate it into campness, or kill it with kitsch, Valley Of The Dolls remains a brave, bold, angry and, yes, definitely a feminist book. All that, and still about the most fun you can have without a prescription.’

Well, I’d got my prescription, and I wasn’t having fun. The ‘Dolls’ of the title are not the three female protagonists, but pills; uppers, to get you going when the thrill wears off, and downers, to help you sleep, also usefully doubling as a way to kill yourself when it all gets too much, as performers such as Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland discovered. Even as an adolescent, I’d recognised myself as a Neely, who attempts suicide but fails, her monstrous ego and her undeniable talent pulling her through; I definitely wasn’t a kind and modest Jennifer, who succeeds in destroying herself when she is deemed surplus to requirements by a cruel world which only valued her for her beauty.

To add to my sorrows, I didn’t recognise myself; I’d aged decades in months. It was as if while I’d kept moving, I kept age at bay; people often expressed surprise when I told them I was 65. The five months in hospital beds had acted as a kind of Swiss sleep cure (now illegal, but featured in V of the D as a handy way for an ageing star to lose weight, being rendered unconscious and fed vitamins but no calories through a tube for a fortnight) in reverse. Mother Nature, of whom I had once written so blithely ‘One of the best things about being a feminist is showing that bitch Mother Nature who’s boss’, had finally caught up with me, and doled out a proper punishment-beating.

Starting at the top, I was suffering from extreme ‘Telogen Effluvium’ - the hair loss which can follow the shock to the body caused by severe physical injury. My hair makes me think of that line about prison food: ‘It’s lousy - and there’s not enough of it.’ Half of my teeth are missing, partly due to neglect, partly due to drunken stumbles, partly due to the fact that I am a freak of nature whose real non-baby teeth are still sitting in their gums; anyway, mouth-wise I make the late Shane MacGowan look like the latest boy bombshell on Love Island. My splendid rack has shrivelled and shrunk; my stomach is scored and seamed in the way which often bears witness to rapid weight loss; my once-perky bum resembles a beach ball with a slow puncture. I now wear a catheter, and will likely do so forever, my gorgeous vulva vandalised by an unspeakably common plastic tube. My legs, once lovely, are like an old man’s, white and wasted; my feet, always ugly, are now less ‘feet’ than simply where my legs end.

Lying there waiting to be signed out of the emergency unit, my mind strayed to my late and last pet, beloved Sox, and how many times I’d thought of him in the rehabilitation hospital. By the time I finally plucked up the courage to take him on the one-way walk to the vet, he was on a dozen meds a day and resembled a stripy tea towel dropped carelessly on the floor. On the rehab ward, I was the only ‘Spinal’ - the other ladies had all had strokes. But we were all only half the person we had been. Every day our loved ones came in to try to talk us back to being the people we had been before our bit of bad luck, and though I adored seeing my husband, sometimes I’d look around wearily and think ‘I am Sox - we’re all Sox!’ in the manner of Spartacus. ‘Let us go! We’re never going to be the people you loved again - because we’re all Sox now!’

‘Ready to go home?’ asked my husband. I nodded, too sad to speak. As I slithered from gurney to wheelchair - a semi-human centipede - I sincerely hoped that Acceptance & Hope (Stage 6) and Processing (Stage 7) weren’t too far off. Or I could see myself coming back for a repeat performance as soon as I could get my paws on another batch of pills - and next time, I’d be sure to take a nice round 50.

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