HALFLING: A FAREWELL TO LEGS - Part 2
2nd chapter 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’.
A month on from my little ‘hiccup’ (the suicide bid which saw me survive 28 Zopiclone) it looks like I’ve moved on to Stage 6 - Acceptance & Hope - and Stage 7 - Processing - of the grief thing. As before my Bit Of Trouble, I rise with the dawn, hop into my wheelchair (‘Wendy’) and set off to the kitchenette to make black coffee singing the old Blue Mink hit ‘Time For Winning.’ This was the theme to a much under-rated film, 1971’s The Raging Moon, in which two sexy Spinals attempt to get it on while in wheelchairs; Gary Oldman said that it was Malcolm McDowell’s performance in this film which made him want to become an actor. In the street, I still resemble ‘Brilliant Boy’ from The Fast Show, so dubbed by my husband when we first got together in the 1990s. I get excited about everything: ‘LET ME PUSH THE BUTTON!’ I yell as we approach street crossings.
As I’ve tried to explain to less sanguine friends, it wasn’t despair or anything dramatic that drove me to my suicide bid in the first place; it was impatience. EVERYTHING TAKES SO LONG! In my pre-Halfling life, I was notorious for being a fast woman, hasty even, always eager to move on to the next bar, pub, club or restaurant. Now everything takes forever. Keeping clean’s the worst thing; I’m NOT dirty, but I feel dirty - and not in a good way. For most of my adult life - ever since I was 17 - I was either anticipating, having or recovering from sex. Now I’m either anticipating constipation, having constipation or recovering from constipation - the same with UTIs.
‘Invalid’ is a ghastly word - just break it down! - but that’s what I am now. Before I became a cripple I’d never given much thought to disabled people. I felt bad for them, in an abstract kind of way. But I felt no enmity towards them and I never, ever looked at someone in a wheelchair and thought ‘They’d be better off dead!’ Indeed, watching people like those amputee runners or those wheelchair basketball players or indeed any kind of Paralympian, I have always thought ’I’m not half the person they are.’ And since I’ve been wheelchair-bound, I’ve felt patronised by people but never loathed by them - most of them. There was the odd man who hissed at me ‘People like you should be locked up!’ - but he was in bare feet, and we all know about them. Actual handicap-hatred is the choice of a very few nasty outliers, and few as frank as a below-the-line poster who commented on a column I wrote about my recent misfortune where they opined ‘Somethings (sic) are much worse than death and this is one of them. Essentially, the person you were is dead.’
To make matters murkier, I recognised the poster as an ex-best friend of mine. She