HALFLING: A FAREWELL TO LEGS - Part 4

The 4th part of my series about my collapse, surgery and subsequent life in a wheelchair, and the attitude of society towards the disabled - not quite humans, but ‘Halflings’.

‘Stop fiddling with it!’ my husband Mr Raven reprimands me. Guiltily I remove my hand from my underwear. ‘If you keep fiddling with it, it really WILL come loose. Just leave it alone!’

Once upon a time, he might have been urging me not to auto-excite myself sexually while we were having a quiet connubial evening at home. No more. There are three of us in this marriage - him, me and my catheter.

Caterina - ‘Catty’ - was fitted on me without my knowledge in the week before Christmas 2024 as I lay unconscious in the emergency unit at Brighton’s Royal County Hospital after extreme spinal surgery. I totally get why they did it; I’d be lying in bed - after having my spine excised and thus no longer in control of my bladder and bowels - for five months, and there’s no way that I could have been kept clean had it been left up to the flimsy capabilities of an adult nappy. I suppose I’m lucky that there’s no way they could have carried out a similar process on my ‘back passage’ as my mum used to call it, considering that I was filling my nappy four times a day in that direction.