*
I
arrived back at K&S from
I was disgusting: Disgusting of Tunbridge Wells. Utterly constipated and dying for a shit, out of my head on heroin and misery. I shouted and swore and raved. One of the nurses tried to prevent me touching my own anus, something I considered a medical necessity. I called out to the ward, trying to apologise.
“I’m sorry ladies. I should not be here.”
“And we are ladies.”
“Of course you are; this is Tunbridge Wells.”
Not only this (a ward full of distressed ladies), but the ambulance men had failed to pass over what very limited paperwork had come with me, and had then knocked off and gone home. There were only two envelopes, but the general impression was that I, as a person (of sorts) was more or less insignificant, the truly important thing being the notes intended to describe me. I was demoted below the status of an envelope.
*
I was moved to a men’s bay, in a bed opposite Harold Atcott, a sweet-natured, white-haired man of eighty or so, who told me something of his life, about how he met his wife, about growing up in Kent, working, and being in the Army. He had been in the 2nd World War, got crushed by a truck, run an Officer’s Mess, been ‘in Service’, working in big houses for the Queen’s milliner, among others. He was a very equable man, not only a philatelist but a numismatist and a collector of badges. I could not have imagined the two of us seeing each other and not taking an instant dislike, me with my long hair and wild mood swings, he with his army neatness and his stick covered in badges, yet we spent four or five days in intense conversation, and I think really liked each other. Certainly I liked him, and he professed that I was ‘a lovely man to talk to’.
*
Aldon
snores for
*
Two nurses try to change a soiled old woman in the corner. She is demented. She has a broken hip.
‘Don’t do that’, ‘Stop it’, say the nurses.
‘Mum, Mum, Dad, Police, Charles.’ she calls, slapping them and pulling their clothes.
*
NEWSPAPERMAN
He was a bit of a showman, perhaps. He would enter the ward bays announcing himself and his wares. Sometimes he would tell a joke. I could tell Harold didn’t like him. He didn’t like electric razors either. Anyway, for some reason that morning, perhaps my third or fourth back at K&S I took him on, deciding perhaps that I had lost so much already that I had nothing left to lose.
“How are we this morning?” he asked in his showman’s voice. Of course he didn’t want to know, he wanted to sell us Newspapers, entering the ward bay with his trolley.
“We are marvellous!” I replied loudly from the bed where I reclined in my lascivious agony.
He double-took in my vileness as I lay there. He turned in astonishment for support to his presumed allies in the ward.
“Where’s he come from?” he asked.
“I am from Venus.” I said. “We are all marvellous on Venus.”
“I thought they were women on Venus.”
“I am women.” I said.
*
Oscar works as a ward domestic after college. He is a handsome young Spaniard. His girlfriend, also Spanish, also works as a domestic. Lord preserve the International Health Service. He is surprised to see me lying in a bed instead of sweeping floors or driving a van or something.
“Hola.” I say.
“What happen you?”
“I drive my car through a hedge. You do not do this.” I wag my finger like a windscreen wiper.
He tells me another Spanish domestic is dead, making a sign for vomiting and pointing at his back.
“You know?”
“Kidneys?” I guess.
“Kidneys.” Oscar concurs. Tears are in his eyes. It has been sudden, although Pedro always looked pale, even sullen. Unwell, I suppose. They had been partners, working together doing the ward polishing. It is not safe to work in Hospitals. ‘Let’s gather all the sick people together into one place and let them infect one another. Perhaps some of them will die. That might save us money.’
Misery Warehouses or Death Factories, the difference depends on the work of the ward domestic, a post of unremitting drudgery paid at or about the minimum wage. Victor is ill. Gloria has never looked well. Victor is a good man, a Portuguese with kindly brown eyes. His wife is ill too, he tells me. He was one of the two domestics who trained me, insofar as I was trained. He would put three huge bolster-like teabags in the huge aluminium teapot for the drinks rounds, aslthough he told me he was only meant to use two. ‘My patients like a good cup of tea.’ he explained.
Later in the week, Oscar sits in the chair beside my bed. “I rest five minutes.”
“Yes, good, please do, si, si, acqui, muy bien.”
He leans forward, to confide in me.
“I have problem: I like to smoke chocolate.”
My mind whirs for a few moments before I realise he means hashish. He looks so tired, he is in a foreign country; worse, he is in Tunbridge Wells. I feel sorry for him. He wants me to get him some. Of course, he can tell just by looking at me.
“I will try,” I say, “I don’t know”
“Don’t forget” he says.
“I will not forget.”
I do try, ringing my friends, and it seems just possible, even at this distance, but in fact I am transferred before it can take place.
*
I
remember sitting in my first wheelchair on ward 6 of the K&S with pale
sunlight coming in through the french windows. I had a cheese roll in one hand
and another cheese roll on the trolley in front of me. ‘I am in
*
In order to be accepted onto the Neurological Rehabilitation Unit, the registrar at K&S put me through an exam. Most of it was straightforward: Who is the Prime Minister? What is the date? Who is the Queen? Count backwards from 100, and so-on. Of course I didn’t know the date and I can’t count backwards from 100 with any ease, but one was really difficult: say as many words as you can beginning with ‘p’ in one minute. Now, at this moment, I could almost certainly reel off a huge list of monosyllabic ‘p’ words; pig, peg, pan, pen, pun, pin, pick, pack, pox, puck, peck, pal, pull, pall, peel, pale, pole, and soforth. At the time, conscious that it might matter if I succeeded to a certain level or not, I struggled with every one, my brain whirring and threshing. Among the feeble crop, with increasing desperation came ‘pangolin’, ‘parity’, ‘penis’, ‘prostitute’, ‘penetration’.
*
METEORITES
I could
not sleep. I did not sleep for two consecutive hours for weeks. I would prowl
and rotate on the kingdom of my bed, usually reaching the morning with my head
at the foot end. It was the heroin, I think, which hadn’t worn off yet,
although I hadn’t had any since before leaving
Conditions were not favourable. I was in Tunbridge Wells, which is a long way from heaven, and as powerfully illuminated as any built-up area. Not only that, but the hospital building had lights on outside all night, either to deter thieves, or to aid in the detection and apprehension of such errant patients as might attempt to flee. I was fortunate to have a french window beside my bed which allowed me a view of a steep slope covered in grass and containing some small bushes and trees leading up to the main body of the hospital building, itself permanently illuminated from within at its stairwells and certain other windows. This building was at the crest of the hill, blotting out nearly all access to the sky, but there was a certain amount visible nevertheless, a portion which I realised could increase if I lowered myself in relation to the top of the window.
At about two in the morning, (Aldon, the one-legged all weather British snoring champion sleeping loudly in the bed beside mine), I pulled some blankets onto the floor and lowered myself, useless legs first, out of bed and on top of them. With enormous effort and concentration I reached up and pulled back the bolt which held the french windows shut, and allowed the door to swing open. The sky visible above the hospital was mostly cloudy, but the occasional star was visible. It was freezing with the door open, and I was very uncomfortable on the hard floor. I could not see any meteorites. The cold was damp and the floor was hard. I had to call a nurse and get her to help me back into bed.
*
Mr. Scum
Ian came in, thin as streak of piss. He took over Harold’s bed. He was cheerful, but in pain from his arm. He said he had been sleeping upright in an armchair for several nights, since otherwise he kept his wife awake. He announced himself as ‘Mr. Scum’, and it was clear that he was a drunk.
He had a
number of unlikely stories he seemed determined to tell: he had been among the
members of Special Services who got lost in
He told bad jokes too. He’d been a train driver, and had killed two people, one of whom he never even saw, as he was going backwards, the other being a suicide. It is not easy to stop a train, even when someone stands in front of it. He nearly got fired once, for placing his Uncle’s artificial limb with red paint smeared on it on the front of his engine and crashing the buffers at Kings Cross.
In his
role as Mr. Scum, if offered a chair, ‘Take a chair’, he would pick it up and
carry it from the room. I told him he should develop a new career as an arty
shit. He could get £10,000 for spraying the I.C.A. with blood, I said, dressed
like that. While it was hard to see him in the S.A.S. or something, he certainly
had a way of dressing, like an off-duty prison officer might, in a blue shirt
and crease-perfect slacks and hideous zip-through knitwear which I was
convinced would strike terror into the hearts of the frothy avant-garde. In
truth, the daring art ploy in our times would be to set out to shock the
‘avant-garde’ and conceptualist elite. He didn’t know what I was talking about.
His D.T.s got so bad I had to roll his cigarettes for him, and he could not
feed himself. He had been born just north of
Ian had had an operation to set a broken arm, but this had never healed. The bone had never grown across the little gap. They did a blood test and found he was low on platelets, and they wanted to take a bone-marrow sample, but when they eventually came to do it Ian was shaking so badly with D.T.s, and so vague and confused that he was not capable of giving ‘informed consent’.
He was getting worse. He would wake up, thinking he was at home, and we would have to tell him where he was. The doctors said they couldn’t operate on him while his blood was like that, and they sent him home. How they expected him to improve at home whilst shaking and with cider available to him I have no idea. It seemed a dereliction of duty to me. The man had come in, got worse, and been discharged with no treatment whatsoever.
*
I was transferred to Lewes, a tiny hospital near my flat, and placed in a ward full of geriatrics while I awaited my transfer to rehab. The Woman, my (ex) Lover rang, and told me she was coming to see me. It was clear she had something to say. I talked to the Ward Sister about whether we could be alone.
“I don’t mind,” I said “but she’s a very private woman. This is just a room full of ears to her. It’s a bit of a delicate negotiation.”
She came on Sunday, and we went out to Minor Injuries Reception by the main entrance, me in my wheelchair. I had tried already to make it clear that by moving from Tunbridge Wells to Lewes I had ceased to expect her to look after me, that Emily was now my main conduit. I’d wanted for a long time to be able to give her her own life back, since I was no use any more. I could see how visiting me made her suffer, and I care so much for her.
“There’s nothing” I said, emphasising the word “that I used to do for you that I can do anymore.”
There was a rocking-horse in Minor Injuries Reception, its tail held in place with a screw.
She told me that we were no longer together, that she was not my girlfriend any more, that she needed her space. I don’t know what she told me. She was very determined, very closed.
“I know, I know.” I said. Snot came out of my nose. I was trying not to cry.
“Sniff.” she told me.
“I can’t sniff. Get me a tissue.”
A rugby player came in with a cut above his eye. He was still wearing his boots, which clacked on the floor.
*
“Where’s Mum?” (Ron, 83)
“Whose Mum?” (bewildered overweight grandson with greasy, tousled hair) “My Mum?”
“No! MY Mum. I mean, my Wife.”
*
Richard visits me, looking solemn as a heron, folding up into my wheelchair and radiating a gentle humour. It is only now, after two months, that I can see people without weeping and feeling unworthy of their concern.
*
Had I had the choice I would have switched myself off on several occasions, but no switch was made available.
*
Rachel visited. She looked beautiful again; it was good to see her. She told me she has Hepatitis C – this is a liver disease, probably contracted through the use of dirty needles, I don’t know much about it, but it’s fairly serious. Rachel is training to be a midwife, she is in her third year of training, making what seems a step forward from years of stasis. The diagnosis is not yet certain, but she has antibodies, her liver function is impaired.
I looked at her and wept. I loved her all over again.
“Now we’ll have to do something for you” I said, “We’ll all have to follow each other round in a circle with swabs.”
These are the drug-wars, my darlings, the wars we wage upon ourselves, the wars we always lose.
*
When I was transferred to the Neurological Rehabilitation Unit I was taken upright in an ambulance, rather than lying on a trolley. This later caused me severe pain in reaction, as my back was so weak. I saw a number of magpies en route, and tried to interpret them in my usual desperate, superstitious way. On arrival, I was placed in a bed in a bay which was occupied by several men in the last throes of a television addiction. In my first few hours I was subjected to ‘Pet Rescue’, ‘15 to 1’, Countdown’ and ‘The Weakest Link’. In my normal life outside hospital I would have killed, left home, broken a marriage, or committed suicide in order to avoid any and certainly all of these. I do not even own a television, although there are some shows I actively enjoy. I had to call a nurse and make a fuss. I could not read poetry. Some people have the television on as though it were a window, but it is not a window, it whispers insidious madness, it poisons the mind with insistent assumptions.
I was lucky. A certain amount of bed-juggling took place and I was moved near the nurses’ desk on the main ward. I was then left for the weekend in my new bed with no therapy of any sort, of course, since nothing happens at the weekend in hospital. I gradually adapted to my new surroundings and the culture of the new hospital, as each hospital, even each ward, has its own way of working, its own culture, customs and schedules.
*
Due to the fantastic success of my ill-health diet plan, I have lost two stone in a month. I now weigh approximately the same as an eleven-year-old rat. Combine this with the attention-span of a sardine, and you have an assessment of my general condition, which is fairly impressive, I hope you will agree.
*
I need weeping each day, just as a cow needs milking.
*
I have back and shoulder pain because during my operation it was considered necessary to amputate one of my wings.
*
Doing some dying.
*
Night Staff
The three witches show Eric a photograph of a pig, and tell him it is of him when he was a child. “No, No” Eric shouts, clearly distressed. It’s about all he can manage to say.
Earlier, they had refused me a sick bowl because the drug trolley wasn’t locked. I was sick on the floor.
*
Ask not for whom the phone rings, it rings for thee.
*
Under my new care regime, nurses wake me up every four hours to check if I am asleep. This morning I woke up in order to tell them when they arrived.
*
A nurse comes to give me my four-hourly shot of antibiotics. These are fed to me through a waspy tube (canula) inserted into my vein in my arm. The antibiotics sting and make the vein swell, and the tube, which is inserted on a long needle, has to be moved every so often, sometimes once a day, sometimes less often. This has left me with a number of small wounds like bee-stings over my arms. I shall soon run out of vein.
This nurse distracts me efficiently with a number of stories: the Police helicopter was out last night looking at a man on the roof of a nearby block of flats; the hospital is funded and staffed by four different trusts, each of which has different priorities, protocols and procedures. Her husband had intravenous antibiotics when he had ‘the snip’. He was in hospital for a week. When he came home, she bought him a card and some sweets, and perhaps thinking this was romance enough, threw them onto the bed, where they landed between his legs. He contracted internal bleeding and was taken back to hospital. He got so swollen he could not move, and on his next discharge was issued with a truss. One morning the dog ate it. The nurse became overcome by the humour of the situation, and her husband more and more cross. Tragedy and comedy are different sides of the same coin.
*
The Woman, my (ex) Lover came to see me (not for the first time, poor darling). The erotic charge she carries is incredible. It was just over a week ago that I saw the consultant, who asked me whether, when I needed a wee, I woke with an erection. I had said no, but that I knew where he was heading with this line of questioning, and that I thought things would be all right. Ever since then I’ve been getting worried. I hadn’t thought much about sex, but impotence, or sexual dysfunction, is another matter, calling into question my sense of being. I started wondering about Viagra, and feeling foolish and miserable, since no-one would want to go to bed with me anyway now that I am an old cripple. I wonder what sort of a relationship I could have without the prospect of sex.
What are relationships about, anyway?
We looked at each other and kissed. She brought me a lamp and some books, which was great, but it was her that I wanted. I was so pleased to see her that I lit up.
She sat on the bed and I rubbed available bits of her. After a while Nurse Philip came and said I had a phone-call, but that he’d told them I was busy. Which I was.
“Would you like some privacy?” he asked, and drew the curtain across the bed. He then went out to the car-park and got run over by an invalid carriage.
“You
ought to watch where you’re going, young man.” said the occupant. I’m sure it
was our fault, we had distracted him. Phil had to go to A&E in
The Woman, my (ex) Lover lay beside me on the bed and we cuddled and snogged. I got an erection for the first time in two months and more. She felt me up, rubbing my cock through my trousers. I undid her trousers and put my hand inside. When she was about to go she had to rearrange herself. She pulled up her top and I intervened, kissing her breasts and sucking her nipples. I kept thinking of the lubricant I had stolen earlier and hidden in my washbag. I wanted to fuck, or at least to try, or at least to rub lubricant over her until she had an orgasm, or at least became insanely aroused. I think I could have had sex. This is not bad for a man with a broken back. She is an erotic miracle: I have always known that.
However, we resisted, telling each other we were naughty adolescents.
“Spank
I gave her a gentle, symbolic slap on her blue-jeaned bottom.
She pulled her top straight, her breasts pushing against her tight, thin, rust-coloured knitted top.
“You’ve made me all wet.” she said, pulling a face.
*
When Wendy came the next day, or the day after, I wept, and told her we never know the harm we do until afterwards. I meant me, of course, in regard to her, and Sarah, and Emily, my daughter. She had told me she was terrified of me at Em’s birthday, when we were playing wink-murder, and this had stuck in my mind. She brought me a card and a hyacinth and my washing which Em had taken away and dried improperly. She was lovely, of course. I told her about the Woman, my (ex) Lover coming to Lewes to tell me we were over. I said she must have done it to cause me extra pain. I wept and wept, saying that I hoped it was over now, that I couldn’t stand it any more, it was too much. I do believe it, it is true, but it seems we cannot choose who we love, or how and when we love them.
*
I heard a friend of mine on Radio 3 last night. This seemed utterly bizarre, and gave me a shock. Why not me? I wonder.
***
The world could not decide what to put on today, and has stayed in bed.
*
CHRISTMAS
In any case, Christmas is the pressure-cooker of the emotions. Family steam builds up, fuelled by alcohol, greed, inactivity, boredom. Tension mounts, the expectation of festive goodwill and the general perfection of happiness contrasts so acutely with reality that an unbridgeable gap opens between life as advertised and life as it is experienced. Not only that, but the solitary, the lonely, the disconnected are made to feel the full measure of their exclusion from family life, so determinedly glorified in the media at this time. The whole tradition and the entire force of the media are devoted to the glorification of the family through consumerist excess.
So it might be quite a relief to be excused Christmas, but being excused Christmas on account of being in hospital does not sound promising. Hospital food does not seem adequate to expectations of the occasion. Ill people do not suggest themselves as ideally cheerful companions. Besides which, Christmas in Hospital entails a lot of enforced jollity. Entertainments. Cards. Ghastly, cliche-ridden seasonal music. Miserably inadequate baubles and tinsel lost on institutional corridors. Grimly determined nursing assistants long past middle-age wearing glittering novelty headgear, or flashing electric reindeer antlers whilst carrying bedpans and mopping up sick.
There was an adequate lunch, involving something like Christmas pudding. A few days before, Phil had put on a concert, playing the keyboard and singing. He did Tom Lehrer’s ‘Poisoning pigeons in the park’, which made me laugh. Sarah, the Mother of my daughter came to visit me, borrowing her Mother’s car, which meant she had to go to Christmas dinner with her. This was intensely brave, indeed, quite heroic. It was really good of her to visit me. She brought me some underwear and a bag of things from her Mother including the autobiography of Malcolm Muggeridge, which I refused. The Woman, my (ex) Lover rang me up. She was happy and fine; it was lovely to hear her.
The caterers knocked off at lunchtime. All that was provided for the evening meal were sandwiches. The nurses Peter (an Aberdonian mod who owned a fishtail parka with bullet holes in it and a red Lambretta) and Sarah provided some food, Peter home-made sausage rolls, and Sarah a quiche. Between us, Val and I (mostly Val) provided assorted cheeses, salad, olives, bread, nuts and yoghurt. Other patients must have produced something from inside their false limbs and dressing-gowns because the two tables on Bluebell ward (to which Val had invited James) were covered with food, and the assembled patients participated in a scattered but considerable feast. Val looked askance at uninvited guests, strangers to us, on the other table, people who had come in for Christmas, I think, having nowhere else to go. ‘I hate gatecrashers.’ she said.
Joy, a tiny wizened lady with a whispery voice who had lost one leg to an operation sat with us. We pulled crackers and I read out the awful jokes, courting universal unpopularity. I put on my paper hat. We were all surprisingly jolly: having expected so little it seemed as though we had achieved something. Expecting little is a good start, if it can be arranged.
*
My mother keeps sending me yoghurt through the post. I daren’t eat it, and have to throw it away.
*
It’s
2003. Thank Christ for that. It can’t be worse, can it? I wouldn’t have thought
so. Lots of fireworks went off at
*
Eric is imitating a colony of parrots again in protest against being washed. Sometimes he makes enraged donkey noises. He is much better though, he used only to make these noises and recite a litany of his family members ‘My Mum is Jacky, my Dad is Robin, my Brother is.....’ because this was all he knew or could remember. Then he would ask where he was, and when he was going home.
This annoyed the piss out of me, frankly, I being at that time in the bed next to him. I tried to answer his questions, but information clearly had no portal through which to enter his spotty brain.
*
This is not meant to be a series of writings about love, but about illness (and, I hope, recovery), but of course everything is about love if it is about anything at all.
My ribs, which are stoved in like those of a sparrow that’s been kicked into the kerb, stick out at crazed angles with little nubs and daft weldings. It’s damp today: there are 130 flood warnings, and my ribs ache. Phil is coming soon to pump antibiotics down my I/V tube, which will sting like ant venom. The muscles down the right-hand side of my back are agony when I try to get upright and straighten my spine. I have been woken every four hours now for a fortnight.
I’m really quite happy.
*
I’m beginning to even out a bit, I think, neither quite so up or so down, although last night I was whimpering and biting the sheets whenever they gave me the antibiotics, and today I had a go at the physiotherapist for saying “Nothing’s impossible” and generally treating me like a child. I told her to cycle up Everest for me tomorrow. There was a single huge glossy magpie sunning itself in the garden outside the gym window as my knees buckled and I collapsed onto the bed.
I’m
knackered now, and my legs are wobbly. I think the antibiotics are nearly over.
I hope so. Then they can grow another blood culture and find out if I’m still
infected. I got diahorrea and vomiting in
*
I would like a short holiday from my body, even though I know there is no ‘me’ independent of this physicality. To be imprisoned (or less pejoratively) contained within or transferred to a jar, vat, computer or other container would probably be even worse.
I have always assumed, even declared, that I am my body, and that there is no possibility of my existence without it, but in view of my recent physical and mental experiences I think I should modify my position at least to this extent: I believe now that there is a certain distinction between the physical and the mental which, in the case of the most highly developed saints might mean a delay of about three days between physical and mental disintegration.
This, (as my wise, mad friends have suggested to me) might explain why Christ rose after three days, and the traditions around the departure of the soul from the corpse.
*
This morning it was snowy with snow. It was white on the roofs of the huddled houses. Then the sun came out and melted them red again.
*
They sit now in a golden sun, reflecting orange brilliancies from their windows.
*
It’s a bright, frosty morning. A lovely day for a walk. Ironic, how we want what we cannot achieve. Flocks of pointillist gulls flicker off and on. Clouds sit on the downs, fat and mulberry coloured.
*
The fog has remained on the tip of the downs beyond the houses and the various roads, beyond the line of trees, the fence. It has held itself at the entrance to the tunnel, where the red lights disappear after going up the hill, and the white lights emerge from the other side before descending.
It’s getting dark now, the streetlights are winking on, orange.
*
No-one’s come to see me for three days at least. All weekend I’ve been stewing in hospital juice. Val and I ordered a pizza yesterday, which was some sort of fun, but I feel musty and divorced from the current of my own life. If it even has a current any more. Perhaps the batteries have gone flat.
I’ve even lost more weight, a feat seemingly impossible for a stick. I need people to come and see me, people I know, who have something I understand to talk about. I am running out of self.
*
SUZY
They
took Suzy away to
“Kinnell” I shouted, not having been warned beforehand.
They tried to get hold of Terry, her boyfriend, but had to make do with her niece in the end, which will not go down well, I fear. Terry, a shambling, florid pink torpedo with sparse, ill-fitting teeth and thin blond hair is the son of a gangster, a London-next-the-Sea wide boy in the antiques trade, with a knitted gold ring and a supply of submerged violence.
Terry told me about the death of his father, who shrank from 15 to 5 stone, refusing medication.
“He was a tough man.” he said.
His brother wanted only the money, the house. Terry inherited only a watch. He is filled with anger towards his brother who, he said ‘stole’ from his father and did not recognise his illness. Now his brother is in hospital he will not visit him. He’s fallen out with Suzy’s mother, who’s ‘accused’ him of something, and he seems by his own account an unforgiving man.
No
sooner had they taken Suzy off to
The Firemen knew what it was at once.
“Toast smells good.” they said, “Who did this?”
“Ere Dave, I’ve found a red one.” a fireman called out as we castored back in, having located the guilty toaster by her blush. As soon as they left the alarm promptly went off on the ground floor. I expect toast to be banned, like mobile phones.
*
It was after my mother visited me for the first time that I succumbed to the new infection that every hospital also seems to have (and to give to me). It was nothing to do with her. I tried to stand after physiotherapy, lost my balance and hit the bed. I was trying to attract the attention of the ward Doctor in order to get something the Department of Social Security required of me. The Nurses were cross with me, assuming that it was my fault, but shortly after that I started sweating so much that I soaked my bed twice a night. I then had a violent peak of high temperature. I was ill.
It turned out that I had two separate infections, one urinary and the other in my blood. This is why I am being woken every four hours to be injected with new pain.
*
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