As I became used to hospital life and formed a more detailed mental map of the corridor ceiling and its ambushes, I turned dodging the drops into an organised sport. I would steer the trolley myself in a lordly way, not with my body but my voice. I was the captain and the porter was my crew. The captain doesn’t need to steer the ship himself, or climb the mast, or drop the anchor. All he needs is the voice of command. A voice doesn’t need legs.
So I’d call out, ‘Left a bit!’ or ‘Hard right!’ and if the porter was in a mood to play he might give the trolley quite a swerve. At first I issued orders more or less on a random basis, since I couldn’t see where the obstructions and free spaces in the corridor might actually be. Little by little I became more sophisticated in my driving. In time I learned to detect the presence of superior powers by the way even a coöperative porter, responsive to my commands, would suddenly slow down and abandon any deviation from the straight. Then I would sing out, ‘Good morning, Sister!’ from where I lay, before her face even came into view above me, looking down as if she was on the point of telling me off, the moment she had managed to decide exactly what it was that I was doing wrong.
Years in a kiln
The physiotherapists weren’t working out how they could get me to walk. That was far too ambitious. They were working out how to get me to sit. Without significant movement in my hips I could either stand — if supported — or lie down, but nothing in between.
The régime at the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital, in line with the ethic of the period, was determined to get people to walk, however badly they did it. Wheelchairs were regarded as soft options certain to sap the fighting spirit. As assessed by this philosophy my case was paradoxical. It would take arduous months of physiotherapy before I would even be able to sit in a wheelchair for long enough to have my fighting spirit sapped.
The physiotherapy team weren’t addressing the disease, they were trying to reverse some of the damage done by the treatment. Still’s had affected my joints, and inactivity had made things much worse. Those years in bed had been a sort of kiln slowly baking my joints into hardness. Bed rest had caused my muscles to waste away, with the honourable exception of my quadriceps. The physios would do what they could with what I had left.
I had to get used to my built-up shoes. I had to learn how to use a wheelchair, and then in the distant future I was supposed to learn not to use it, to devise some approximation to walking.
It doesn’t sound as if sitting in a wheelchair is something you need to learn. It’s a chair, isn’t it? You sit in it. It’s not as simple as that if your hips are stuck in one position. My posture wasn’t fixed so that my lower half continued the line of the upper — there was a bend of a sort, so that my legs were at an angle of perhaps 160 degrees to my torso. I couldn’t sit, exactly, but I could perch on the edge of the seat. Because there was a little flexibility in the lower spine, I could make the limited bend appear greater than it was. I could even seem to be ‘sitting comfortably’, in true Listen with Mother style, but this was an optical illusion. All of it took effort. To start with, until my muscles became strong enough to hold me up, I could only sit in the wheelchair for short periods. Later when I went back home on weekend visits and even went socialising with Mum, I could manage reasonably well perched on an ordinary chair, as long as some kindly soul didn’t come bustling along with a footstool, in which case my body went hurtling backwards and all impression of ease went out of the window.
If I had Jim Shaeffer to thank for giving me a watch that kept my right elbow marginally active, then certainly Dr Duckett deserves some credit for helping me resist atrophy in one crucial area at least. In the history of my health, though, he is a complex figure.
It was only much later that I understood that cortisone had actually been tried on me, and then abandoned, during the years of misdiagnosis and bed rest. Dr Duckett had tried prescribing cortisone at one point, and watched in amazement while I ran around as if there was nothing whatever the matter with me. Yet somehow he misliked the drug, despite the apparent miracle of its working. He didn’t trust it. He told Mum that he wanted to discontinue the treatment — the results were just too dramatic. He was too experienced a physician to believe that any drug could just abolish an illness, when there was no question of curing it. It went against everything he knew about the relationship of the sick body with medicine.
The amazing thing was that Mum went along with him. Of course this was before she understood that a doctor might know less about what was wrong with her son than a magazine that someone had left in a dentist’s waiting room (rare condition or no, he should have done a bit of homework). But Mum had been a nurse, however unsatisfactorily and for however short a period, and nurses normally have a healthy disrespect for the doctors after whose decisions humbler professionals have to clean up.
Even about the big issue of misdiagnosis she was remarkably forbearing. By rights Duckett should have been disgraced in her eyes. Of course it’s always comforting to have someone to blame, but there was still an awful lot of taking-it-on-the-chin in the national culture.
Authority had prestige, right down to the level of village policeman and general practitioner. Even the postman had an aura vulnerable only to dogs. Mum accepted the mistakes of authority as having the force of fate, rather than anything as trivial as human error, and she never said a word against him.
In the earlier, lesser case of the steroids, she had taken his professional advice even when it was a substantial violation of common sense. Take the boy off these new-fangled drugs — they’re doing him far too much good.
A dispersed function
Perhaps there was an extra factor at work. Sometimes it happens that a mundane communication taps into a deeper source of meaning. A buried spiritual charge turns ordinary lower-case sentences into commands blazing with capitals and italics, all the curlicues of presence, so that a debatable proposition is instantly proven. Not that Dr Duckett was necessarily a spiritually commanding figure. The guru is a dispersed function as well as a real presence. The guru can requisition any tongue, speak out of any mouth at any time. And so Mum had followed Dr Duckett’s directions, even though my immediate and seeming health relapsed dramatically as a result of her obedience.
My dreams of pushing Peter over, of being punished, of not wanting to go to bed in case I never got out again, all these were memories of a real period of two weeks when I was five. It’s just that it was so unlike the experience of what came before and after that I meekly relegated it to the category of the nightly unreal.
Guru or no guru, Dr Duckett was a religious man, which in a strange way may explain his resistance to the wonder drug of the era, even when he saw its effects at first hand. Rather than actually restoring people to health perhaps he saw himself as ministering to the sick. He had the pessimism I have often noticed in practitioners of conventional medicine.
While I was in the hospital at Taplow he gave me a Bible. I had a Bible-cull a few years ago, when I was feeling particularly got at by the local Christians, and it’s the only Christian book to have escaped. A whole box of holy tomes was lugged down to the charity shop, but this one survived the purge.
Only when I looked again at the book, at the time of that cull, did I see that my doctor’s name was actually Ducat. Ducat like the money in Shakespeare. Ducat like the middle part of educate. His name was imprinted on my mind for all those years, yes, but misprinted.