"It matters a great deal who is going to win, but not at all who won"
The world I fell out of
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Melanie Reid, 4thEstate, London, 2019. ISBN 978-0-00-829137-2
This is a compelling tale of life after a riding fall left the author paralysed from the chest down. The story is written with emotion, with reason and throughout with (black) humour. As a professional writer she uses her talents to describe the indescribable.Ironically a major “healing” moment was the realization that “I’ve got to tell people about. I’ve got to write about it”, something she did from an early stage in her Times newspaper “Spinal column”. Even so, this somehow involved accepting that she had been irrevocably changed from a doer to an observer.
The book’s dedication is to her husband and son whom she has forced “to live in a parallel universe”. This is a common theme, her anxiety not about her own plight, but about what she has inflicted on others, even to the point to telling her husband he can leave her if he wants to. Remarkably, too there is a sense of positivity that she has managed to achieve more than the doctors ever thought would.
She constantly finds words to express the inexpressible: “Losing the use of one’s legs is profound, an event so fundamentally wrong that it catapults you through a door which no one else who has full function can possibly enter, into a place which often is the loneliest place in the world” or “Nothing at all-can prepare you for the appearance of those paralysed limbs sprawled where you do not feel them to be on the bed lifeless and somehow deeply misshapen”.
The experience of losing control was a compound fracture of the soul or being taken hostage by paralysis, being taken through a door into a world you did know existed. The staff who turned her during the night worked like a Formula 1 pitstop team. Her experience of the mechanical aid to help her walk was “Wallace and Gromit in The Wrong Trousers”. There is the daily experience of starting all over again fighting your way out of your prison, her body was, in effect, her prison – and a prison sentence with no hope of parole. The prison metaphor is widely used.
At times she reflects deeply, trying to make sense of the accident. Her analysis of the effects beyond the physical are that “paralysis had robbed me of most of my personality” with her former confidence, power and decisiveness, for example, removed from her. In one paragraph she expresses frustration with religious explanations concluding that “Terrible things happened at random to lovely people, or natural disasters swept away thousands, it belied the existence of a protective loving divinity”.
She writes with insight and humour of the experience of being in a public place in a wheelchair, always at fart height. It is as if there is a tannoy annoucement “There’s a cripple in the room!” and again “Cripple heading for Ladies! Make way!”
Among the poignant descriptions of her experience she uses are:
• Getting up was a ritual like preparing a medieval knight for battle
• First, the nurses have to dress you. It feels like they are stuffing a giant sausage.
• I was rolled to get the hoist cradle under me and lifted up to dangle for all the world like a dead cow in an abattoir
• sent to university to do a degree in humility.
• congregated in the manner of elderly tortoises around the hand therapy table in our wheelchairs
• the dead who did not die yet may not live
• in the gym, I was like child at Disneyland too small to go on the most exciting rides.
• I was a secretary trying to do her job while wearing a pair of leather boxing gloves.
• I fell off my horse, I nose-dived like Alice down the rabbit hole, from the upper world the lower one, a place I didn’t know about.
• When I ventured out getting me in and out of the car seemed akin to transporting a large circus animal.
• Robert the Bruce’s Spider, I suspect, would have said “bugger this for a game of soldiers” and given up.
• A never-ending tie-break in final set and I was facing yet another advantage point against me.
• A full-time conscript in that army I never knew existed.
It is a profound book which lifts the lid on a world most of us never think about. It is not a comfortable read by will have you – with the author’s permission – laughing loudly.