03-05-2025
‘I can't even stand unassisted, let alone walk, but I'm looking forward to my new life': JULIE BURCHILL has a few weeks of hospital rehab left
There's about a month to go (and about two months gone) of my projected stay in rehabilitation after life-saving surgery left me without the ability to walk. I am a puppet with severed strings; in the gym my spirit animal appears to be Orville the Duck. 'I can't!' I bleat to the physio. 'You can!' she urges me, too young to remember him.
I'm looking forward to going home more than words can say. I long to be alone in my bedroom again, even if I do have to be decanted in and out of bed. There's a reason I turned down Celebrity Big Brother twice, and that came with a six-figure reward: I'm awful at living with people. Once so easy-going, I've become a tutter; I use my first breath of the morning to tut, and my last.
To be fair, there's a lot to tut about. The nursing staff will turn their hands to anything; other employees, not so much. A man comes in to flush the taps and when asked if he can open a window, he says he can't but he'll find someone who can. A woman with a clipboard can't ring my emergency call-bell but she'll ask someone who will. The broken window by my bed is 'mended' with strips of Sellotape when I arrive here in midwinter – it's 'bracing'. As I cannot stand or walk, I need to be hoisted in a kind of big sling; there's only one that can be used in the bath, serving a ward of more than 20 people, and it has to be washed between uses. It does make you wonder where all the money spent on the NHS is going.
Inevitably, there is camaraderie in the ward. In the morning and evening we call salutations by name to each other, like in The Waltons. Occasionally, the riffing of certain ward-mates on mobile phones on the subjects of illness and death makes me, a natural Pollyanna, somewhat exasperated. They list ailments they've had, as well as the ones friends and relations have had, then it's on to people they know who have expired from aforementioned ailments. And when they've exhausted the roster of people not in the pink, sick pets get a mention!
These nuggets of nihilism are interspersed with feel-good clichés about how we are Strong Women and We Will Recover. I crave conversation about something other than sickness interspersed with fatuous positivity statements that Etsy would ban for being too saccharine.
I find myself a sourpuss more and more these days; I, who used to be called Tigger by my friends. I haven't been without a catheter since the surgery and – though I felt a certain affection towards the little bag at first – after three months, taking a paperback-sized sample of my own urine around with me makes me feel like a ventriloquist with a particularly surly puppet. I no longer mess myself, but wear a nappy (great excitement when I graduated to pull-ups) and use a commode twice a day.
Growing up, I was a shy girl; when my mother tasked me with buying toilet rolls I'd get boxes of tissues instead. Now that more people have seen my anus than Edmund White's, those days are gone; in my hoist I dangle happily waiting to be wiped, like a piñata full of excrement rather than gifts. I am praised by the cheerful young nurses for my promptness and productivity. 'Make me proud!' one of them instructs as she leaves me in my cubicle. Once, on a very rare occasion, I become tetchy when there is a mishap: 'I have urine on my hand!' I exclaim, like Lady Bracknell. My outrage, when for weeks the nurses have been performing the most intimate assistance for me, is ludicrous, and we all start laughing.
My husband Daniel praises me for being so stoic, but I only let him visit for an hour max, so he doesn't know the half of it. I don't know of any Stoic who'd sit on a commode swearing like a Steven Berkoff character because they'd been made to wait till last for their bath.
Our relationship is unusual. I know it works for many people, but I don't want to ask him to be my official carer. Though he's a lot younger than me, I've always been the tough one, health-wise, and a complete role reversal would be too much for me to handle. Because of this, I become over-brusque. When invited to ask him to the initial Patient Planning Meeting, I answered crisply, 'No, thank you – he needs to mind his own business.' At the next one, I'm very pleased he's with me.
Right from the start, when we got together illicitly, the partners-in-crime motif has been strong with us, from our toothsome youth to our toothless old age. I don't want the playful element – for me, the essential ingredient to a successful intimate relationship – to be swamped by the considerable burden of being my chief carer. Just like we always met at restaurants rather than wasted time cooking – I'd rather make more money and pay for it. Nevertheless, we've become much closer.
'I see more of you now than I did when you lived ten minutes away,' he points out in hospital one day, only half-joking. It's true I like my own space, but when he leaves I cling to him and whisper, 'Please let me come home now. I'm promise I'll never be bad again.' It's done in the character of one of the menagerie of creatures who people our private language, but we both know I partly mean it as Julie.
There are bad times to follow. An MRI shows that there's still some poison in there after my operation. I alternately convulse and freeze like a statue, the process waking me from my sleep. It's scary. I dream about my mum: 'Do you like my scar?' I ask her, displaying the line that goes from the nape of my neck to the top of my bum. 'No, I liked you the way you were before,' she answers. (My late mother was the sweetest of women and wouldn't have dreamt of saying this.)
I awake crying and remark loudly that I'd rather be dead than live this way. They send a counsellor to talk to me. When he asks, 'Do you ever feel that your thoughts are being broadcast?' I reply chirpily, 'Only for payment!' and tell him my professional name, which, being around my age, he recognises. I answer his questions frankly for an hour and at the end I say sweetly, 'If you need more, I can be heard talking about my deepest feelings on Desert Island Discs from 2013, available on BBC Sounds.'
I've appreciated my time here – principally because of the nursing staff. It's easy to fall into the 'angels' cliché but there is something superhuman about the ability of the best ones to tirelessly deal with the more harrowing and/or malodorous aspects of human life, which most of us couldn't handle for a morning, let alone every day, and so light-heartedly. They are a wonderful antidote to the common belief that human beings – especially young women – are easily traumatised or 'broken'. Only a couple out of the team of dozens act as though they find their work a bore or a chore.
I ask a friend who is also unable to walk how she reconciles her situation with her former life, when we both relished them so much while other un-handicapped people moan ceaselessly and don't seem to enjoy what they have. She says, 'I know what you mean. But if you think about it, they will be miserable all their lives, despite being able-bodied, whereas we can be happy despite our bad luck.' It's a lovely bit of wisdom, backed up by that baseline happiness survey some time back, which claimed that miseries who win the lottery soon go back to being miseries while cheery types who lose their legs go back to being cheery.
I can't even stand unassisted, let alone walk; I'm nevertheless looking forward to my new life with curiosity as well as trepidation. It won't be the lovely carefree one I had before but I'm going to give it everything I've got. And I'm going to learn to love it, too.
