Dignity

It has been a testing year in the most literal sense, in that there have been plenty of tests, and she has been there for all of them. She was there the time they packed me off, childlike in pyjamas, into the rattling white tube. She was there the time they attached the electrodes to my hand and elbow and turned the dial. She watched as my arm twitched into the air, a levitation, a magic trick. “It was like a Hitler salute.” she told me later on, smiling despite herself, and so, to my surprise, did I.

She was there when they put the drops in my eyes, when I sat in the café, pupils the size of dinner plates, unable to see things properly, the world all bright blurry edges and swimming shapes, like photos from a camera where the light seals have started to perish. She made me put on her ridiculous outsized sunglasses and took pictures. “Look, you’re cute!” she said. Looking at them afterwards the silliness appealed to me. The holes in my eyes and the shape of the world had returned to something like normal, and only the good things were still extraordinary. They didn’t learn a lot about me in all those tests, but I learned a lot about her.

So naturally, she is also there when they put the camera down my throat.

We go into the room together and she sits in the corner. There is always a chair in the corner, in these rooms, and it’s always where she sits. They get me to lie on the coach on my side and then they ask me some questions. They ask if it’s okay to use my first name, and without thinking, I say yes. It’s a low and dirty trick, asking that. They don’t tell you just how many times you’re going to hear your name spoken in the next twenty minutes, like a mantra, like an incantation. If I’d known I would have bloody-mindedly said no, got them to call me Sir instead. Let’s see how they build trust and rapport now, I’d have thought to myself.

The ineffective, inadequate anaesthetic spray in my throat is next. It is given the bare minimum of time to work, only just long enough for me to register how vile it tastes. Then the guard goes in my mouth, like being at the dentist. I’m not scared of the dentist. You could almost think it’s innocent then, right until the point where they get me to swallow the tube. “One big gulp” says the nurse, jovially belittling what I’m about to do. It’s not a sensation I can properly describe; imagine swallowing something that never ends, for what feels like forever, and you might get close enough. I hope you cannot really imagine it, I wouldn't want you to be able to.

All I can hear is the rushing sound of the fluid in my mouth, my breathing, harsh and jagged, the nurses repeatedly saying my name, cajoling me, telling me to breathe. I am facing away from her, away from the screen. Even if I wasn’t I would still have my eyes shut. I’ve always been frightened of what I look like on the inside. I try to pick out, in the smallest of gaps between all those noises, a supportive silence from the corner. It’s one of the only things that helps.

I’m not one of life’s stoics, so I’m no reliable judge of whether this is anywhere near as awful to watch as it is to experience. I sort of hope it is. But how would anybody know? I can’t move or make any noise at all. I wish they’d stop saying my bloody name. I wish I could tell them that. But I can’t say anything, I can only lie mute, a jangling bundle of sensations I can’t ignore. If time flies when you’re having fun, it shuffles on its knees across broken glass at times like this. Everything is in the worst kind of slow motion, the slow motion in which accidents, disasters and sporting injuries always seem to happen. I could have been there for hours or seconds and I just wouldn’t have a clue.

The consent form I signed and gave to the nurse when I first arrived uses the word “invasive”. I can think of dozens of better, more accurate adjectives but if they were on the form instead nobody would ever sign it. The information sheet I was supposed to look at beforehand is folded up in her bag. I never did; I asked her to read it for me and tell me whether I had anything to worry about. I can’t be trusted to decide what to worry about, another test, a test I always fail.

An eternity later, they tell me they have got to the end of the procedure and that the camera is coming back up. Another lie; what they mean is that we’re at the halfway mark. This is when the retching begins in earnest, awful heaving with every tortuous millimetre. That noise sounds like it’s coming from somebody other than me, would that it felt like it did. I wonder if I could get the tube out quicker this way, but it seems not; the nurses sound worried. There is an urgent, hectoring tone to their voices as they keep telling me how brilliantly I am doing. I bet they say that to everybody. I bet they lie through their teeth to everybody.

I am lying in the foetal position as they draw this thing out of me, the hugest of rabbits from the tiniest of hats, rising up like a clichéd snake from a charmer’s basket. And they keep saying my name, again and again, so much that they’ve put me off it, telling me to concentrate on my breathing. It’s a grotesque parody of childbirth. Finally it is done and I am sitting up, no euphoric glow, nothing to cradle in my arms, no photographs of the beautiful moment, just a feeling of shame and confusion. Then I see all the blood on the pillow.

“What’s that?”

My throat still works. I wasn’t sure until that exact moment that it would.

“It’s nothing to worry about. It’s standard when we take a biopsy.”

The specialist sits me down and gives me the diagnosis. Still traumatised, I’m not in a fit state to take any of it in. It’s as if my brain is speed reading everything he says, condensing it down to one word, hernia, and when I realise that I feel old. Hernias strike me as something that old people have. They probably are, I probably am. I am handed more fact sheets, I in turn hand them to her. She can read them later for me, tell me how worried to be. I feel weak and bewildered as we leave the hospital and walk to the car. Cold, too: the air is biting and I can’t put my jacket on because the shoulder of my t-shirt is soaked with liquid. I don’t know what it is and would rather not be told, which is my attitude to a lot of things.

We drive home in silence. I can still feel the tube down my throat, a phantom presence I’ll subsequently discover lasts for days. Back at the flat, in a new t-shirt, I shiver uselessly on the sofa.

"You’ll be all right." she says.

"Will I?"

I always say that; she outranks any doctor. If she says I’ll be okay I nearly believe it, even though she gets bored of me asking. I worry that eventually she’ll stop answering me, and, always superstitious, I think that will be the day things start to go badly wrong, on more levels than one.

“Of course you will. Don’t be silly. Do you want me to do your verrucas?”

“Okay.”

I remove my socks, wriggle round and position myself so the pads of my feet are poking in the air. The treatment we’ve bought is like a suction cup, firing a freezing liquid into a confined space between the tube and my feet. It’s incredibly cold for a moment, and then it’s over. I am lying on my front, size twelve feet in the air while she performs molecular gastronomy on them with something a little like liquid nitrogen. It’s not a scene I remember seeing in any romantic comedy.

“There you are, all finished.”

“Is it like having a pet sometimes?”

There’s a terrible pause and I think she’s going to say Yes. She momentarily frowns in concentration, then she smiles, then she comes out with something even worse.

“No. It’s like having a child.”

Afterwards she goes into town to shop and lunch. I would usually go with her but instead I lie alone in the bedroom, dim daylight creeping under the blind, feeling ancient, feeling sorry for myself, feeling that tube that’s no longer there. I try to drift off to sleep so I can forget. And I hope there’s still something she loves about me, because it feels like I don’t have any dignity left.