| I was going to say “I recall when I had sepsis in my teens”, but the truth of it is that I don’t - there’s a six week hole in my memory, that skips straight from lying in a pool of blood and puss on the floor of the kitchen at school, having a mop thrust in my face, to lying in a bed in hospital with tubes snaking out of me. The weird thing is, despite being unconscious for over a month, I woke up feeling like I hadn’t missed anything, and even now I look back at this with slight disbelief - surely you’re thinking of someone else, surely it wasn’t that long. I felt like I’d been out longer after a general for surgery a few years ago. They did run a whole battery of neurological tests on me once I was conscious and eating - they were pretty surprised I had no obvious brain damage - I had maintained a fever over 108 for several days, despite ice baths and the, what, 20g of daily antibiotics? I do wonder if there was some, but rather more subtle than what was being looked for. Re-integrating was weird. For everyone else I’d been as good as dead - they’d seen me carted off in an ambulance, and then a few weeks later term had ended. I on the other hand basically went straight from the end of one school term to the beginning of the next with zero intervening time, and nobody could figure out why I was pissed off. They kept asking me about what had happened - and I answered honestly that they probably knew more than I did. It also sucked that I had no soft landing back into classes, and in the time I’d been unconscious they’d started calculus - I came back and had to differentiate and integrate and had no frigging idea what I was actually doing - I remember sitting in an A-level maths exam a year later and finally having the revelation that it was about curves and rates of change. All this because I had what looked like a zit on my knee. It grew until I couldn’t fit trousers over my leg, school offered me a sticking plaster, and said I wasn’t getting out of sport that easily. Then my leg opened up one night fetching water in the kitchen, and I lost consciousness. I’ll never forget the sight of custard in crude oil swirling over the linoleum - perhaps that’s one side effect of the coma - my last conscious moment is vivid in the extreme. Anyway, that brush with death didn’t change my outlook one bit, but then again I was an invincible 16 year old. The ones since then have definitely left their mark. |