The day my body broke down

I needed to pee.

I had woken up in the dark and I needed to pee. There was nothing
unusual about this; I often had a cup of tea or warm milk late in the
evening and when I did it would hit my bladder at about three in the
morning. I didn't bother to switch on the light, the loo was en suite
and I just needed to feel my way to the opposite side of the room and I
would soon find relief. I was living in a self-contained attic flat in
my mother's house, the ceiling was low and the stairs were narrow, so I
had no bed, just a mattress on the floor. I started to attempt to roll
over off bed - and couldn't move.

I wasn't worried, I thought I must have been sleeping particularly
heavily on my right side and all the muscles had, as they say, gone to
sleep. So I lay there for a few moments waiting for the pins and
needles to start tickling which would mean that sensation was
returning.

Nothing happened.

It was only my right arm and leg I couldn't move, my left side seemed
unaffected. I reached up and switched on the light with my
fully-operative left hand and lay there trying to work out what had
happened. For three years I had been experiencing epileptic fits, fits
which caused the muscles in my right leg and arm to seizure. After
x-rays and cat scans and mri's and angiograms it was concluded that
some of the blood vessels supplying the left lobe of my brain were
unnaturally tangled and causing electrical impulses to jump erratically
around the motor control section for my right side. Like when you put a
current through a frog's leg and watch it jerk about. I was that frog.
It didn't take much thought to see that this apparent disappearance of
all the muscles on my right side was somehow linked to my
epilepsy.

After a while it became clear that nothing was going to change and this
was becoming serious. What could I do? There was no phone and I was
alone in the room. My mother's room was directly below mine so I
started thumping on the floor with my working fist and shouting out for
her. And I shouted and thumped and thumped and shouted. When I thought
I was stuck there for the whole night with no idea what my body had
done to me, a sleepy voice came up the stairs.

"What on earth's the matter?"

"Um, I have a bit of a problem...."

I found I was trying to make light of the situation and get her to call
a doctor at the same time. It's odd how you don't want to scare your
mother even when you are on the verge of panic yourself. When I finally
convinced her that waiting until the morning and "seeing if it was
better" was not an option, she went off to call our doctor.

The rest of the night went past in a blur of increasing activity. The
doctor came, asked questions, did various physical tests and looked
worried. He called for an ambulance. The ambulance arrived. I was
strapped into a little chair and carried down two flights of narrow
stairs. I managed to joke that the next time I did this sort of thing
I'd make sure I was on the ground floor. The ambulance took me to a
hospital ward where I was helped into a bed, surrounded by screens and
tapped, hummed over and questioned by a couple of tired doctors.

At about seven in the morning, as it was starting to get light, the
nurses' shift was changing and breakfast was being served to the other
patients, one of the doctors returned to tell me I had had a stroke.
And that, as far as he was concerned, was that. He went off duty and
walked, on his two completely healthy legs, home to his family.

And so the rest of my life began....