I started hallucinating at about 10am, just after taking the third sort of antibiotic I'd tried in three days. It wasn't unpleasant. Although I had worn all the hippy gear in the 1960s, I'd never taken LSD, unlike most of my friends. I was a politico - one of the organisers of the anti-Vietnam war movement and the big demonstrations in Grosvenor Square that turned violent - too serious, or too scared of a bad trip, to drop acid. So I can't directly compare the two experiences, though they sound similar. During my hallucination I saw images of my past life in brilliant technicolour, flashing, one after the other, in quick succession and, in the background, a gentle humming. I'm not sure whether it was a sound or the experience of my fever coming under control.
Ominously, I knew I was ill before I felt ill. The ladies of the bed chamber, the carers who arrive to put me to bed each night, reported that my urine bag was full of blood. I have a suprapubic catheter - it was inserted into my bladder through my belly soon after I broke my neck and was learning to live as a tetraplegic - and the moment at which it is changed every month is the moment when the risk of infection is at its highest.
My temperature began to climb. The feeling was very different to the more common symptoms of high temperature which I have when I suffer from autonomic dysreflexia. (This is the term for what happens when something goes wrong with my body that I can't feel; my blood pressure goes up rapidly and my head and shoulders start to sweat - the only parts of my body that I can feel.) This time, I didn't sweat as my temperature climbed. I just began to feel terribly hot and started to pant like a dog trying to lose heat.
The worst part, though, was the unbearable "feeling" in my legs and arms. This was very strange as, of course, I cannot feel in 80% of my body. On the other hand, I always know when I am hungry or have eaten enough. How can this be? One of my personal assistants (the live-in kind of carer, in this case a medical student), came up with a tentative explanation: he thought the communication mechanism might be the blood passing through my brain.
Whatever it is, the feeling in my limbs was dreadful: not exactly pain - I had to interrupt my wife, Val, when she described it as pain to one of the doctors who came; I was afraid they would think it was the onset of phantom pain (please God, not that!). Rather, my arms and legs felt hot and swollen and full of tension. I had an uncontrollable desire to thrash around in bed, but of course I couldn't move.
When the feeling was at its worst, the tension could be relieved only by moaning out loud, and on a few occasions, by roaring at the top of my voice, much to the alarm of those looking after me. Normally, I am a reasonably good patient, in the sense that when ill I tend to curl up and go into myself. But this was different. I needed a fan blowing full on me and a succession of cold wet flannels bathing my head and (far too many) paracetamol to get the damn temperature under control.
The first night (why is it always night-time or the weekend when you need a doctor?) we had to call the GP cooperative for our area. This takes several hours as you have to go first to a receptionist, then wait for a return call from a nurse, then again for a doctor. When the "doctor" came, he wasn't - he was an "emergency care practitioner", a very nice young man, called Steve, dressed in a smart blue uniform. He had been a paramedic but had undergone further training.
Steve diagnosed a kidney infection, quite severe, and gave me an antibiotic.
It didn't work and I reverted to my virtual thrashing and actual roaring. The next day, a different antibiotic. That didn't work either, and I resumed the desperate histrionics for another day and night before, on the third day, bull's-eye! Immediate relief as the new antibiotic brought the temperature under control at last.
From there on in, it was a matter of stuffing antibiotics, ibuprofen and paracetamol down my gullet at regular intervals and drinking litres of every kind of liquid. I was very weak and had to stay in bed for eight days in all (I got up one day but had a relapse) until my urine was clear again.
Staying in bed this length of time would normally have driven me mad - once, unable to move, I had become almost suicidal - but Val sat next to me reading her own book and turning the pages of mine, so I read and slept the time away.
A week in the life of a tetraplegic ...
