'My Year Off' by Robert McCrum

On 29 May 2012 I was 47 years old and sitting writing at the small green table in the sitting room when I found I was incapable of using my left hand. I found this confusing and somewhat frustrating (though, strangely, not frightening), so, after one-handedly peeling and eating the egg I had boiled for myself, I decided I should probably go to the hospital and one-handedly drove myself there (not a good idea, in retrospect). When I arrived I realised I was in fact feeling rather strange, and, after a CAT scan, I was told that I had had an ischemic stroke, though a very mild one. Control of my hand returned after a few hours, and, after a sleepless night and day in hospital with electrodes on my chest, an MRI, an echocardiogram and every kind of blood test, I returned home to recuperate through three months of gradually abating mental fatigue. No certain cause for the stroke was identified. I cannot say I am the same as I was before the event, partly due to neurology: the permanent loss of three small areas of my brain; partly due to psychology: the experience (the awareness of the ever-present nearness of personal cessation and the reprioritising of values consequent to this, and the loss of trust in the integrity of my person (whatever that is or was) due in part to the uncertainty of the cause of the stroke); and perhaps due to the anti-platelet medication which I am advised to take indefinitely. One day, when he was 42 and editor-in-chief of Faber & Faber, Robert McCrum woke up completely paralysed on his left side. His stroke was of a different kind from mine, and near the other end of the scale of seriousness - he spent months as an invalid lying on his back and over a year slowly recovering his function – but it is interesting correlating his experience with mine (for instance, he also was confused and irritated but unfrightened by the event; his stroke also had no identifiable cause). In this book he describes the transforming effects of being shunted the short sudden distance to disability, the reassessment and rediscovery of his life that resulted from time in the ‘antechamber of death’, and the deepening of his relationships with those who cared for and about him. The disjunction of the mental and physical aspects of existence is profoundly disconcerting, time henceforth flows differently, and the natural compulsion to look for meaning in life’s occurrences finds itself frustrated at a deep level. What carries on has a different texture from what came before.

July 2015