Morphine

Posted 00:21 (GMT) 28th October 2007

Hello, my adoring public. I suppose you're wondering where I've been. Well, have I got a story to tell you? Yes, yes I have. I must warn you before we start that this tale is not for the faint of heart. If you are of a squeamish disposition stop reading now. This is a story about where I've been for the past week and a half. Specifically, this is a story about morphine.

Okay, it all started last Monday. I was bed-ridden with agonising abdominal pains - I was throwing up all the time, I was sweating, I was moaning - the works. It hit me suddenly - Sunday fine - Monday agony. I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't do anything. It was maddening. Tuesday I felt a little better. I expected to be back on my feet by Wednesday. Then Wednesday came - agonising abdominal pains, this time even worse than Monday. Sunday fine - Monday agony - Tuesday better - Wednesday super-agony. I was like a headless chicken with this pain. If you wake up with a stabbing pain in your gut the first thing you want to do is get up and make it stop. I got up and the pain got worse so, naturally, all I wanted to do was lie down to make it better again. It got worse. I jumped in the shower thinking the warm water would help my stomach muscles relax. That just made it worse. I tried getting back into bed. It got worse - so I got up.

I was literally running around in circles - I was sweating, I was confused. It turned out the pain was just getting worse in general and it had nothing to do with where I was. This is when you find out who your real friends are and luckily for me my flatmate Sophie was Florence Nightingale. She dropped everything and called me a doctor, then a taxi to the doctor, then rode with me in the taxi to the doctor. She was an angel. She was a saint. She was Mother Teresa. She was Elvis. She was God.

The doctor told me it was too serious for the normal dose-up and turf-out and said I needed to be on the other side of a hospital wall. Sophie, of course, rode with me in the taxi to the hospital and stayed patiently by my side in the waiting room and in the emergency surgery ward. By this point I was unable to walk - they were wheeling my ass around in a wheel chair, then a gurney. A lot of men and women came by to poke and prod me in various places and the conclusion in the end was appendicitis.

I was a little incredulous, to be honest. I would have had an easier time believing it if they'd told me Nazis had planted a small explosive device in me because of my left-wing sympathies. The appendix is vestigial, right? I never felt it when it was 'working', why should everything go wrong when it stops? It's like if the government ground to a halt because the Queen went on strike.

Anyway, they had to keep me in overnight. Sophie, bless her, finally got to go home and my parents and Liz came to visit me. It was late night on Thursday before they could cut into me and fish out the offending organ. I wasn't complaining, apparently serious head injuries take precedence over twenty-something cartoonists with dickey tummies.

They x-rayed me exactly too many times beforehand, as well. Like, three times and none of that lead-sheet-over-the-balls stuff either because of where the problem lay. I'm probably infertile now just so stern-faced men can glance at the images and say "Hmm, this shows nothing." Appendices don't show up on x-rays, folks. That's an interesting fact I can not teach the children I won't have now. Thanks.

I've been under the knife before so the surgery itself wasn't too scary. General anesthetic as before, key-hole this time. They went in through my belly button, bafflingly. This wasn't like my hernia op, though, because instead of putting something in (gauze) they were taking something out (part of my body, a whole organ). So when I came round there was none of that "Oh God there's a cut in my skin" pain but a more traumatic "Oh my God there's only a tiny cut in my skin but there's a piece of me missing" - my digestive system was reacting like America would react if Wisconsin was wiped off the map. Total chaos. So I spent another week in the hospital vomiting. All the time.

I didn't even have anything to eat all week - where was it all coming from? Did they just cut up the appendix and it's up to the patient to remove it from their bodies? I couldn't keep water down. The back of my throat was bleeding. So that's how I spent my nights - sitting up in a hot hospital bed retching into what looked like a cardboard hat, worrying that the next lurch of my stomach would rip my stitches and spray blood all over the ward.

The nurses rushed over and administered anti-sickness drugs and pain killers. Of course, I couldn't swallow tablets so they dispensed with the paracetamol and went straight for the morphine - BAM - right into my ass. It was lovely. I mean, having an ass like a pincushion wasn't, but the morphine? Ah, truly this is the opiate of the masses. It was almost worth going through a nightmarish week of torture for the sweet relief that morphine provides. Was I nervous as they pumped me full of a highly-addictive chemical which, if I had taken it two weeks previously, would have opened the twisted black door to a dangerous life of crime and drugs in which I give blow-jobs for pennies behind the bus station? Of course I was nervous - as any smack head will tell you, that's one of the side-effects. That and a sense of euphoria which is... just great.

Oh yeah, they also x-rayed me a couple of times every night too, just to make sure future generations of Bishops wouldn't darken their doors with violent nausea and an unsettling taste for Class A drugs.

These things aside, my time in the hospital was very Shawshank Redemption - trapped inside a drab building, mutilated by the staff, watching fellow in-mates lose their minds, praying that you can demonstrate your rehabilitation and be released. I have lots of stories of life on the inside but space restricts me to only mention the best.

There was a guy on my ward who tried to escape. Most of the action took place away from my bed, off-screen as it were, so I have no idea how this round-faced old man who looked like Richard Attenborough on a shoe-string budget got the ugly cut on his hand. He shuffled out of his bed, there was some sort of commotion - loud clattering sounds, raised voices from the staff, the sound of broken glass. Then he was bleeding. I was pretty high at the time, so I wasn't putting together a story in my head. By the time I realised what was going on this Great Escapee was cornered outside the bathroom by two security guards who kept asking him to sit down. He had a chair, you see - he was shaking a little and using it to prop himself up. He was also using it to create an obstacle between himself and security, like a lackluster lion-tamer. They asked him to sit down, doctors asked him if they could look at his wound, they asked if they could hear some of his stories about Korea. He was having none of it - he thought they were just handling him, which of course they were. They didn't give a damn about his Korea stories they just wanted to sedate him. And he knew it. This stale-mate went on for hours, after which time they were able to convince him he needed an injection to stop his hand getting infected. He still wouldn't let them near him, fearing deceit, so they allowed him to inject himself. The fool.

Hospitals, it turns out, are the worst place possible to sleep. Being asleep is okay, if you don't mind waking up with the same kind of back pain you could expect from sleeping on the ground, but you can only do the sleeping when they turn the lights out and then when you finally get off to sleep you wake up to the sound of your drip machine beeping - which it will continue to do until someone changes your drip. Then someone else's drip machine starts going off. Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, Richard Attenborough shuffled out of bed and hit an alarm that sounds across the ward summoning additional staff. Every time the alarm stopped he started it up again and wouldn't let go. A new stalemate, louder than the one before. I could hear the nurses pleading with him, asking him what he wanted while he told them to get away from him. Big mistake answering in English, if you ask me. He had no demands - he just knew he had to keep pressing that alarm. At four in the morning. Later, my mother asked me if it was post-traumatic stress from Korea but the fact is that this guy was so old it didn't have to be. It didn't matter if he was reliving a traumatic memory or a happy one - the ravages of time had rendered every memory a potentially harrowing ordeal. It didn't matter if he thought he was sounding an air raid siren or pulling a lever to dispense scotch eggs to a labrador puppy, the important thing was he was fucking keeping me awake again. Nurse, more 'phine.

During my days I watched a lot of Cartoon Network on the TV above my bed. When you spend your time malnourished and blowing chunks there's very little else to do with your time. Cartoon Network makes no bones about being a channel just for kids and I have no problem with that - children and men have fewer and fewer territories in TV Land and what these people are doing is admirable. That said, I love animation and cartoons. My reasoning was that adults made these shows so if they were well-written and unpatronising there should be nothing stopping me from enjoying them. So, surreally, here's my post-op morphine-laced rundown of the cartoons I watched in hospital.

Ben 10

This show is on all the time. If you've just been sick the idea of a ten-year-old boy transforming into grotesque monsters might be a little too visceral but ordinarily I would welcome something like that. It's certainly a very Kafkaesque approach to crime-fighting. The animation isn't the best you'll find on television these days and the plotting isn't quite what it should be. I'm not entirely sure how the writers reconcile science fiction space aliens and magic powers but largely this series manages to have its cake and eat it and with a wry sense of humour. It does contain its share of "what the fuck" moments that make an adult reader sit up and question why Max grabbed the bad guy and belted him into an ejector seat instead of just throwing him out the vehicle because it amounts to the same thing and saves you having to buy a new chair... but children aren't going to care. They don't have to think about chair costs.

Stormhawks

God, I wish this show had been on when I was a kid. It's awesome. The look and feel of the show is very reminiscent of Jak and Daxter except there are energy crystals and kick-ass airships that turn into motorbikes. The characters are uncommonly well-developed for this kind of fare and there's a healthy dose of comedy which is actually funny, something which came as a surprise to me because it really doesn't have to be this funny. They could get by on less and still sell their action figures. It's very much my kind of cartoon. Did I mention that the animation and visual effects are at times breath-taking? And that its protagonists are sky knights? I don't care how old you are - try watching an episode of this thing.

The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy

This cartoon is crap. The characters are all one-dimensional and unsympathetic grotesques which would be fine if they were meant to be unsympathetic. It's all animated in that generic cookie-cutter Dexter's Squarepants style which I'm frankly getting sick of but, again, I would be able to forgive this if the script was any good. It's not badly scripted in that it's evidently written by intelligent people. It's just that the script doesn't make any sense and each episode's plot revolves around contrivances and self-conscious breaking of the fourth wall, after which time the episode just ends before any of the plot points are resolved - right at the end of Act Two of the Three-Act Structure, as it were. I can't imagine how kids will get a thrill out of this unstructured incoherence, as an adult I found it insidious and unsatisfying.

Da Boom Crew

I only watched one episode of this show but apparently I was incredibly unlucky since only four exist and the odds were against me ever bearing witness to its baffling levels of stupidity. It's about four children who (improbably) create their own video game and (even less probably) get sucked into another dimension which is coincidentally identical to their game. So far so Dungeons and Dragons Animated Series. The problem lies in the series' moronic choice to aim everything squarely at street-wise black kids living in the 'hood, kids who want to be like 50 Cent when they grow up (i.e. skeezy drug-dealers). I'm not saying black children are a demographic that should not be catered to but this is not how to do it - one gets the feeling instead that some of this self-conscious hip-hoppery is for the white kids in the audience too - like black kids will be able to relate to an ethnically diverse team of would-be gang bangers tooling around in a space car doing drive-bys at aliens and wielding pistols and shotguns all the time talking street and white kids will not be able to relate at all but will recognise it as inherently cool because it's black. It's just roundly patronising and cack-handed. The writers relentlessly bludgeon you over the head with this shit - one of the planets is called Yo-diggity, another is inhabited by rasta aliens, it's Da (not 'The')Boom Crew and from the aggressively hip-hopped opening titles onwards the main character Nate (who calls himself "big daddy Nate") responds to every situation with violence and a stubborn disregard for knowledge or even common sense. As Chris Rock would put it, nothing would make Nate happier than not knowing the answer to your question. In the episode I watched the team were set a series of riddles they needed to solve in an ice-fortress (only the penitent man may pass etc. etc.) - Nate indignantly ignored all the riddles, charged in with his weapon, set off all the traps and put everyone's life in danger. In fact, there was no villain that week - all the characters' problems were the direct result of Nate being a complete fucktard throughout. By the end of the episode Nate had not learnt his lesson, no-one had learnt anything apart from that wisdom is for suckers and charging in like a bull in a china shop is perhaps not what you should be doing but something you will do and you'll look cool and everything will be okay in the end despite the disastrous and easily-avoidable consequences. In short, it's more about being cool than being intelligent, yo. So kids of all backgrounds can drop out of school and fucking rob me in ten years. Yay!

Anyway, I'm out of hospital now. I'm a little ill-shaven and seriously malnourished. I've lost a lot of weight - my face looks different, I'm bonier all over and my love handles have evaporated. I'll probably put it all back on again by the end of November but it's going to be weird living in a different body in the meantime. All in all? Worst two weeks of my life, no contest.

The worst part is this: what happens the next time I suffer organ failure? I've run out of vestigial organs. No more mulligans. Next time it'll be something I need. Should I be worried? Or should I be relieved that I've got my organ failure out of the way early in life and it happened to be something relatively non-life-threatening? These are things my mind focuses on at times like these. It's probably the morphine.

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