Greetings
You’ve probably gathered
from my last post that I am supposed to be writing a book with the rather grand
title "Rhythms Of My Life".
However, I have been
stuck in stasis, that place of motionlessness for such a long time, I am beginning
to wonder if I will ever finish this book!
I have done 50,000 words
and the creative pool from which all my words come, seem to have run out and I
cannot find another pool to dive into.
I know the ideas will
return, maybe I am being punished for being arrogant and living on the
assumption that all I had to do was take and the pool would automatically
fill up again, with even better and bigger words than before.
If that assumption is
true, then a full pool is a long time coming. However, I wait, I mind-map, I walk,
do all the mental exercises that forces the brain to think differently, but
nothing changes.
I will continue to go
fishing in the pool, and in the meantime, here is part of a true story from the
pool when it was full to the brim.
It is a section from
my current book "Walking In The Shadows Of Death" available on
Amazon, see link below.
"It was 5am on Friday, 22nd
December 2000, when I woke up with a bit of a start. I felt, from the time my
eyes opened and my head cleared, that my old adversary was in the room. Since
my stay in the hospital, I always seem to wake up at the same time in the
morning. This time, however, it was different. I knew something was seriously
wrong. I felt nauseous, faint and out of breath. I automatically checked my
wrist and could not believe what was happening. The VT had returned. My
heartbeat was up at 140 beats per minute as opposed to the 55 beats per minute
it usually ran at.
I went to the toilet and sat down and as I was
about to get up, a hand from the netherworld pushed itself up my rectum,
grabbed my heart and started pulling it right out of my body. At least that is
what I felt was happening. What was really happening was that the ICD had fired
its first shock to bring my heart back into its normal rhythm.
The pain was intense. It was not of this
world. It was not just painful. It was without any redeeming features in its
remorselessness. It just was what it says it was. Absolute pain.
I screamed and in my own head it sounded like
the voice of death. I felt that I was dying again, only this time I knew all
about it. My first scream woke Sue up. She looked at me, sleep still in her
eyes and she must have seen in my eyes what I was feeling because she quickly
changed and, even as she was changing, the second electric shock sank into my
heart and literally lifted me up from the bedside table, where I was
frantically taking my socks and underpants out to prepare for the ambulance I
knew would have to take me back to the hospital, and threw me into the middle
of the bed. I weighed fourteen stone and I was lifted like a grain of salt and
thrown.
I stayed in the middle of the bed, lying
foetus-like and
minimising my size and dying.
And death laughed at me. It said I was a coward who could not take a little
pain. It said did I really think I could escape him by going home? Did I not
know that he knew where I lived? I lay there foetus-like, trying to get back into my mother’s
womb, where there would be no pain, where I would be safe.
I lay there and screamed as the third shock
came and I heard Sue knocking on our next-door neighbour Simon’s door, and Simon, who had
already heard the scream and was coming down the stairs as she rang the bell,
came over and helped.
I heard Sue’s frantic call to the ambulance and
their controlled information gathering, which was more than Sue could bear,
when the fourth shock slammed into my heart and I screamed again. I glanced at
Simon, who was sitting on the stairs, with his head in his hand, looking
totally helpless.
I screamed for the fifth, sixth, seventh and
eighth shock and wondered whether any God would let anyone suffer so much pain.
What, I wondered, was in it for him? I was now waiting for the shocks to come.
I thought they would just keep coming until the battery in the ICD ran out or
my heart stopped as it had done before. Only this time if it stopped, there was
no cardiac crash team to leap to the rescue. There was only Sue, my by now poor
hysterical partner, Simon, my next-door neighbour, and my two youngest children, lying fast
asleep in their beds, downstairs.
By the ninth shock, I would have welcomed
death. I would have gone over to him and said, “It is a fair cop, just take me
and let me not have any more pain, and release Sue and Simon from their
nightmare. This fight is between you and me, keep them out of it.” Only in that
dark, stark moment of total and absolute despair, when I looked for him,
actually sought him out, death was not there".
Copyright: Roy Merchant
2015
