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Showing posts from May, 2011

Locked up

How quickly fear can change your perspective. It drops on you from nowhere like a thick prickly blanket. The more you try to pull it off your head, the more entangled in its dark folds you become; you can’t see, and it feels as if its dusty fibres are filtering the oxygen out of the air. Panic shoots through you like an electric shock. I have always had a healthy distrust of anything fully automatic. Perhaps it’s because I don’t like to relinquish control. Yes, that’s it. I like to be in control. It unnerves me when I’m not in control of my own circumstances. Like before my back surgery, when I lost it – my control, my composure and my nerve – just before being wheeled into the operating theatre. They’d forgotten the pre-meds, the nurse on the ward had told me. I didn’t know what pr-meds were. But they had forgotten them. And so just as my bed was lined up to push through the swing doors, my mood swung off the scale; the reality of the impending procedure became suddenly too frigh