Back in a Bit

It was a gloriously sunny and warm bank-holiday Saturday in what had otherwise been a damp and grey summer, and I had spent it self-indulgently. In the late afternoon I hurtled towards the centre of town to find a drum shop, and spent ages rolling up and down the narrow back-streets between Victorian terraces trying to find a parking space that was at least on the same side of town as this particular percussion emporium. In fact it took me longer to park than it did to buy the percussive odds and sods I was after and hurtle home again.

Little did I know that the events to come would make this day one of the most significant and memorable in my life so far.

Around this time, I was really starting to get into the swing of living alone. Having more space than I really needed opened the flood-gates for all sorts of things I’d wanted but for which I’d never had the space to accommodate, so very rapidly I’d gone from rattling around in what seemed like a cavernous expanse to filling it up with stuff. The latest addition was an electronic drum kit. Maybe I was feeling particularly middle-aged at the time and was just hankering after my teenage years, but I decided I should now have some kind of drum kit again. The box in which it was delivered was huge, but didn’t include some of the basics (like a decent pair of sticks or a kick-drum pedal) so had remained frustratingly unopened for a few days.

Now, the time had come. All the components were together, and a thoroughly enjoyable and self-indulgent (and seriously nerdy) evening of assembly, reassembly and general fiddling about lay ahead. Part of the charm of a drum kit is that its layout is entirely personal and unique, particularly if, like me, you suffer from cack-handedness. There’s no real right or wrong way to put your kit together as long as you’re comfortable with it, so this is one self-assembly job where instruction manuals are truly useless and trial and error is the only way to go. With a large cup of tea; a packet of fig rolls; and two sets of Allen keys (just to be sure), I set to work unpacking the enormous box of bits and bobs, and began assembly.

A moment later, I found myself lying on the floor. Funny, I thought – what was I doing down here? Come to think of it: what was I doing? I must have laid down to reach and adjust something intricate… now what on earth was it? Christ, I’m always doing this – a moment’s lapse of concentration and I haven’t the slightest idea what I was doing. If I had a pound for every… unless… I dosed off? Hmm. That’s really strange. It’s hardly late – why would I dose off? In fact, why am I so drowsy?

There was nothing for it other than to get up off the floor and make another cup of tea but, when trying to move I found that I was in a great deal of pain. My left shoulder and most of the way down my back were intensely painful, and my legs were stiff as boards. Maybe I had knocked my head and dropped like a stone. Or did I electrocute myself?

Confused, increasingly irritable, and feeling various kinds of unwell, I decided to go to bed for a bit and see if things were clearer after that. With hindsight this is an amusing and almost primeval male response, but at the time, and in that state, it made perfect sense. Still very stiff and still in a lot of pain, I half-crawled, half-dragged myself into the bedroom and into bed, where I fell asleep almost instantly.

I awoke no more than a couple of hours later, and the recollection of what had taken place unfolded once more in my head. Had it really happened? The pain and stiffness in my shoulder, back and legs hadn’t eased, so I rolled out of bed and dragged myself back across the flat to survey the scene. What I saw, and what I hadn’t noticed originally, was carnage – a mess that made it increasingly clear that I had fallen to the ground, and taken all sorts of things down with me. Stuff from the desk had clearly been swept to the floor, and what had been on the floor already had been crushed and dented by my fall. The pieces of the puzzle began to fit together. Had I fainted and fallen awkwardly, that would explain the scene before me and also the physical complaints – but why had I fainted?

It was time to call upon professional advice, but by now it was past eight on a Saturday evening. Not wanting to call the emergency services (by now the proverbial horse had not just bolted but gone on the run), I dragged myself back to bed, found a phone, and opted for NHS Direct. If you’re not familiar with the service, the idea is that you can phone with a medical complaint, and a fully-trained nurse (or occasionally doctor or paramedic, if appropriate) will come back to you for advice. It’s absolutely ideal for situations when you need help sort-of now-ish, but you’re not in any sort of danger.

I rang in, within 15 minutes a nurse called me back, and I described the scene in as much detail as I could. I have had cause to ring them once before – ten years previously, a housemate showed me his fresh appendix scar and I went out like a light. So out-of-character was this that my then-girlfriend bullied me into ringing NHS Direct but, after a lot of questioning, they were quite happy there wasn’t anything wrong with me.

So I’m going through what appears to have happened, and answering the nurse’s questions as best I could. To my surprise, she took all this rather more seriously than I expected, and said she was going to organise for an ambulance to come and take me into A&E. Christ, I thought. When the call ended, following the nurses instructions, I called some friends and asked them to come over and help me out. They and the ambulance crew arrived together, and we all made our slow and awkward way out of my top-floor flat and off to the hospital. As anyone who’s ever been to A&E will appreciate, a lot of pratting around then ensued – painkillers, blood tests, Electrocardiograms, a lot of waiting around, gallons of Lucozade, and visit after visit from increasingly senior doctors.

In the morning, having come up with very little, they turfed me out for my friends to collect. I spent the rest of the weekend with them, still feeling a little stiff, but otherwise back in full health. As the extended weekend drew to a close, I returned home to start the clear-up operation and prepare for the working week.

Back at work, I soon more-or-less forgot about the episode until a week later, when I wandered across the office to inspect a malfunctioning fax machine (my most favourite of office appliances) and hit the deck again. This time I regained full consciousness very quickly but nonetheless my colleagues decided I should go to hospital, so another was day spent in A&E with a whole load of Lucozade, and still nobody was really any clearer about what had happened. Given that it had now happened twice, I wondered if my body was starting to tell me something. Maybe it was diet, for example. I had a balanced diet, but perhaps not ultra-healthy, and maybe I had reached an age where this needed to be examined more closely. I bought a whole load of fruit and vegetables and began recording what I ate every day. I also shook my sleep patterns into shape – ensuring I went to bed and got up at the same times each day. Nobody had mentioned any of this to me, but it all seemed like a good idea. As time went on these two strange episodes became less present in my mind, to the point that I could more or less forget about them.

Three weeks later, it happened again. This time while I was queueing outside the sandwich van in the office car-park, and I landed face-first on the concrete. The ambulance had arrived before I regained consciousness and took me in again. Now, it was starting to get worrying. What the hell was causing me to pass out, and how could it be stopped? Nobody at A&E had come up with any answers so far, but I couldn’t keep on dropping to the ground as and when. It was time to reach for the big guns – time to engage the might of the company’s healthcare scheme and put myself in front of the specialists. It was time to get this thing under control.

More on that… in a bit.