health
Somewhere in that unconscious
netherworld I lived a non-stop string
of what I called “coma dreams” – still
as vivid to me over three years later as
the week I lived them – though now
I think some of them may have been
hallucinations due to the amount of
life-saving medications I had been
placed on. It’s not something I tend to
give much thought to, but I am curious.
Those drugs changed me, at least for a
while. My husband received a call from
the hospital to say I was finally awake
and talking – talking too much and too
loudly and disturbing the other patients
– and would he please come sort me
out? At least my husband had some
good news to tell my children, not to
mention the folks back in Canada. My
stroke happened at the moment when
my beloved Aunty Ellinor passed away,
and I was going to make myself heard at
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her funeral ceremony. A federal election
was about to be called, and I was saying
some ridiculous, and rather uncharitable,
words about the Prime Minister of
Canada. (And I will admit now that in
the week or two before my stroke I was
posting similar things on Facebook.)
As it so happened, all the necessary
documents for new passports for
myself and my daughters were sitting
on my home-office desk. My eldest
needed that passport for an upcoming
school trip so my husband took them
in himself and mentioned that I was in a
coma. I received word soon after from
the Canadian Consulate informing me
that one of the duties of the consular
office is to visit critically-ill citizens
abroad. Would I like a hospital visit
from the Consul Genreral? I decided it
wasn’t necessary but felt chuffed that I
had been given the invitation.
Exactly three months after my stroke,
I left the hospital. In that time I had a
craniectomy, embollisation, cranioplasty
and an angiogram. I had numerous CT
scans and a few MRIs, and was woken
up in the middle of the night once to get
one on doctor’s orders before a surgical
procedure. My situation was complex, but
in addition to the issues in my brain, I was
receiving daily physiotherapy, as much
as my weakened state could handle.
The first time I was bolted into a standing
frame I lasted four minutes before I felt
like I was going to faint. And once I did.
Each time like clockwork an orderly would
come to my bed with a wheelchair to
take me to the OT and PT floor, in a lovely
facility funded by The Jockey Club. For
the first few weeks, my half-flaccid body
would be hoisted out of bed and lowered
into the wheechair by an electric pulley
system. While in the convalescent ward
I was also given weekly baths. Nurses
would wheel a rubberised trolley up to
my bed and roll me onto it. They'd raise
the plastic sides like a little tub, then take
me to a large tiled room with hoses and
sinks. As they washed me they would
laugh and chatter and ask if I could
speak Cantonese or Putonghua. Towards
the end of my stay they said that I was
getting ‘too slim’. I had lost thirty pounds,
and much was certainly muscle mass,
but I had lost fat, too. I can tell you that
needing accompaniment to the bathroom
is good incentive not to eat, and I didn’t
have much of an appetite anyway. My
week of coma dreams had also cleared
my system of any bad dietary habits and I
never went back; I was off sugar, alcohol,
salt, caffeine and felt really good because
of it. I never imagined I'd be in this
situation, let alone facing a long recovery
so many miles away from Canada.
I was being given cognitive tests
regularly during my stay in hospital,
and became practiced at saying my
name, telling my questioner what time
of day it was and what facility I was
in. I became adept at counting down
from one hundred by seven. I had to
choose words that didn’t belong. Later
the tests became a little more complex
but were really too easy I thought, until
the day I was asked to draw a clock
at ten minutes to two and found that
I was stumped (I ended up drawing a
composite version, for some reason,
which I found fascinating). In the week
before my discharge, a psychistrist
from a nearby hospital came to see me
twice, asking me questions like ‘Have
you thought about killing yourself?’
I laughed and said no and felt like I
was not telling a lie: I had two little
girls and a husband who needed me
and besides, the storyteller in me was
always wanting to know what was
going to happen next.
For the big release day my husband
had booked a special hire car, staffed
with a driver and an aide who sat
next to me and my wheelchair bolted
to the floor. As I rode across Tsing
Ma Bridge enjoying the view and my
newfound sense of freedom, I made
note of the fact that I would never be
seeing Hong Kong from quite that
vantage point ever again. Later that
day my husband received a phone
call from the hospital asking where I
was. When he chuckled and said I had
left, they asked him to bring me back
so I could get discharged properly. I
thought I had done it well enough, said
my goodbyes to other patients; some