Somebody comes to explain that I’m staying tonight and they’re waiting for a bed. Visiting time is done at 6pm so she has to leave, we hug and say goodnight. The paramedic asked me who The President was. So good to see her! She explains that I had a seizure, I shuddered and juddered and yelled and clenched my hands into claws and convulsed. She has had to walk across Fort Greene Park with her recently-operated-on left foot and it has taken her half an hour. Jenny arrives at 5.30pm with a bag containing my dressing gown, slippers (neither of which get used for the next three days) phone and charger, nothing else I can recall. After a while someone comes to wheel the bed along a corridor and round a corner and into a room where I am wheeled into a doughnut shape. Student nurse brings me a burger and chips and I eat it. I had a fit? Am I now epileptic ? My back is fucking killing me. It is 3.30pm and I have eaten nothing at all since waking. There’s that fit nurse, there’s that kind nurse. I watch the various staff doing the rounds. The clock creeps forward two hours and nothing happens. It’s a procedure, a process, I’m just a case number. Each person asks my name and my birthday. Little suction caps attached to my chest and ribs in four places, leading to some kind of monitor. Someone comes to take my temperature, blood pressure, monitor my heart-rate. They tell me that I have had a seizure – convulsions, and now I can feel my lower lip is swollen and sore, that I nearly bit through it in fact, and my back is really killing me, in fact my entire body feels wracked with aches, I can scarcely move without shots of pain shooting through my back, I don’t really want to move. I think I say “ I’m all right, but my back hurts“. I’m spaced out and my back is killing me.Īfter a while somebody comes up to me and asks how I am. I have two T-shirts on, one gold and one white beneath it, blue n white striped pyjama bottoms and black socks. After an indeterminate time I am wheeled to a space and my stretcher becomes my bed. There are nurses and doctors rushing around wearing blue or white scrubs and there are beds, either curtained off or not. Then the doors close and there I am in my pyjamas on my way to hospital, siren wailing, a handful of corners and we are in reception on the same stretcher which has wheels now, waiting for something or other. I’m looking up at the front door and there is Jenny watching me and I make a face known only to us, a private comedy face which essentially means: “ oh well“. First thing I remember was waking up on a stretcher being wheeled into an ambulance outside my house in Brooklyn. You shoot me down but I won’t fall, I am titaniumįriday morning September 3rd 2021.