Graham Higgins Illustration

My surgery was a seven-hour procedure on Dec. 30th 2009. I remember a moment which must have been on Dec. 31st when I registered my own consciousness and therefore by Cartesian deduction concluded I must have survived.

Other than this reassuring knowledge, the plane of consciousness and my memories of it was and are a fractured, laminated and ramshackle unreliable collection of impressions. It’s reminded me of the phenomenal job of cognitive orchestration and editorial required to maintain a sense of coherent everyday reality, as the faders shifted on the mixing-desk of memory, imagination, thought-convention, language and that mysterious sense of continuity that carries the sensation of a first-person ‘me’ from one minute to the next.

The first few days in Intensive Care were divided between observation of personalities and routines on the ward and dream-excursions to The Morphine House – an Escher-like interlocking place made up of all the seedy beige student accommodation I’d encountered in my early student days in Birmingham – stained fawn carpets matted with anonymous dropped human hair; craquelured perished magnolia emulsion paint on rattly window frames; woodchip-papered walls on narrow winding stairways; stacks of abandoned magazines in empty rooms. The air there was greasy with stale cooking-smells, a taste in the mouth evoked by one of the medications plus a dry tongue for which – in the real world – I was given styrofoam cups of ice-granules the size of cherrystones to eat two or three at a time.

The Morphine House was more than the cinema of dream;  the range of Neuro-Linguistic Programming modalities (visual; auditory; kineasthetic; olfactory; gustatory) intensified to create counterfeit memories indistinguishable at times from the ‘real thing’.

The distinction wasn’t helped by the round of blood-samples and pressure-measurements and sundry incidental checks for which I’d be suddenly conscious, like a swimmer surfacing into the noise of the baths from the muted sounds of a swim underwater. In these lucid episodes it was quite easy to sort out the vivid memories that couldn’t have happened and belonged to dream by contrast with the continuity of life in the subdued light of the ward; what was unusual was the operation of the mental sheep-gate that consciously separated the low-key surroundings of reality from sense-saturated hyperreal fantasy.

I didn’t choose to dive back into unconsciousness but was often uncomfortably aware that the real sensory world was too full of information which I lacked the energy to filter.

Curiously my rational mind was aware of the components of the hallucination created by itself as ‘I’ crossed to and fro across the borders of wakefulness. Having registered that ‘I’ had bobbed back to the surface after anaesthesis, who was this ‘me’ who observed my own thought-processes with various degrees of detachment?

Even in that patchy and contingent version of consciousness there was an editorial voice coolly noting that this was a useful empirical demonstration of misc. altered mental states such as full analytical awareness of the moment with a connection to memory that faded in seconds like an evaporating vapour-trail: an insight into, or preview of Alzheimer’s. The sense-images of incidents were lucid but seemed like lengths of movie-film snipped into individual frames and stored in small unlabelled boxes to be retrieved by chance and ordered tentatively.

I’m still waking up feeling physically as if I’ve been thrown  out of the back of a lorry and I have to remind myself that this probably has something to do with having my ribcage cracked open three weeks ago. Occasional coughs and sneezes still feel as if I might pop open like an Advent calendar (‘oh look! meat!’) if I can’t head them off with careful throat-clearing.

Coherently describing the subsequent mental fragmentation from inside the state is tricky not least because the tranquilised brain becomes quickly exhausted and I’m aware that my impressions of my drift on that post-op lagoon are already receding, so I’m leaving this as a message-in-a-bottle to myself to read when I have a longer perspective on the episode.