George by Frieda Hughes

Author:Frieda Hughes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

Thursday 26 July

As the weeks passed I was still struggling with the fact that I didn’t seem to be able to shake my chronic fatigue relapse, and now my lower back was so painful I had to roll out of bed in the mornings on to all fours, then negotiate the pain in order to stand upright, dress, and strap myself into a stretchy back brace before I could even manage to sit at the kitchen table.

The pain in my back would ease the more I moved, although it would never totally leave me—I’ve had it for over thirty years, since I was a passenger in a car crash when I was seventeen. I was getting a lift in the back seat of a 1970s Mini (one of the old, tiny Minis, not the modern things that are the size of a proper car). The Mini was hit head-on by a Ford Cortina doing around 76 mph on the wrong side of the road.

Two firemen had to cut me out, as I had been thrown, kneeling and bent over, under the front passenger seat when my own seat was shunted beneath it as the car crumpled. When the occupant of the upturned chair slumped back into it from being catapulted on to the bonnet through the hole where the windscreen had been, his weight pushed the bar at the base of the seat across my lower spine. He then remained lying half on the bonnet because his chair was resting on top of my curled-up form. I found myself trapped, crouching in a space so small I didn’t think a human being could fit into it, with two unconscious companions.

Pain began then and continued in various degrees throughout my life. I had found exercises to manage it, together with visits to osteopaths (very helpful) and chiropractors (very unhelpful) whenever I got stuck bent double, and occasional bouts of painkiller use, but I dislike taking medication that has its own side effects. At least if I managed the pain through exercise—and later, as arthritis set in, diet—I knew what my body was coping with.

However, if I had a lie-in because these two stones in my existence were grinding me between them, George would be pissed off as hell by the time I let him out of his cage; I had to find ways to get downstairs to release him, even if I collapsed on to the sofa afterwards, when he’d soared off into the sky outside. But today I couldn’t get out of bed at all to begin with—it simply wasn’t possible. I couldn’t lift an arm, and lay there like a starfish, dazed and bewildered and scared. Chronic fatigue isn’t like being overtired; it is like becoming inert, barely able to form thought, knowing that something is very, very wrong, losing the strength to move a limb, before falling into unconsciousness. Reluctantly, I had to rely on The Ex to release George into the garden.

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