Out of The Blue (17 page)

I couldn’t stop my mind wandering. I could hear muffled voices but nothing or nobody recognisable. My mouth was so dry I could hardly swallow. A firm pounding in my head blurred my vision as I struggled to open my eyes. The room was bright; I couldn’t figure out where the hell I was. My eyes fell on a shadowy figure moving next to me as I tried to move my hand to rub my eyes. I couldn’t lift my arm; a feeling of confusion filled my body.

“Don’t move. I’ll get the nurse,” a soft voice said. It took me several moments to realise it was my mother. I felt a warm hand cover mine. It must have been on top of the covers, but I still couldn’t seem to lift it. It felt numb; in fact my whole body felt frozen. I started to feel a wave of panic spread over me. What had happened to me? I tried to open my mouth to talk but there was nothing. I couldn’t even be sure I’d opened my mouth; there were no words, not even noises.

“It’s okay, Robin, you were in an accident. You’re going to be fine. The nurse is here now.”   

A second voice. It was familiar but I couldn’t quite place it. I heard a few mumbled replies to questions about pain relief; the conversation was going on about me and around me. I felt my fear ebb away as my mind started to drift once again.         

The next few days were a blur as I slowly came around. It was like swimming up through turbid water. Finally, I broke through the surface, only to feel worse than I had ever felt in my life. My limbs felt dull, like something had been sitting on them for weeks, cutting off all circulation and feeling. My head felt as if someone had taken the top off, vigorously used a hand whisk inside then sealed it back up again.    

The doctor arrived, asking me if I knew my name and where I was. I struggled with my words when I tried to reply. They were jumbled but I knew the answers. I just couldn’t formulate the words. Eventually, he informed me that as a result of a car accident I had suffered intracranial haemorrhaging, forcing them to keep me in a coma until the swelling went down. This took a total of twelve days. I could hardly believe I had lost twelve days in the blink of an eye. When he asked me the last thing I could remember, it was a little fuzzy, maybe being in the office or on-site working on a landscaping job. It wasn’t clear. I took no comfort from his reassurance that memory loss was normal at this stage. The gaps were opening up, I felt lost and all I wanted to do was hide in sleep.      

I acquired a specialist who visited me the following day. He told me how lucky I was to be alive while dropping breadcrumbs of my prognosis along the way. Apparently, no two brain injuries are alike. Brain injuries are not like other injuries; they are very unpredictable. Sometimes, when the brain presses against the skull, impairment occurs and the extent of the impairment or injury is not always obvious. He informed me I would need some speech therapy and physio to relearn how to control my limbs and dexterity, which made me relax a little. It was at least possible to return to normal but this also worried me; what would happen if I couldn’t?   

My parents, James and a couple of people from work were my only visitors. I had no girlfriend waiting in the wings; long-term relationships weren’t really my thing. My parents had not been a big part of my life for some time and I already started to feel awkward in their presence. Although we had never really fallen out, the customary feeling of apathy soon returned as their visits continued. Yet they seemed to be very attentive, ignoring any negative remarks I managed to make. The phrase ‘killing me with kindness’ came to mind.      

It was the following day that I discovered I had lost a further nine months of my life. I had become quite insular since the accident, not that I wasn’t before, but I hated being in hospital surrounded by strangers. I felt trapped in my own useless body. In my mind it was still February, or March at the latest, considering I had been in hospital around two weeks. The weather looked the same; February and November can be hard to distinguish if you only see the view from your hospital bed. I’d never been one to watch television or read the papers but a fellow patient handed me her newspaper on one of her daily jaunts, asking if I wanted to do some Sudoku instead of my customary staring into space. They obviously had little comprehension of my lack of ability to successfully hold a pencil. I lazily scanned the page regardless; spotting the date at the top of the page, it slowly registered in my brain. What the hell had I been doing for the last nine months? I was just coming to terms with the actual accident and how it could impair my future; finding out I had lost nine months of memory made me feel frustrated all over again.

The fact that everyone around me was playing it down only made it worse. It felt like they already knew and weren’t sure how to break it to me. All I wanted to do was go home, but I knew that was months away. My repeated requests were always met with the same answer – “When you’re able to look after yourself – not until then.”

After heated discussions with both my parents and James, in search of answers, I discovered that I had been transferred up to Manchester soon after my accident. I had no recollection of the event itself, but I was reliably informed that it wasn’t unusual with traumatic episodes. James said I was on the way to a site in Suffolk to do a few days’ surveying. But I had no memory of the contract. The last thing I could remember was working on the outskirts of Manchester on a corporate job. The specialist diagnosed retrograde amnesia, informing me it was a side effect of traumatic head injuries. 

My long-term memory was intact; I knew who I was and who my immediate family and friends were; there weren’t many more important people in my life. To be fair, I didn’t know what I couldn’t remember. The doctors were confident that my short-term memory would return and they even recommended that I immerse myself back into my life, get back into my usual routine as soon as possible to assist in its return.

It was in the hospital that I started having horrendous dreams, flashbacks to what I assumed was the car accident that had put me there. I was always driving, but not in my normal relaxed fashion, more like Dick Dastardly from
Wacky Races
, focussed, tunnel vision behind the wheel. The screeching of tyres as I sped along, rounding corners, followed by ear-splitting silence. I always woke up at this point – there was no actual crash in my dream – and I had to cover my ears in an effort to hear something, my own breathing, my heartbeat, if only to know I had survived.                     

My time in hospital was coming to an end but my short-term memory still hadn’t returned. The doctors began bringing up other possibilities, saying that I maybe didn’t want to remember or that it was the fear of remembering the accident that was preventing my memory from returning. I needed to open up to remembering to try and fill in the holes; it started to feel like it was my fault.    

Without discussion, my parents organised a private rehab centre in Manchester to assist in my continued recovery. I honestly wasn’t sure whether they were doing it for me or them. Either way, I was grateful. The thought of having to move back home to be waited on by my parents filled me with dread. At the same time, I didn’t like the thought of them taking control. We didn’t see eye to eye on many aspects of my life. Sadly, it made me suspicious. I couldn’t help thinking this would be a perfect opportunity to try and steer my life down a more agreeable path in their eyes.      

The rehab centre was amazing, which made me feel immediately guilty for all those negative thoughts. Persevering with endless hours of speech- and physiotherapy, my mind and body began to mend and improve, to my great relief. I had a life I wanted to get back to. As I progressed, I continued to pump James for information on events leading up to the accident. I’d noticed he’d become shaky on the details when put under pressure. It worried me. I’d known James for almost half my life. He was my best friend. I didn’t like the feeling he was hiding something from me.           

The nine months before the accident were still largely a jumbled mess, as if the video tape of the time I had lost had been chopped up and spliced back together by the worst film studio intern in the world. I could remember small snippets of situations and places but I couldn’t tell if it was in order. Out of frustration, I decided to try and piece my nine months back together. During one of James’s visits I asked him to bring in my work diary, which I hoped would map out my work activities at the very least. Unfortunately, he wasn’t too hopeful. He thought it had been lost in the accident along with my phone, but said he would see what he could do.    

As more and more flashes of memory returned I began seeing the same face regularly, but I couldn’t place her: short, scruffy blonde hair, piercing blue eyes with an easy smile that reached her eyes. According to James we hadn’t employed any new members of staff and with my history I was hardly capable of holding down a relationship of any kind. It had never been my strong point and besides, where was she if she existed? Wouldn’t she have visited me by now? No one had mentioned a girlfriend if that’s what she was. Physically, she didn’t exist for me or anyone else.  

James produced a fresh diary complete with my personal work undertakings and I spent long evenings studying the various contracts we had worked on, even researching the various places on the internet and the publicity on our own website. I started to fool myself that I was remembering events but, in truth, I was probably only recalling the information I had researched. All the while the attractive blonde was there in the background, her piercing eyes boring into me. The feeling of friendship and intimacy was so strong on occasion it was hard to distinguish reality from wishful dreams. I could almost feel her next to me as I slept.   

After spending almost six months in the rehab centre I was cleared to leave. I had physically recovered. Mentally, I still had the odd nightmare alongside continued and more favourable dreams of a certain blonde. I had plans to return to work in the next few days and finally put my body back to good use.                        

Robin’s story continues in Latent Memories (Out of the Blue Part II)

To be published November 2016

To the reader:

Thank you so much for reading
Out of the Blue
I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. If so, please take a few moments to write a review on Amazon. Getting feedback from readers is amazingly useful it will also aid other readers in deciding whether this is a novel they might enjoy. Thank You.

Other books by the same author:

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Journey to You.
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