Words change meaning as reality alters

The man sitting here at his computer is not the same one that wrote this colyoom last week. That bloke could breathe through both nostrils and cough without having to clench a distant sphincter, for fear of what might happen at the other end.

For those of misandrist inclination, switch off now, as you’ll be blinded to everything but a man mansplaining man-flu, but this is not about my illness, but the altered state I feel I’m in.

Think it started back when I was 17 and smashed my femur. My biggest bone was broken in two, the tibia below had a compound fracture and I came out of surgery with a chest infection.

On the ward they slapped my leg up in a sling, stuck a metal stick sideways through my knee and attached it to weights at the end of the bed. Every thirty seconds my rasping chesty cough shook my body and leg.

When I asked how long it was going to hurt they said six weeks, so I took myself off painkillers. They’d been giving me four-hourly pethidine jabs that had me floating on the ceiling, and DF 118s and all sorts, but no.

Instead I learned to see pain as simply another way of being. An altered state. Not pleasant, not to be sought out but if unavoidable, I step sideways from it in my mind and go: “Oh look. My back’s in spasm.”

I’d say it helps put things in perspective, but what does that mean? Perspective implies that there’s a common ground somewhere, from which differing views emerge. I’m not so sure.

Which is the real world? The one last week inhabited by a scribbler healthy and full of vim, or this drab place I live in today? Same room, same carbon based life form (cap’n) but now physically debilitated to the point where breathing is hard and conscious work, while a pile of crumpled soggy kitchen towels climbs higher by my side.

Beyond those we seek out through alcohol, caffeine and other drugs, we live in an infinite amount of constantly altered states, thanks to chemicals, climate and other people.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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