Once they’d managed to get me fully conscious and off of the plasma drips became a bit of a liability; mainly because I could get out my bed and walk around the place. With my brain now firing on all cylinders I was (for want of a better term) an absolute nutter! I think it was interesting though in that when we are drunk, on drugs or in a state like this it removes our inhibitions, it shows what we’re really like. If you look back to Freudian theory, the ‘Id’ is:
“Is a part of us that knows no judgement of value: no good and evil, no morality”
If we’re up for a fight, we’ll start looking for one, if we like the look of “some bird’s tits” (sorry), we’re going to tell her just that. For most people this will be even more the case when we ‘pop a pill’ or something like that. We’ll start hugging our mates, telling them we love them and all sorts of stuff.
To a large extent, it was “Tony’s Id” that was running around the ward at this point. Ok, so I wasn’t running around trying to shag anything that moved but I wasn’t holding back when it came to secrets of the past, hidden crushes and things like that.
Although I was critically ill and being being constantly monitored by a consultants, I was going from providing a good laugh to being a complete pain in the arse for the rest of the nurses, cleaners and the like. During this period, I told my mother in law that she had ‘lovely tits’ and sat there reminiscing about years previous when my mum had battered the shit out of my sister. This moment of group therapy meant that my sister was quite chuffed that my mum had to finally acknowledge that this had indeed happened and in turn it probably healed some wounds that my sister had had to live with for some 25yrs or so.
My bad-side, rather than going around kicking the shit out of people and wrecking the place, manifested itself in a huffy/stubborn streak.
There are only three or four tv programmes that i’m ever interested thing and despite there being a strict ‘tv off’ rule by 8.30pm in the day-room, i’d negotiated a ten-thirty deal so I could finally catch up with Match of The Day. My very existence at that point was relying on finally getting to see this, after having nothing else to look forward to for so, so long.
It turned out however that they’d got a battleaxe of bank nurse in that night for shift and she was unfortunately unaware of the deal that had been struck. When she laid down the law on ‘lights-out’ time, she wasn’t expecting me to protest by walking silently back and forward past her desk for the next nine hours. I never saw her back in my ward again after that.
It’s nice to confirm to both myself and everyone else that, deep down, I'm not really that bad a bloke. This childish and huffy streak has continued in all the years since and it’s not nice that my wife has had to deal with it without ever being able to ‘clock-out’. All credit to the other nurse though, they did apologise the next day and I think the story has now made itself into hospital folk-lore.