A Misalignment of the Stars by Peter Leyland

A Misalignment of the Stars

 

Recently I suffered a painful bout of sciatica, something which I have experienced before but never with this level of intensity. I was becalmed for a few weeks, being unable to walk more than a few paces. Stairs were almost impossible to climb. Co-incidentally, however, the author Lissa Evans* with whom I have an online acquaintance, posted a compelling recommendation on social media of a book entitled To Exist As I Am by Grace Spence Green. It was subtitled A Doctor’s Notes on Recovery and Radical Acceptance. Trusting in Lissa’s judgement of the book, I ordered a copy using my local library’s reservation service. It arrived within three days, and I began reading it. 

 

The book is the extraordinary story of Grace Spence Green’s journey, after suffering a spinal cord injury which paralysed her from the waist down, which gave a completely new cast to a life that was up to that point her training as a fourth-year medical student at Kings College, London. The event which caused her injury was bizarre and might be characterised as a misalignment of the stars, my chosen title. It happened that after a meeting with a friend in London Grace was walking from Westfield Shopping Centre towards the train station when someone jumped from the balcony' of an adjacent building and collided with her on the pavement. She learned later - she has no memory of the incident - that the collision had broken her spine. 

 

 

In Part 1 of the book entitled Aftermath Grace tells us about her immediate treatment by doctors and nursing staff, and the presence of her boyfriend, Nathan at the Royal London A&E, where she was later put into a high dependency unit. She records her total bewilderment about what she was doing there:

 

“A steady stream of doctors, nurses, psychologists, physiotherapists and policemen coming to peer over at me.

     Where am I? Hell? I thought…” (p.19)

 

This continues with accompanying photographs of Grace’s operational scars and of her lying on a hospital bed, and it was a relief for this reader to reach Part 2, which takes place in Stanmore Hospital and is called Rehabilitation: there is a picture of her sitting in a wheelchair giving the thumbs up sign. Stanmore is a specialist rehabilitation centre and Grace describes in some detail coming to terms with wheelchair life, which initially she hated, and more specifically to life as a paraplegic. She describes washing where the reality of water seems like a memory:

 

“I began to talk to my legs in the shower. As challenging as it was, I felt like I was loving and caring for my body more than I ever did before. I wanted to look after it. It needed help. Now, to clean my toes, I have to lean down to grab my foot and pull it over on to my other leg. The water doesn’t feel like water; instead I feel only vibrations around the sides of my knees, my feet, my ankles, the left-hand side of my stomach and the backs of my thighs.” (p.63) This and other descriptions paint for us the new reality of life for Grace. She describes the kinship with other patients at Stanmore, getting skilled in the management of a wheelchair, and the realisation from the prognosis she is given that she is going to be forever disabled.

 

Part 3 is entitled Reformation and has a subtitle, Caring. It is a very powerful chapter and begins with her talking about the history of her family as caregivers and how she had always wanted to emulate the caring nature of her mother. She then proceeds to tell us how she returned to her 4^th Year Medical Studies at Kings College: Nowadays when I see patients at work, or a family member in hospital, I can understand how they feel their stay is never going to end. I know what it is to feel that you’re never going to get out of it, you can’t imagine a way forward, can’t see a new life ahead of you. You are in a black hole…’ (p.109)

 

She does come out of that dark place and Reformation contains an account of a meeting with a therapist, also disabled, who acts as a mentor, enabling her to free herself to some extent from what has happened. She resumes training as a doctor and later describes an incident with a medical instructor, who being annoyed with the lateness of her class, singles Grace out as 'a lady in a WHEELCHAIR' who has been kept waiting. Grace responds to this echoing: ‘THE ONE IN THE WHEELCHAIR’ (p.120) and describes feeling for the first time the power that she has, to compel some recognition of herself as an individual.

 

Grace learns to set boundaries, something which arise from her anger at seeing herself not as an individual but as a victim. There’s nothing wrong with me, she now replies to strangers’ queries. (p.123) By the end of the chapter, after giving an example of an incident in a pub where her wheelchair progress is mocked by a drunken customer, she describes taking charge of the situation and turning the humour back upon him. ‘I was getting angry enough to realise that I deserved to be treated better.’ (p.125)

 

In another section of Part 3, subtitled Doctor, Grace describes how, having completed her medical training, she takes up a place as a junior doctor in a busy London hospital, treating patients just like you or I, with varying conditions. She becomes at one with her wheelchair and realises that she has power in her work because she is never seen as threatening. She finds herself becoming closer to her patients, the wheelchair acting as ‘a visible scar’ and indicating that she too knows what it’s like to be on their side of a hospital bed.

 

Part 3 ends with Grace reflecting on the meaning of disability, that it is a valid way of existing, and how we hold so tightly to normality as if anyone who deviates from that idea is deficient in some way. I used to feel this myself when negotiating in a world where my encroaching deafness was not recognised even by myself, and was joked about, sometimes unthinkingly, by others. I was eventually able to make a career change which enabled me to teach without feeling undermined by the disability.

 

Moving to Part 4 of the book, Reflections on Life Today, Grace makes some concluding points about achieving acceptance for the person that she is. Finding other people in the same situation as herself was important as was looking for the experiences that she shared with them: “I was told early in my hospital stay by a fellow patient that, by sustaining spinal cord injuries, we had joined ‘a club that no one wants to be part of’. That’s how I felt at the start, before I realised that the club is one of the great parts. Some of the best people I have met are disabled, have spinal cord injuries. Sure, the injury can be hard, but the people? The people are brilliant.” (p.161)

 

In this final section she also talks about how she has connected online with others around the world and about the interdependence of people who care for each other. She speaks about the care given to her by her loved ones, remembering for instance her boyfriend Nathan washing her hair for her while she was still in The Royal London. To be kind to one another in a world that seems to offer only the antithesis of kindness, “is a profound act”, she says on p.178. 

‘To exist as I am’, is a quotation from the Walt Whitman poem, Song of Myself, which prefaces the book and Grace’s story is clearly ongoing. The sciatica that I suffered from is much diminished now and I am looking for ways in which I can follow up on the ideas which this book has generated for me. I reread the comments from her publisher, Wellcome Collection, in the title pages and I found that Wellcome is a charitable foundation which has a museum containing many items related to ‘health, medicine and human experience’. It is situated in London near Euston Station, which is not a million miles away from where I live. Maybe it’s time to make that journey.

 

References

 

To Exist As I Am (2025) Grace Spence Green

 

Song of Myself, section 20, in Leaves of Grass (1855) Walt Whitman

*My thanks are due to Lissa for inspiring me to read this book. Her latest novel, a coming of age story entitled My Name is MacKenzie Bly, was published in August.