After my confrontation with the police I knew I was going to be banned from driving because of drink. In a hurry to get to Aston in Birmingham, I let a friend have the use of my Honda 400/4.
On the train from Bristol Temple Meads to Birmingham New street station I was feeling a bit shaken but very relieved to put Bristol behind me. I was looking forward to a new start. I should have guessed something was a bit wrong as an elderly person on the train had an attitude of indignation, scorn or disapproval. My arrival to the campus was met with staff providing tea and coffee for new comers.
On the way to my room, I met my neighbour in the corridor and he came out with the comment that his wife did not mind him sleeping with the student women on the campus. I felt slighted, and then he came out with the comment that something was better than the army trousers I was wearing. I liked them because they were loose fitting, durable, cheap and with lots of pockets.
While in my room I could here a couple of people larking around in the room above. All of a sudden there was a large bang as somebody dropped something heavy on the floor and I shouted 'oi'
at the top of my voice. That was the start of my feelings of being pinned down or a grudge match in the postgraduate building. While trying to study the person in the room next to me made his presence felt, or I would find that I was always picking up on strange noises from his room. One example was while I was sat at my desk and about to concentrate, the neighbour did what sounded like a kick to his bin which led me to think that what I was doing was invalid or rubbish. This left me with a feeling of impotent rage. On one occasion while I was still ranting, I suddenly heard what I took to believe was a clockwork toy. I assumed he had left his room and left me ranting at a toy behind the wall . He happened to be on the same course as me, an M.Sc. In Information technology. Another person on the same course was a female who I visited in her room near to the end of the day. We talked for a while and then she told me shed a had a disability before suddenly jumping up inside my space causing me to be startled and getting up quickly to leave the room with an intense fear reaction. Another evening an undergraduate invited me to his room for a smoke of cannabis. He had a bong which is a bottle without a bottom in a bucket with a plug of of cannabis at the to of the bottle. He also had a sachet of white powder which I thought was opium which he sprinkled over the cannabis and lit for me. I thought he was making Nepalese temple ball (opiated black). About thirty years later I guessed this powder might have heroin and to escape the feelings of guilt and stigma I rationalised that all the drugs I have taken were used for medicinal purposes at some time or other, even heroin was on prescription in the 1950's. I left the room and fell against the corridor wall, slid down it and blacked out before returning to my own room. From the same undergraduate I bought what I thought was speed (amphetamine) to engage my imagination and study, but on taking a line I found it it to be something else which made me feel numb and lifeless all over, for a moment I thought it had stopped my heart.
One daytime I kept hearing a door opening and closing and heels which sounded like high heeled shoes being dragged across the the floor. I went upstairs and spoke to the person in the adjacent room, somebody else who was on the same course as me. He told me he had not heard anything and I thought you have got to be lying, so I kicked him in the behind and marched him to see the accommodation officer who complained to the head of my course about me.
I got an appointment with the doctor on the campus and complained of feeling depressed. I pressed for medication and was prescribed Amitriptyline.
On one of my visits to Bristol to get away from the people on the course and to see my friends, one of my friends took me to casualty and fitted me in with a consultation with a psychiatrist in the Bristol Royal Infirmary. I was given the major tranquilliser Stelazine and started visits to Barrow Guerney hospital a few miles out of Bristol, an asylum for the mentally ill. Even though I was feeling distressed and under pressure, I was still almost pleasantly distracted by my surroundings. After Birmingham I would either walk or catch a bus out to Barrow hospital for a reprieve for well over a decade until the government closed it down, I imagine to convert it into something or sell off the houses / villas on the beautiful grounds. This was to be the Tory governments 'care in the community' in which some people were vulnerable and compromised and became run down developing a secondary, or opportunistic illness.
Even though I was unsettled and commuting between Birmingham and Bristol, and Birmingham and Devon, I still managed to get some work done and completed assignments such as equations using Boolean algebra to design circuits, and I also wrote an essay on the growth of IBM. I even heard after leaving Aston, a band of companies, or a syndicate, banded together to try and take the market away from IBM.
After one of my visits to Bristol, I returned to Birmingham with my Honda 400/4. One day I had enough of the campus and trying to live off my wits all of the time, so I went to get on my motorbike to leave the course behind and I found somebody had removed my ignition barrel. The next thing my bike was removed or stolen for which I claimed for theft from my insurance company.
After seeing another campus doctor at Aston university, he asked if I would see a psychiatrist. During my psychiatric consultation I told the doctor that I was feeling strangely altered by noises of dense objects being slid across the floor. I was not familiar with the word depersonalisation, and the way I spoke may have suggested that I thought someone was controlling my mind. The doctor asked me what I meant by dense, referring to the object being slid around on the floor above my room. I replied, ' a lot of weight in a small area'. I did not think to say density was mass divided by volume from my O level physics at school. I then stated that I was hearing voices, because as I was stressed in my room, I remember straining to try and hear something as I thought I could hear whispering. I wondered if it was the refrigeration motor in the nearby kitchen, or some similar mechanical noise. I opened my room window to strain and see if I could hear where the whispering came from, nothing. Closed the window and then I think I remember hearing it start again or I was vexed. The doctor told me I had schizophrenia and put me on Modicate injections which I believe to be modified snake venom. The medication coursed through my veins, I felt a bit like a wrinkled, deflated balloon being blown into and expanding to its full capacity. My consciousness or awareness expanded but then flattened out and stopped partly at the thought of the continuing saga with me sensing intent all the time from my neighbours room behind that stark wall. I had moved to another room on the other side of my neighbours room to escape from the noise above but even in this room it felt that the wall of silence continued and that there was a grudge match going on behind the wall and the room above.
At the start of my Easter vacation, I returned to Bristol to see friends on my way to Devon to revise for the summer term final exams. After a nights drinking with friends I suggested we take a trip to an inner city area to buy some cannabis for an evening smoke and some detachment. I handed twenty pounds out of the car and the youths came back with very small pieces of cannabis resin. I chased after them and all I remember was something behind me or to the side. I thought I saw what was possible plain clothes CID saying 'if you wanted a decent draw you should have come to see us.. The next thing I remember was waking up in casualty having my head X – rayed with my wallet and money for my keep at home missing. After, I vomited in a hospital bed because of concussion. Next I remember my father carrying me across the kitchen floor. I had no idea how I got to Devon from Bristol. Had I caught a train or had somebody, a friend, driven me home?
On returning to Aston for my finals I attended my exams and after the last one I left another blank paper and walked out of the exam room. I went to bed because of tiredness and concussion and medication. I awoke some hours later at night when it was dark. As I opened my eyes, I could hear phrases in my head like 'id, ego, beautiful ego, bleed for me, trick shoe, see the doctor, that cant be done' . I looked around and there was no one in the room but when I looked in the mirror I saw that my hair had been cut. As I left my room and looked at the name tag on my door, I started hallucinating and in my mind saw an image of the woman who had previously brought about a fear reaction. I went down the pub to forget about it. Some years later while I had anxiety, to the extent I felt fear my my safety and well being, I visited the casualty in the Bristol Royal Infirmary and told them I had been taken somewhere in my sleep. The reply from the doctor was 'hypnosis'. I appealed to the board of examiners saying I had concussion during my exams, and was granted deferred examinations. If the truth was known alcohol, drugs and disruptive behaviour from the other students was to blame as well. On returning to Bristol I started to visit my regular pub with my friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment