Luis Drayton and the Gods of Pus - Part One

Skinny and anaemic little tranny that I am, I'd nevertheless always considered myself extremely fortunate, in that I had never been prone to any kind of disease or serious illness. So it came as something of a surprise, to say the least, when out of the blue I was struck down by some fucking illness - one I'd never even heard of - that almost killed me and laid me flat out on my back to boot! It's a long story, but worth telling, so here goes...
In October 2003, I began to feel ill. At first, I thought it was nothing more than a bad case of flu, and so I tried to continue with my business as if nothing was wrong. But two, three weeks passed, and it only seemed to get worse. I couldn't eat, I felt continually sick, had a fucker of a headache which I just couldn't seem to shake off. Worst of all was a nauseating smell of decay, of something rotting, which actually seemed to be coming from inside my head. Pauline (my wife...yeah, you heard right) was at first kind and patient, but when she saw me continually sticking my fingers down my throat in an attempt to make myself properly sick, she began to think I was trying to wind her up. She was very ill with flu herself, and so wasn't thinking properly. And neither was I, evidently; a month or two before, I had discovered, on weighing myself, that I had gone down from seven and a half to six and a half stone. Yet it never occurred to me to mention it to anyone; that or the fact that whenever I lay down, as soon as my head hit the pillow I was afflicted by horrific stabbing pains in my head which lasted several minutes. Then one day, Pauline came home to find the living room an absolute wreck. What had happened was, I had crawled off the bed to take a piss, then found I couldn't stand up. And though I was able to use my right arm and leg to crawl about the room, pulling things down, dragging the duvet off the bed in futile attempts to pull myself back up, my left side just wouldn't seem to work at all. I spent what seemed like hours lying on the floor, phone receiver a few feet from my head, desperately trying to dial Pauline's mobile number. Towering above was the image of Des O'Connor sharing a joke with special guest Richard Digance on some shitty daytime chat show. In the end, though, I somehow managed to get back into bed, and when Pauline returned and asked what the hell had happened, all I could think to say was that it was the work of the cat! Thank Christ for Pauline, though; finally she got so pissed off with my letting the food spill out of my mouth when she tried to feed me, and nonsensical replies to questions accompanied by idiotic half-smiles and a lot of staring off into space, that she gave me an angry push...and watched as I fell off the bed, spent a few seconds thrashing around on the floor, then just sat there (half-)smiling to myself and staring off into space. It was at this point that Pauline realised there was something seriously wrong, and it was only 'cause she kept on at the emergency services to send an ambulance that one arrived in time; there'd been a big pile-up on the motorway that day and they'd run out, apparently. (Send for an ambulance, or an accident investigator, he's breathing like a furnace, see ya later alligator...) But then Pauline was encouraged in her efforts by the fact that I'd started having almost continuous fits, 'like something out of The Exorcist'. Pauline later told me it was only in the ambulance that she noticed how thin I'd become, 'like something out of Belsen, the skull was showing through your fucking face!' The paramedics, meanwhile, thought I was suffering from AIDS. The ambulance is the last thing I remember. Next thing I knew, I woke up in a strange room. I walked out and down a corridor into a much larger room. Various people asked me how I was feeling. Then a doctor sits down next to me and tells me I have a new personality. Really, the stupid fucker should have said that I was a new personality, that would've made much more sense! Nah, seriously*...

Click here to read Part Two...

* You'll only get this joke if you've read Robert M. Pirsig's novel, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". If you haven't, I really can't be bothered to explain...