On The Record

As I recorded back in early February I needed considerable help from Dr Shivangi (my current brain doc) and Ms Jessica Koh (the only human representative of the Medical Records Dept at NUH who could be tracked down) to triumph over the hospital's digital bureaucracy and obtain - late last week, finally - the report I needed from the Neurology people to submit to my prospective insurers in Malaysia. It made interesting reading, I must say, for me at least, and shed a little more light on the events of late August & September 2022 with regard to yours truly.

Of course, I struggled with the plentiful technical jargon involved, but it was good to see the word mild featured frequently. At least, this was the case after the reports on the initial scans which featured some pretty heavy evidence of severe brain seizures. Must say, my experience of The Delirium itself didn't feel in the slightest bit mild, but I suppose there's a good chance that some of the various drugs fed into my system to bring me back to sanity might have helped keep me in the strange mental world I inhabited for some three and a half weeks. But it looks as if all I need to worry about now going forward is some (mild) degree of white matter damage in the old brainbox which is pretty common in lots of folk my age. There's no treatment for this - which is why the docs are happy not to see me and I remain happily unmedicated - but the usual stuff about checking for high blood pressure, a decent diet, plenty of exercise, good sleep, etc., etc., applies. Which is very fine indeed by me.

The mystery remains as to why I suddenly lost all touch with reality back in 2022, and almost as suddenly came back again. (Not to mention why my lungs, heart, liver, etc. decided to severely misbehave.) But for me the most pressing puzzle is how I came to sustain what would seem on the surface a kind of double consciousness in the first few days of the breakdown (roughly five or six, I reckon.) Noi and others who were around to try and help are quite clear as to what I got up to on the general ward and it's all highly embarrassing. In fact, just a month or so ago Noi played a bit of a recording she has of me indulging in a spectacular rant and it sounded colourful, to say the least. (Unprintable in polite society, I'm sad to say.)

But all the time I was entertaining, perplexing and generally irritating the world around me in NUH I was in a world elsewhere caught up in a series of interlinked narratives, a place and events I remember extremely vividly. And there is almost zero overlap in terms of the obsessions I manifested in the two entirely separate versions of me. 

Now I can grasp the notion of the Divided Self as made familiar by our chums Dickens & Dostoevsky. But the entirely Divided Consciousness, fascinating as it is, is a step too far. To use a handy colloquialism: I just can't wrap my head around it.