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Ink in the Blood
A Hospital Diary
HILARY MANTEL
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain in the London Review of Books, November 2010
Copyright © Hilary Mantel 2010
All rights reserved.
Ebook Edition 2010 ISBN: 9780007427758
Version 2019-06-10
The moral right of the author is asserted
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
Contents
Copyright
Ink in the Blood
About the Author
About the Publisher
Ink in the Blood
Three or four nights after surgery – when, in the words of the staff, I have ‘mobilised’ – I come out of the bathroom and spot a circus strongman squatting on my bed. He sees me too; from beneath his shaggy brow he rolls a liquid eye. Brown-skinned, naked except for the tattered hide of some endangered species, he is bouncing on his heels and smoking furiously without taking the cigarette from his lips: puff, bounce, puff, bounce. What rubbish, I think: actually shouting at myself, but silently. This is a non-smoking hospital. It is impossible this man would be allowed in, to behave as he does. Therefore he’s not real, and if he’s not real I can take his space. As I get into bed beside him, the strongman vanishes. I pick up my diary and record him: was there, isn’t any more.
This happened in early July, 2010. I had surgery on the first of the month, and was scheduled to stay in hospital for about nine days. The last thing the surgeon said to me, on the afternoon of the procedure: ‘For you, this is a big thing, but remember, to us it is routine.’ The operation was to relieve a stricture in my bowel, before it closed completely and created an emergency. But though we had used the latest scans in preparation, neither patient nor doctor could imagine the damage left by the endometriosis for which I’d had surgery 30 years before. Organs were stuck together, pulled out of shape. It took six hours to disentangle the wreckage. When I woke up, my surgeon was standing at the end of the trolley in the recovery room, grey and shrunken as if a decade had passed. He had expected to be home for dinner. And now look!
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