Ruby Stark

On Tuesday, I went on a work outing to a bowling alley. My boss and I prodded each other on our way past to the bar or the loo or the food laid out. I attempted to skittle the pins in the next lane, but missed. We went for a few drinks afterwards, and when I said I was leaving, Malt walked me to the U-Bahn. I wanted him to come home with me, but it didn’t happen.

On Wednesday, my friend, Suki, came for supper. I made gazpacho soup and bread and a salad with French dressing and tzatziki. We ate and talked about why people believe in homeopathy, and about boys and having multiple irons in the fire while we played with the cats.

On Thursday, I was beside myself with tiredness. I had had three early-morning visits to the doctor to get more drugs and have my INR level checked with a blood test, so I was completely shattered. At work, we had a review meeting and everyone wrote down good and bad things about the past two weeks’ work and then we grouped them into categories for discussion. When we got to the final item, all the points were positive, so someone suggested we have a group hug, so we did. Each of the fifteen people in the meeting hugged each other person and it was very moving. I love the company I work for so much.

In the evening, I went to a programmer meetup and watched Dust give a talk about running a certain programming language on a certain hand-held device. I decided against going home to get some sleep and went to meet Malt and some work friends for someone’s leaving drinks. On the way home, I listened to Sunset Rubdown.

Today, I have pottered and, soon, Malt will arrive for supper.

Tomorrow, I get on the sleeper to Paris.

I went to the London Ambulance Service with the Moms. As I was standing at reception waiting for the PR guy, a policeman came in and asked for Ruby Stark and I said I’m Ruby and put out my hand and then realised he was going for a hug and we embraced. I took him to meet my Mum in the waiting room and they hugged, too. We got talking and N, the policeman, told his part of the story. He said he was going past with his partner on their motorbikes and he saw a crowd on the pavement. He went to investigate and found me on the floor in the recovery position. He said I had gone blue. A passerby was on the phone with the emergency services and tried to pass the phone, but N shoved him aside and began mouth-to-mouth and chest-compressions. After four and a half minutes, I coughed in his face.

At that moment, he started crying, my Mum started crying and I started crying. Mum and N hugged again. My Dad arrived and we retold the story and he nearly cried.

The PR guy arrived and we went to the coffee room. The paramedics arrived and seemed kind of detached and professionally dutiful. A photographer chap took some photos of us in the back of an ambulance, and then we all shared doughnuts and cookies. One of the paramedics asked me what my plans were and I said I was moving to Berlin. I explained that I’d applied in May and got a phone interview, but then I died and Mum had to explain to them that I was indisposed. Everyone laughed, and I think the ice broke. My sister arrived.

We took some more photos with me astride a paramedic motorbike in my dress and tights and schoolgirl shoes. And N asked if I wanted to take a photo with his Police hat on and I politely agreed and my Mum took a photo that will never ever see the light of day.

One of the paramedics said that the first five minutes after a cardiac arrest are crucial and it became clear that N had saved my life.

We all hugged goodbye and my Mum and Dad agreed to go on an ambulance shift as observers.

Afterwards, my Mum, Dad, sister and I went for supper. I remember when I saw Touching the Void with my Mum and her friend and her friend’s son. We all came out and felt like we’d been through the emotional wringer, but we just couldn’t stop talking and we were all on such a high. Supper felt like that. I felt tired, but very special and loved.

I remember feeling really cold and trying to pull my wooly blanket over me, but not being able to because it was tucked under the end of the bed.

I remember there was a woman in the bed opposite who used to groan and cry out. She had flushed red cheeks and wild, curly hair and a huge card by her bed that said Spring. I judged that she’d been in a while. However, given that no one else remembers her, perhaps my judgement of that time is questionable.

I remember reading an article in one of the London free papers about Mr Christmas, the man who celebrates Christmas every day of the year.

I remember my Dad asking me how I felt and me saying, Terrific. Apparently, that was the first thing I’d said since I was admitted.

As I waited for the bus last night on my epic journey home from The Black Heart Procession, I looked at the blue-lit entrance to a club. It brought me back to intensive care and some wild, extended dream or hallucination I had that I was in a club. I remember a lot of blue wall-lighting and that there was pretty much no one else there. I just wandered about with a faint feeling of unease, kind of lost in the sense that I didn’t know what I should be doing. Lights low, distant nurses moving about, not being in danger but not feeling safe, and alone alone alone.

Yesterday, I met my old Uni friend, Grain, for lunch. We ate steak and drank coffee and orange juice and talked about our friends and old times. Afterwards, we went back to mine and watched Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex.

That is my favourite film of the last two years. It blows my mind that there were left-wing fighters in a rich European country who wouldn’t hesitate to open fire on the police.

After the film, we talked about Matte, and Grain’s girlfriend. We talked about how relationships are so much more complicated than they appear when you are a child. We talked about the way that individual problems can be solved with a rational approach, but that whole relationships cannot be analysed logically: either it makes you happy enough, or it doesn’t.

We discussed marriage and children and watched the Hitler Doesn’t Get His MDMA Pizza video on YouTube.

I had been feeling intermittent chest pain under my arm all afternoon and, faced with the prospect of an evening alone, decided to ring NHS Direct just to be safe. I answered no to all the heart attack questions, but, upon hearing about my recent cardiac arrest, they sent an ambulance.

The paramedics arrived and did an ECG and took blood and asked me heart attack questions. They decided to take me to hospital – again, just to be safe. Grain instantly charmed the paramedics with his calm buoyancy and was excited that we were riding with blues and twos.

We arrived at A&E and the nurses put on a blood pressure cuff and oxygen saturation snapper. They took blood and I said Grain could stay while they put on dots and clips for an ECG. I desperately wanted him to see me with no top on. I think because I wanted him to be my boyfriend. He remarked later that my boobs are bigger than he remembered them.

Wave one of doctors decided that I wasn’t about to die. Wave two said that the only possible explanation for re pain was that my grafted bypass had come away. They would check that later with a blood test.

In the meantime, Grain sat on my bed and we held hands and he told me the story of his friend who lost his mind whilst tripping on mushrooms.

I realised that I didn’t want any of the girls I like: not Matte or Allure. I wanted nurture and strength: Grain and Dusk.

We saw a gurney go past with a covered body on it. We looked at each other in silence. I felt terribly upset that someone had died while we were there. I leant forward and Grain hugged me for a long time and said I was precious to him and that he loved me. For the hundredth time, I fell on love with him.

A little later, I was taken up to the cardiac ward. At two a.m., the nurse took some blood. I got about three hours’ sleep and then woke at six a.m. I’ve just heard that my blood test came back normal and that I should be discharged when the doctors do their rounds.

A few days ago, I watched a film called Lost and Delirious. It’s about two girls at a boarding school who are in a relationship. And whenever I think of the one who was more in love, or perhaps less cautious, the doomed one I get that same feeling of sadness and comfort that I get when I think of Aimee Argote from Des Ark.

Today, I have that strange, close feeling when I think of Grain. It’s like that feeling you have when you think of someone you dreamed intimately of the previous night. I know if he walked onto the ward, he would greet me with his usual enthusiastic, broad hello and a hug and a kiss on the mouth. But the closeness I feel is nearer to the thought that, last night, he saw me half undressed.

In a few weeks, I will meet the paramedics who saved me. Apprehension has turned to excitement. I am trying to decide what presents to take them. I am also entertaining a secret fantasy that I will fall in love with one of them and they will save me for a second time.

Last week: appointment with doc where I was taken off some drugs and put on others, long, boring meeting at squat about a party, geek camp by the seaside where I spent the first night puking and went home to the warm embrace of my family and the This Life DVD box set, super fun job interview with music software company in Berlin, helping to run the geek camp I’ve been involved with organising and also learning about Go, a push internet protocol, fonts on the web, NES emulators in Javascript and design in LOST, lots of ohwhydoIloveitso banter with a lovely, long-term-girlfriended boy who I developed a painful crush on.

This week: an answer on whether I have the job, two random gigs, Efterklang with an orchestra, house hunting, supper with two old friends from school and a geeky conference about the artistic aspects of game design.

My Moms just sent me this article about a man who had a cardiac arrest out of hospital and survived.

I cried while I read it, I think because I am struggling to find the new purpose that the guy found. I’m not living like every moment is important.

I try to make my life more like how I want it to be. I do something really cool, or have a great time, but I can’t maintain it. I want to have a relationship with someone in London, but I can’t find anyone. I want to write more songs, but they come out of me so slowly. I want to hack on a personal project for a living, but I can’t find users for the things I build. I look for a third place, but can’t find it. I want to play gigs, but can’t find people who will put me on.

On 14th February, two days after my 28th birthday, I wrote this post:

The good: I’ve got a solo music project that is pretty good; I’m spending a lot of time with my family; I’ve got several art projects on the go; I’m reading a lot; I live in London; I’m going to lots of gigs; I’m heavily involved with the tech scene.

The bad: I’m not playing enough gigs; I wish I was in some more bands; I’m not in the US; I haven’t got a girlfriend or a boyfriend or both; I’m not doing any politics; I’m not playing squash; my job is not what I love.

I am trying to sort out the job thing at the moment. I am trying to sort out the squash thing, too. I have a girlfriend, but our relationship makes me sad as much as it makes me happy. [Full disclosure: I think the only relationships I'm into are the ones that make me sad.]

Some people are happy, man. It fucking blows my mind.

I’m finding it quite hard to cope with not being dead.

First, there is this awful dissonance between normal, mindless being alive and abnormal mindful being alive.  Normally, a person stumbles around inside life.  Maybe, like me, you think a lot about what is going within life: politically, romantically, anthropologically, morally, physically.  Or, maybe, like I wish I did, you live without analysing.  Regardless, it is very rare to look up and go, “Good Lord, I am alive”, because that almost necessitates trying to use that incredibleness to make you use every second.

The problem is that, because I died, I am having a high number of those, “Good Lord, I am alive”, moments.  So, I rapidly switch between getting on with things and stepping outside life to see that it exists.

Second, I cannot fathom the relationship between other people and the fact that I died.  I know they were all terribly upset when I was in hospital.  In that time, I realised a lot of people cared very much about me.  However, now that I am back in real life – out of hospital, walking around, not very ill, back in London – I don’t know how they feel about it.  I sometimes worry that they’ve forgotten that I was dead.  I wonder why they don’t hug me like it’ll be the last time, or why they don’t focus on me.  I wonder why Matte had spare care to pursue another relationship when she almost lost me.  I do know how terrible this sounds.

Matte has a new chap.  He is an American that she met at the G20 demos and they were friends for a while and then stuff happened I guess in Belgium and then when she went to Brighton after she visited me.  I kind of already knew, but she told me for real on the telephone last night.  I went through precisely the same set of feelings as before.

The difficulties.

First, when she’s not with me, I can’t rely on the constancy of feeling that is assumed in a monogamous relationship because she is sometimes with someone else.

Second, when she is with me, she could be elsewhere in her head.  If that elsewhere is the trees or an action or a festival, that’s OK because those are things.  However, if the elsewhere is someone else, I feel like I’m left with vacancy.  She says that it’s only the former, but we all think about another when we’re with someone, so she probably does, too.

Third, the announcement of these new people strips away any trust I have in her, and makes it impossible for me to be vulnerable.  If she were here right now, I couldn’t imagine being anything other than friends.

Fourth, and this is very difficult for me to admit, the thought of her having sex with other people gives me a feeling of mostly sickness and stomach removal, and a tiny bit of sexual excitement.  I find this very shameful and I don’t really understand it.

Fifth, all I see ahead is occasional sharp stabs of pain when someone new comes along, followed by the slow ebb of sadness and a return to a hands-over-the-ears happiness, followed by another sharp stab of pain.

Sixth, she is considering either moving to a forest eco camp, traveling around a bit, moving to Brighton or staying in Bradford.  The first and most likely two of those four choices will favour her spending more time with this new chap.

Seventh, for her, I am the safe relationship and I am pretty sure I don’t want to be her home base from which secure preparations are made for adventures and to which she returns for rest and recuperation.

She is supposed to be visiting me in London the week after next.  We are supposed to be going to stay in a cottage in Cornwall at the end of this month.  The Moms has suggested doing these things and having a nice time and then thinking about where I stand afterwards.  However, I’m pretty sure that will be impossible for me.  I expect that, within a week, I will have decided to get on with going out with her, or say it’s finished and do that slicing gesture like Al Pacino in Serpico.

For extra bonus fun, I think The Moms and step-Dad are reaching a crisis point again.  This time, when we talked about it, I half counseled The Moms to end the relationship.

The palpitations are back, too.

The scar down the middle is from the operation two weeks ago. The crosses are from where I had blood drains in. The gray stuff is damned elastoplast that refuses to come off.

After seven weeks here, it looks like I might be getting out of hospital soon.  A couple more scans, one of which will, hopefully, confirm that I don’t need an ICD, then home on maybe Friday or Monday.

I’ve had a few bad days, recently.  On Sunday, the pain of my chest incision and in my back just would not go away.  And, yesterday, I went downstairs to the river to eat supper with Matte, my sisters, my Mum and cousin, waved them all off, came back upstairs and felt so tensely gripped by tiredness, I got into bed and went straight to sleep.  Nights are the worst.  Though it is a huge relief to be free of Monty the heart monitor and Johnny Drip – though not, of course, iPhone – my routine runs: take drugs at ten p.m., sleep, wake at two a.m. going ouch, take more drugs, sleep, wake about five or six a.m., sit up and feel the ouch dissolve from my torso, or take more drugs at eight a.m.

Lots of people have visited.  This is like an injection of real life and is so reviving, so necessary.

Matte has been here since Saturday.  It has been heavenly.  We have held hands and she has given me massages and we have pashed next to the hospital bed and in the lift and she has read to me and she has gone to get us noodles and pizza and we have started planning a holiday in a cottage in Cornwall.  Today, she left London to return home to pack and she will then travel to Belgium for a protest camp.  She will spend a bit of time in Brighton on the way back [heart tug, tears], then go to her Mum’s civil partnership ceremony, then come to visit me in Cambridge.

On Monday, I had a coarctation repair and an arterial bypass.  The operation took ten hours.  I am in awe of the surgeons’ superhuman concentration.  Apparently, it took four hours just to get inside my chest without damaging my organs because of all the adhesions between my organs and chest wall.

I woke up on Tuesday swimming in morphine, ate four yoghurts, and was then transferred to the High Dependency Ward.  I was there for a painful and slow night, then had my drains removed the next day and was transferred to the general cardiac ward.  Today, I had my dressings removed and a delicious shower.

Matte is coming tomorrow.  I am sore, and keep on nodding off in my chair, but I am so shocked and grateful to be here.  I get to have some more life! I get to hang out with my little sisters at home.  I get to play the guitar again.  I get to make love with Matte.  I get to have evenings laughing with friends around a supper table.  I get to go on tour in the US.

Last Saturday, I went downstairs to meet her by the piano in the main hall of the hospital.  Apparently, one of the amateur pianists had been coming for years; then, one day, he started singing.

We cuddled together on a bench and she gave me a copy of her latest zine.  We cuddled on another bench in the park outside under the very hottening sun.  She said that I was wearing my white t-shirt again and I said I was.  The stickers on my chest and Monty the heart monitor’s wires showed through.  I also had on my blue stockings and Ariel Schrag shoes and had my loose Levi’s hanging off my ass.

I told her about what the surgeon is going to do on Monday and she sat silent and then said it was going to be OK.  I curled myself around and snuggled my face into her neck.

We went to the posh new cafe in the hospital and ate yoghurt-covered apricots that tasted like warm ice-cream and Sweet Chilli crisps.  We sat on the wall looking over the Thames and watched the couples and children walk by.  I had my hand tucked up inside the back of Matte’s t-shirt and my hand on her thigh with her hand over mine.  A group of young lads approached, taunting the people they passed.  But, all they gave us was a few high-pitched shouts of, ‘It must be love,” and blew us a few kisses.  A large family went past and the daughter smiled at us and said they should take a picture.

On the way back into the hospital, I suggested we go into the toilets and fuck.  We went in, but both became shy.  Then, unexpectedly, we were alone and I walked to a cubicle that was down a little corridor and she followed.  She closed the door and we pashed.  Each time someone came in, we’d grind to a halt.  However, after a while, we got hotter and hotter and cared less and less.  I put my hand around and under her breast and stroked her with my thumb and kissed her neck and she squirmed.  I undid the zip of her trousers and put my hand inside her pants and spread around her wetness and pushed one and then two fingers inside her.

The rest of the world went away.  All I felt was my fingers inside her and her open-mouthed kisses that muffled the sounds she made and the pressure of her thigh between my legs.  After a while, I grabbed her hand and put it against my cunt to tell her it was OK to touch me and she slid her fingers into my pants and stroked me round and round.  I put my mouth to her ear and said, I want you inside me, and she sort of shuddered and then fucked me with her hand.  She came and her knees bent and I faked it and we stood smoothing each other.

There was a break in the crowds of people in the toilets and we snuck out and then stood side by side and washed our hands.  We came back upstairs to the ward and sat very close holding hands, her in the chair and me at the head of the bed.

We started talking about Monday and she said I would be fine because she had sprinkled fairy dust on me and I melted and loved her even more.  Throughout the rest of the day, whenever I looked panicked, she just said, Remember the fairy dust.

We talked about old people.  She had told me in a letter that she thought they are stores of wisdom, even though this wisdom comes from the past.  She told me that they keep themselves alive by telling stories, and maybe keep us alive, too.  Yesterday, she elaborated by saying she thought that old people’s stories are like those memories of childhood that you sometimes take out and look at.  I thought that was quite convicing.  However, to me, telling stories fucking kills people because they are using the past to fulfil the present.

Matte went and bought us some noodles from Ned’s.  We guzzled them and then had syrupy banana fritters for afters.  And, then, she had to go and get her train back to Bradford.

I walked her outside and put my hands around her ribs and kissed her.  I was terrified that I would never see her again.

I had a mini op on Thursday where the surgeon investigated my crazy arteries further. After several weeks of tests and discussion and changed minds the docs have decided. The list of things to fix is basically the same.  However, both the bulging aorta and under-oxygenated section of my heart will be fixed in one big operation on Monday.

The surgeon came yesterday and laid it all out.  Up until then, the aorta had been the sideshow, and the mis-placed artery the main event.  Now, there has been a reversal:  The fixing my aorta is both more urgent and more dangerous.  He said he might  sever one of my vocal chords, thus making it impossible for me to speak above a whisper.  He said he might cut off the supply of blood to my spine and paralyse me.  He said there was a 10% chance I wouldn’t make it through the operation.

I am fucking scared.

I hung out with my girl again today.

When we talk, it’s not like it is with Dusk where we can’t get the words out fast enough. Our conversations happen at the pace of her mind. So, there are lots of discussions that we’ve been having for months: the one about her sexuality, the one about non-monogamy, the one about the way to stop climate change, the one about direct action. When we see each other, she might have done some more thinking and we might take a few steps further.

Just before she left to get on the train to go back to Bradford, we sat on the edge of the hospital bed and I put my head on her shoulder and my face against her neck and curled my arm around her tummy and her ribs. It was as close as we were going to get to being in bed together and it felt like heaven. She is so soft and womanly and she swells in just the right places.

I said to her that being in the ward with all these eighty-year-old women made me want to kill myself and she asked why and I said because they are at the end of their lives.

Matte visited from Bradford today. We hung out on my bed. We snuck sneaky kisses in the lift and on benches and in my bedside chair. We talked and talked. We had an abortive game of chess and I thrashed her at Connect-4. I read her the beginning of Sarah Waters’s latest book. We went to the noodle bar around the corner and ate delicious veggie yaki soba and banana fritters and on the way back, Drippy the drip got a bit agitated with all the walking and decided to have a freak-out so we returned to base and the nurse switched him off and on again and we went back downstairs and sat in the park.

I got hooked up to Monty the heart monitor, a little box with wires running to my chest that I carry around with me. I resisted the urge to pull Matte into the bathroom and push her up against the wall and put my hand in her underwear and fuck her until she sighed in my ear.

I have been in hospital for almost four weeks. The doctors are still deciding what my treatment should be. I feel desperate.

So, more visitors today: my sister, Frost (stopped fancying her again), Dusk and Heather (an old, old friend).  We talked about how I refer to the day of my cardiac arrest as the day I died.  Reputedly, there was some confusion amongst my Twitter acquaintances about whether the death I tweeted about was a permanent one.

This was the first time my sister had met Dusk, thought she has heard a lot about him over the years.  I have yet to find out what she thought of him.  Presently, she and Heather left and Dusk and Frost and I went for noodles around the corner from the hospital.

I take a drug called Warfarin which thins my blood so it doesn’t clot on my artificial heart valve.  However, in periods just before operations, I get put on Heparin.  This does the same thing, but is delivered intravenously.  So, Dusk, Frost and I set off from the main hospital entrance.  However, we weren’t alone.  I was dragging along Johnny Drip, an electronic pump mounted on a wheeled drip stand.  The pump very slowly pushes in the plunger of a large syringe which delivers Heparin into my arm via a plastic tube and canulla.

Drippy doesn’t really have off-road wheels, poor chap, so I had to carry him over the cobblestones.  Our party got a few odd looks as we crossed Westminster Bridge, but the noodle bar staff didn’t seem to notice anything odd.

We sat and ate, JD occasionally interjecting with a beep to remind us that he was unplugged from the mains.  Dusk went into full raconteur mode.  He told the story of how he nearly died of food poisoning in the middle of the African rainforest.  He told the story of how he was interrogated at gunpoint by the security detail for a Landless Peasant Movement camp when they mistook him for an intruder.

I fell in love with him, yet again.  He is just gorgeous: his smile looks like the low, sharp sun on a winter’s day; his mouth tastes like malt and his face is handsome and brown and he gives me the same feeling as hugging my teddy.  I could listen to him talk forever.  I make him laugh.  He says interesting things, unlike most people.  He knows way more than I do.

I met Dusk maybe six months after I moved to Leeds. We were hauling furniture from the house of someone who was leaving on a trip around the world and taking it to a social centre we were both involved with.  I didn’t fancy him, but I went on a date with him, anyway.

We became close, he became the first boy I slept with, and I fell into love that lasted two or three years.  He is the most wonderful person I’ve ever met.  Now, we are close friends.  I know he never loved me.  I think he might still fancy me a little bit, but mainly just really likes me.

Tonight, when Dusk came to visit me in hospital, I was allowed to leave for a short while to go and eat noodles at a bar around the corner.  We talked about Fooled By Randomness, his Glastonbury experience last year and about how the scientific method needs to be used by laymen in like art and literature (this flower is beautiful, but why?)

I told him about the operations I’m lined up for and he asked me how I’m feeling and I said, Terrified, and he sighed and covered my hands with his and I said more about how scared I am and he covered my hands with his again and I saw a second of love in his smile.

My sister told me that the second or third day after I was brought into hospital, she and my family and some friends of ours left me on the ventilator in intensive care and went to get a pizza around the corner. My family had been awake for a couple of days, and they ordered a lot of wine and the evening descended into desperate hilarity and the worry was be transformed into a kind of volatile, anerobic happiness.

I sent the following email to my Dad this evening:

“Hahaha. Thanks so much, Dad. Mum said she will ring you with the latest. In short. cardiac catheter to get more pictures of heart, mend bulging aorta with covered stent and try and stimulate arrhythmias; bypass to sort out probably poor oxygen supply to a bit of my heart; subsequent second attempt to stimulate arrhythmias that, if successful, means that problem not fixed and, thus, defibrillator will be fitted. Aorta mending with covered stent may fail. In this case, it will be mended surgically: one end during bypass, the other with another incision.

All my love,”