Musings

The Man Who Fell Out Of Bed

When I was a medical student many years ago, one of the nurses called me in considerable perplexity, and gave me this singular story on the phone: that they had a new patient - a young man - just admitted that morning. He had seemed very nice, very normal, all day - indeed, until a few minutes before, when he awoke from a snooze. He then seemed excited and strange - not himself in the least. He had somehow contrived to fall out of bed, and was now sitting on the floor, carrying on and vociferating, and refusing to go back to bed. Could I come, please, and sort out what was happening?
     When I arrived I found the patient lying on the floor by his bed and staring at one leg. His expression contained anger, alarm, bewilderment and amusement - bewilderment most of all, with a hint of consternation. I asked him if he would go back to bed, or if he needed help, but he seemed upset by these suggestions and shook his head. I squatted down beside him, and took the history on the floor. He had come in, that morning, for some tests, he said. He had no complaints, but the neurologists, feeling that he had a ‘lazy’ left leg - that was the very word they had used - thought he should come in. He had felt fine all day, and fallen asleep towards evening. When he woke up he felt fine too, until he moved in the bed. Then he found, as he put it, ‘someone’s leg’ in the bed -a severed human leg, a horrible thing! He was stunned, at first, with amazement and disgust - he had never experienced, never imagined, such an incredible thing. He felt the leg gingerly. It seemed perfectly formed, but ‘peculiar’ and cold. At this point he had a brainwave. He now realised what had happened:it was all a joke!A rather monstrous and improper, but a very original, joke! It was New Year’s Eve, and everyone was celebrating. Half the staff were drunk; quips and crackers were flying; a carnival scene. Obviously one of the nurses with a macabre sense of humour had stolen into the Dissecting Room and nabbed a leg, and then slipped it under his bedclothes as a joke while he was still fast asleep. He was much relieved at the explanation; but feeling that a joke was a joke, and that this one was a bit much, he threw the damn thing out of the bed. But - and at this point his conversational manner deserted him, and he suddenly trembled and became ashen-pale -when he threw it out of bed, he somehow came after it - and now it was attached to him.
     ’Look at it!’ he cried, with revulsion on his face. ‘Have you ever seen such a creepy, horrible thing? I thought a cadaver was just dead. But this is uncanny! And somehow - it’s ghastly - it seems stuck to me!’ He seized it with both hands, with extraordinary violence, and tried to tear it off his body, and, failing, punched it in an access of rage.
     ’Easy!’ I said. ‘Be calm! Take it easy! I wouldn’t punch that leg like that.’
     ’And why not?’ he asked, irritably, belligerently.
     ’Because it’syour leg,’ I answered. ‘Don’t you know your own leg?’
     He gazed at me with a look compounded of stupefaction, incredulity, terror and amusement, not unmixed with a jocular sort of suspicion, ‘Ah Doc!’ he said. ‘You’re fooling me! You’re in cahoots with that nurse - you shouldn’t kid patients like this!’
     ’I’m not kidding,’ I said. ‘That’s your own leg.’
     He saw from my face that I was perfectly serious - and a look of utter terror came over him. ‘You say it’s my leg, Doc? Wouldn’t you say that a man should know his own leg?’
     ’Absolutely,’ I answered. ‘Heshouldknow his own leg. I can’t imagine himnotknowing his own leg. Maybeyou’rethe one who’s been kidding all along?’
     ’I swear to God, cross my heart, I haven’t… A manshouldknow his own body, what’s his and what’s not - but this leg, thisthing’ - another shudder of distaste - ‘doesn’t feel right, doesn’t feel real - and it doesn’tlookpart of me.’
     ’Whatdoesit look like?’ I asked in bewilderment, being, by this time, as bewildered as he was.
     ’What does it look like?’ He repeated my words slowly. ‘I’ll tell you what it looks like. It looks like nothing on earth. How can a thing like that belong to me? I don’t knowwherea thing like that belongs…’ His voice trailed off. He looked terrified and shocked.
     ’Listen,’ I said. ‘I don’t think you’re well. Please allow us to return you to bed. But I want to ask you one final question. If this - this leg - isnotyour left leg’ (he had called it a ‘counterfeit’ at one point in our talk, and expressed his amazement that someone had gone to such lengths to ‘manufacture’ a ‘facsimile’) ‘then whereisyour own left leg?’
     Once more he became pale - so pale that I thought he was going to faint. ‘I don’t know, he said. ‘I have no idea. It’s disappeared. It’s gone. It’s nowhere to be found…’

Postscript

     Since this account was published (inA Leg to Stand On, 1984), I received a letter from the eminent neurologist Dr Michael Kremer, who wrote:

     I was asked to see a puzzling patient on the cardiology ward. He had atrial fibrillation and had thrown off a large embolus giving him a left hemiplegia, and I was asked to see him because he constantly fell out of bed at night for which the cardiologists could find no reason.
     When I asked him what happened at night he said quite openly that when he woke in the night he always found that there was a dead, cold, hairy leg in bed with him which he could not understand but could not tolerate and he, therefore, with his good arm and leg pushed it out of bed and naturally, of course, the rest of him followed.
     He was such an excellent example of this complete loss of awareness of his hemiplegic limb but, interestingly enough, I could not get him to tell me whether his own leg on that side was in bed with him because he was so caught up with the unpleasant foreign leg that was there.

“The Man Who Fell Out Of Bed”, written by Oliver Sacks in “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat”

Music

I’m in a musical mood at the moment, so I will be playing guitar for a while.

I may also post/reblog pictures that are relevant.

Electro Swing and Jazz

I’ve always been into swing, big band, jazz sort of music, but nit hasn’t been until recently that I’ve owned much to listen to. So I went on a little spree and gathered some fantastic albums and now I’m obsessed, whistling the tunes, getting them stuck in people’s heads who don’t even know what the genre is.

Why is it that I know of nobody who listens to this sort of music, along with trip-hop, jazz rap and a variety of other musical genres that are just a little bit off the beaten path?


I’ve decided to write a few things down as a sort of guide on how I want to live my life in terms of specific and daily goals. Nothing too huge or extensive, just little things like “Make a point of learning something every day”. 

Workouts

Started a workout regime. Every morning at 6:30am get up, 15 minutes to get ready and then we get on with the warm up, workout and then the warm down.

Today’s workout included:

30x Push Ups

Run (Run is 150m, doing my best to go at an 80% pace)

30x Squats

Run

30x Sit Ups

Run

1-2 mins rest.

Repeat changing reps to 20 and then again to 10.

If I’m not feeling it, I’ll do the same exercises to failure, but if you don’t feel it you’re not trying hard enough. Today, i did no extras as I was overheating and sweating like crazy. I’m thinking I should get up earlier, because it gets warm fairly early in the morning.

Keen as fuck for tomorrows workout.

Here is my motivational quote of the day:

Vegeta: (to himself) “Who does this fool think he’s dealing with!? He’s beneath me! I’ll show him. I’ll show them all! 

I’ll reduce this place to ashes!”

Imagine saying this to your former self. The guy who didn’t want to get up in the morning. The guy who couldn’t do that last push up. The guy who jogged the last run. Fuck that guy. He’s beneath me! 

Sherlock

So I started watching Sherlock yesterday and finished season 2 today.
Right now I’m in that mindset where I just want to learn everything. All of it. Anything I could want to know. Though, the nature of what I am looking to learn is back to where I was 6 months ago and that is to do with intelligence and logic.

About 6 months ago I was learning a lot about codes, ciphers, cryptex’s and other puzzle boxes, intricate mind games and riddles. I was also Geocaching at the time, so Sherlock brought me back into that head space.

I’m a big enough dick as it is, correcting everyone, flaunting my intelligence when the opportunity arises, which becomes more often the less educated the people surrounding you are. But I feel a whole new level of dick coming on. The kind of guy who only says things when he is right, asks questions just to get a reaction. The kind of guy who treats the world like a game and manipulates it in order to amuse himself.

I think I might be almost going out of my way to develop a god complex. I’m not sure I care, either. I mean, it almost always helps to be smarter than everyone else but I feel, again, that it’s probably not the best idea.

I began writing a novel shortly after I started Geocaching and it has been said that once an idea makes a home in your mind it never truly leaves until you discover it to be true or false.

My novel follows that idea and leads the protagonist to commit suicide in order to test his theory and right now I am having that same paranoid feeling again.

I watched a movie called ‘The Prestige’ 2 nights ago and in the end Hugh Jackman, one of the main characters, finds out that he was wrong about something because he wanted it to be more complex and intricate than it was. He wanted it to be better.

The same thing happened in Sherlock, spoiler alert by the way. In Sherlock, Holmes finds himself investigating a case which in the end turns out to be all smoke a mirrors, nothing complex or amazing. Nothing that any ordinary person could not have solved, but because he wanted it to be more he looked for more. He was not satisfied with simplicity, because in his mind that meant that it wasn’t intelligent, despite he himself having once said that in order to hide effectively you must hide in plain sight, a simple concept, the Purloined Letter. 

And so I feel like my pursuit for knowledge is being foreshadowed by TWO clear indications that a certain level of intelligence, coupled with an active imagination and a passion or a drive toward something can and ultimately will lead to a terrible end if you fail to recognise something for what it is and not for what you want it to be.

Something the three of us, Hugh Jackman’s character and Sherlock plus myself, share is that we were playing a game. Sherlock treats all of his cases like a game. Robert Angier, Jackman’s character, indulges in the game of “Who’s the better magician and can create a better trick?”

The game I will play is not apparent to me, but because of the way my brain works I find myself with that niggling feeling I’m being told something. Which, in the end I will ignore for the most part, but it is interesting to note that there has been speculation that those of a higher intelligence tend to commit suicide for reasons that, in the end, are not ideas that usually enter the minds of the common brothers, let alone concern them. That is to say that they suffer from existential depression, but what I suggest is something different.

I’m not going to reveal the plot line to my novel just yet, but anybody smart enough/obsessed enough could figure it out enough to provoke me to share.

So, in conclusion, I’m not going to kill myself nor am I worried God is guiding my life in order to train me for some purpose. But I am going to go and learn some stuff and be really smart at people.

 I’m going to sign off with a single letter from now on, by the way.

-N 

Intelligence

So I’m here researching the effects of nicotine on brain function and memory. I tend to be one of those guys that embodies autodidacticism and goes off and learns things that people either don’t know or do not care to know, and when they do know they find it amazing that they are not the only one. It’s almost alarming how much people don’t know, but even more so, how much they think they are different and alone in their knowledge or views of the world. In this way I can see the appeal to religion, but in the same light their weakness of character on sense of self disgusts me.

I know what I am and who I am enough to be able to see what does not sit well with me. I have been considering getting a packet of nicotine gum to have a chew on when I’m studying or reading so I can ensure that I remember what I read despite my decent memory doing a pretty good job so far already.

I’m also stuck on deciding a book I should begin reading. I just finished a book on relationships and the evolutionary biology behind the mating game and so on. I’m not sure where I’d like to go next. Is it ethics or some branch of philosophy? Is it theology or the denial of it? Is it into the land of fiction? Maybe self-help and personal communication?

I think I’m going to need an opinion or two.