DRAGON VERSUS HYDRA

I’ve said to people in the past that the pain caused by mental illness is worse than breaking a bone.  And then I broke a bone and realised that’s no fun either.  They’re both painful; it doesn’t have to be a competition.

I’d take a week off work, and fester in bed grappling an intrusive thought, unable to concentrate on anything else for longer than a minute, a sickness in my stomach like I’d swallowed a glass of worms.  ‘I can’t feel worse than this,’ I’d think.  But then I caught malaria in Uganda, and along with shaking chills and a burning fever, the thumping headaches I endured silenced Crow as quickly as a shotgun blast to his head.

It was an odd relief, and thanks to an incompetent doctor in the Ugandan town of Jinja, who falsely diagnosed a torn shoulder muscle instead of malaria, the parasite had gone undetected for longer than it should have.

I was suffering.  The pain in my head was unbearable at times, and after Crow told me it was an inoperable tumour, all of a sudden, he became obsolete.  As the illness corrupted my blood cells, I couldn’t think of a shopping list let alone dissect the meandering cunning of an OCD riddle.

“If it’s a tumour, then I’ll die.  The end.”  So loud was the banging in my skull that I could not think past that simple equation.  When the throb became a constant pain like my head was jammed in a vice, Crow fled the battlefield like the yellow devil I always knew he was, white flag flapping in tatters as he disappeared over the smoking horizon.

Little One and I managed to leave Uganda but missed our connecting flights to Mexico, stumbling from Heathrow towards Gatwick, where my brother (who’d come to meet us in the layover) thrust twenty pounds in my hand and guided me into a taxi at King’s Cross station.  A few hours later, at the Hospital of Tropical Diseases, quarantine was finally lifted when they accurately diagnosed the parasite in my blood.  I caught a train back home but spent two days in my local hospital while the medication took control.  I felt relieved, until Crow came back, hopping on the hospital bed, claws clanking on the metal headrest.

I sat incredulous between white sheets but smiled anyway.

He jabbed a talon in my eye, I blinked and thought of murder.

“I missed you, Crow,” I lied.

And there we were again, biting, scratching, rolling around like two lovers in a barn, like rival drunks wrestling on the sawdust floor of a wild west saloon.  I smiled at the injustice of it all.  But his smile has always been wider than mine, and I watched that black rainbow slash across his face.

“You could punch a window and cut your wrist in a second,” he said.  “Or swallow bleach from the cleaners’ storeroom.  Imagine choking to death on your own blood and vomit.”

I imagined it in great detail.

“What’s stopping you, Yan?”  He sank his beak into my cheek.  “Remember, you can erase these thoughts by concentrating on a blast of pure white light.  But you know the rules.  You’ll need to do it perfectly.”

Success was a brilliant, obliterating explosion in my mind.  No more talk of dying.  But OCD is an expert in changing strategy.

“Did you know that Little One wants to fuck that doctor, just look at their body language?  What else could it mean?  Think it through, Yan!  You know I’m wrong, but you know how this works – I need proof that I’m mistaken.  Make it feel ‘RIGHT.’  Come up with a convincing alternative and seal it quickly with another blinding flash of phantom light.”

For a second, I wished I still had malaria.

In 2011, I ingested a different parasite and contracted Giardiasis from a stream in Belize.  By the time I reached Honduras, I was suffering from nausea and extreme diarrhea.  “You’re belching like a swamp monster,” said Little One.  As I lay stinking and rancid, huddled on the bathroom floor, there wasn’t a feather in sight.

As vicious as he may be, it turns out Crow has more than one chink in his black armour, and it’s not a man of straw standing in a field.  It’s a broken bone, but only as it snaps; sickness in my belly, but only during the most nauseating hours; a parasite in the blood, but only when it glues me to the bed with my own sweat.

Whether physical or mental, pain hurts by default.  One is somebody holding a flame to your arm, the other is somebody holding a flame to the arm of a loved one.

It burns in different ways.

And which is worse?  The quick snap of the fibula or the long, drawn-out horror of an intrusive OCD spike?  I’d probably choose to lose an arm if it meant Crow would follow it into the incinerator, but if I had to cut it off myself with a hacksaw, maybe I’d only get to break the skin before I changed my mind.  I guess I’ll never know because medical science doesn’t work like that, not since the Middle Ages anyway – and I’d have taken the leeches for sure.

I hate mental anguish – anxiety, and fear.

I hate physical pain – high fever and broken bones.

A quick death by fire, or much slower, from poison in my blood?

Incineration by flames or suffocation by madness?

Dragon or Hydra?

No contest.

Neither.