Watt - Patient: the True Story of a Rare Illness

Many people suffer the pain and indignities of intensive medical treatment, but few have written about it with quite such alarming vividness or clarity Daily Telegraph

A fine testimonial to [Watts] fortitude, his powers as a writer and the NHS William Boyd

In conversation Watt is an articulate and thoughtful speaker, disarmingly humorous but sensitive to even the tiniest nuances. It is a talent that is much in evidence on the pages of Patient and one which gives the book its tremendous cathartic impact Scotsman

Laced with nostalgia for childhood and the life we take for granted, Patient is as gripping as an airport novel and as gruelling as a horror story. **** Q

A harrowing record of the fear, pain and humiliations which make up serious illness and hospital stays Nursing Times

Remarkable and moving ...What emerges is a testament to one mans courage and the ability of the human spirit to find solace and healing in the middle of despair Muzik

A fascinating book ... Simply, poignantly and unsentimentally told List

An extremely vivid description of the effects of illness and the feelings of hopelessness and mortality it invokes. **** Maxim

Patient is a remarkable literary journey: the quest to understand the physical self ... His survival makes compulsive reading Arena

Compelling ... An eye-wateringly harrowing and candid account of his near-death from one of the worlds rarest diseases Mail on Sunday

An understated, unemotional account of illness made all the more effective by its matter-of-factness Sunday Times

Watt is made of particularly fine stuff, possessed of a shining intelligence that allowed him to transcend his horrible circumstances ... I cannot think of any book that so clearly describes the gap between sickness and health The Times

For Tracey

Special thanks to Tracey, my parents Tom and Romany, Jennie, Charles Mackworth-Young, Rod Hughes, Chris Wastell, Nick Law, David Lindsay, Sil (Sheila) Taylor and the National Health Service. Additional thanks during the books completion to John Collee, David Godwin, Tony Lacey, David Eldridge and Alexandra Pringle.

Everyone is shocked by their first real hospital experience. When I was seven I fell off a wardrobe trying to find an Action Man and I remember a green-stick fracture in my arm, the trip up to Queen Marys, Roehampton, and the excitement of proper plaster of Paris to take to school the next day. And I remember the three hours waiting with a severely twisted knee after a football match as a teenager, the same injury a few years later when I needed physio, and the occasional winter chest X-ray. But none of these instances can count as a real hospital experience: I didnt really make it on to the mountain. I saw Accident & Emergency (or Casualty as it is often called) and witnessed put-upon nurses, senior house officers and doctors called in from elsewhere with their ties loosened and top buttons undone, daytime drunks, kids with their mums, sweating relatives, people with nothing wrong with them, people with something seriously wrong with them but they didnt know it yet. I didnt even get a proper bed I didnt need one just a chair or maybe a hard trolley. (I always wondered why they had to be so hard until I found out its to help them get their hands under you to flip you over in theatre, should you get that far. They are not meant to be beds. They are meant to be worktops.) And the trolley would have had a strip of green absorbent paper for a sheet, pulled off a wide roll, and I probably stared at the back of a piece of curtain material half-pulled across my cubicle and caught sight of someone doing exactly the same across the corridor. And mostly I got away within a few hours, out on to the cool street again, not really very unwell, real people walking by, buses, super-sensing the journey home, maybe bandaged with any luck to at least show Id been in the wars.

I was in a bad car crash when I was eight. That took me a little way up the mountain. The crash happened in Scotland, on the way to the swimming-baths in a suburb of Glasgow. I was on holiday. My mum and dad were in London. My grandfather was driving. My grandmother was in the back seat. I was in the front, my feet up on the dashboard. We were in a Mini. We approached the lights at the crossroads, the lights went red, and my grandpa just seemed to accelerate. I heard my grandma shout, Will!

When I came round, there was a crowd around the car. A tiny trickle of blood was on my ear. Hundreds of small crystals of glass like transparent cane sugar were all over my lap. The car wasnt in the middle of the junction but pushed well over, as though wed turned left but sideways. There was a double-decker bus stopped too. My grandpa wasnt speaking. The bus had hit his side of the car on the junction, side on. The steering-wheel was very near me, touching against my leg. It seemed odd to have the steering-wheel that close to me, like it had been positioned in the middle of the car for use by either passenger. My grandma was lying on her side on the back seat. She was saying something to me. Her shoulder seemed tucked behind her back. An egg yolk was dripping off the seat, and there were peas on the floor. My legs were scrunched up on the dashboard. I always travelled with my feet up. They had stopped me being thrown out of the car.

I couldnt tell how much time had passed. It felt like a minute, but it must have been a while for the ambulance to have already got there. A woman Id never seen before helped me out with an ambulance man. I was barely marked. Shed been a passenger on the bus. We had to wait while they cut my grandpa out. In the ambulance he opened his eyes for a second and said everything would be all right, but then he closed them again. He was very pale. The liver spots on his balding head stood out. His fine, wispy white hair was messed up like he had been sleeping on it. He didnt have his glasses on any more, which made him look less like him.

I didnt see him again after that. The woman who helped me out of the car stayed with me at the hospital until Great-auntie Peggy arrived from across town in Knightswood. Grandma and grandpa had been taken away. A nurse put a sticking-plaster on my ear and they X-rayed my skull. I talked to some men in the day-room and fingered the bump on my head. I thought it was odd that they were in dressing-gowns and pyjamas in the middle of day, all men together watching TV. Watching TV in the middle of the day with my pyjamas on was something I only dreamt of One of them bet me a bottle of Scotch that Chelsea wouldnt beat Real Madrid that night. I didnt know what Scotch was.

Back at Peggys, later on, I was allowed to stay up and watch the match. The European Cup-Winners Cup Final 1971. Chelsea were my team. Ossie, Charlie Cooke, The Cat, Chopper Harris. Id been looking forward to it, but Peggy only had a black-and-white set with a funny fish-eye picture. I didnt enjoy it much, but I was allowed to eat sausages in front of it. My dad arrived. He had flown up. I heard him talking to Peggy in the kitchen. I remember him being furious not with her, but with my grandpa for endangering my life, his son. I didnt often hear him raise his voice.

The next day he sent me home on a plane on my own. I was looked after by an air-hostess. She gave me a BEA keyring. My grandma had dislocated her shoulder. My grandpa died in the hospital on Intensive Care.

Even bearing in mind the impression that it made on me as a young boy, I still regard this story as a mild hospital experience, only one foot on the mountain. Much in the same way I look on my wisdom-teeth operation in my mid-twenties, when I went in for the day but as an out-patient only. All four wisdom teeth were to come out in one go. I had my first general anaesthetic I felt like a big shot and found myself recovering on a day-ward with two other people my age, with a mouth and tongue like shoe leather and a head like towelling. By the end it had been an adventure. I had even put a jacket and tie on to go down to the hospital and had treated it like a special day out. I was charming to the nurses because I knew I would be home by teatime, and I was too over-pampered when I got in, flowers from Tracey, an unnecessary bed made up and ready should I have felt poorly, which of course I didnt. The teeth had almost fallen out. Like honeycomb, the surgeon had said. I was out at the pub by eight oclock.