Abi Palmer - Sanatorium

SANATORIUM

Abi Palmer is a mixed-media artist and writer. Her work often includes themes of disability, gender and multisensory interaction. Her artworks include: Crip Casino , an interactive gambling arcade parodying the wellness industry and institutionalised spaces, displayed at the Tate Modern and Somerset House; and Alchemy , a multisensory poetry game, which won a Saboteur Award in 2016. She has written for BBC Radio, The Guardian and Poetry London . Sanatorium is her first book.

PUBLISHED BY PENNED IN THE MARGINS

Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, London E1 6AB

www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk

All rights reserved

Abi Palmer 2020

The right of Abi Palmer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Penned in the Margins.

First published 2020

ISBN 978-1-908058-79-9

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 publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of Arts Council England.

Have you ever noticed that when were near water I want to fuck? Remember Snowdonia? That icy river? Me stripping down and unfolding into oblivion while you shrivelled up and waited for it to be over. I was in so much ecstasy it has taken me years to notice you werent right there with me.

The problem is not that Im constantly in pain, but that pain wakes me constantly. When I have not slept, I am prone to the following: fatigue, brain fog, paralysis, temporary blindness, floating, climbing out of my body, mid-air encounters with a long-deceased and beloved Carmelite saint.

My body is having an opiate crisis. I have been trying so hard to stay tethered to the ground. Each pill is a stone. We keep on piling them up: stones and stones and stones in my stomach, all trying to knock me down for long enough to stop the floating.

I purchase an inflatable bathtub from China. Its small and bucket-shaped, designed for city blocks where everyone is forced to remain upright. When I fill it, the water floods over my shoulders, so hot it could melt its own container.

If I get out alone, I will faint. I surround the tub with different-sized chairs, each topped with a cup of iced water to bring me round. I switch off all the lights and turn on an illuminated plastic pyramid. It plays frog noises and whale song on a loop. I think about sticking glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, but this isnt a home its all our savings.

I sit, silent and bent-legged, folding my toes until their swollen creases soften. I barely breathe, careful for the skin on my back not to scrape the tubs plastic seams.

In 2008 I moved into a flat with my best friend. We took it in turns to take candlelit baths, accompanied by Radioheads OK Computer . This particular combination of warm water, music and light deprivation led to visual hallucinations which I later understood to be a form of synaesthesia: a rose wilts before my eyes; I fall back into a pool of gelatin; we travel along a series of telegraph wires; doves jump up and down in time with the music.

I once repeated this experiment in my inflatable bathtub, but the water was too hot. Instead of falling rose petals, I found myself surrounded by schools of melting sardines.

Oh Teresa Snchez de Cepeda y Ahumada, drown me with your thick and sacred thighs.

Immersing myself in bodies of water is just one of many techniques I have experimented with to ease my chronic pain. I dont know why floating leads to visions. I think it is something to do with amniotic fluid.

In the early 2000s, an advert for flotation therapy suggested that placing yourself in a room-temperature bath, your weight supported by Epsom salts, is the closest you will get to being in the womb.

Flotation, the ad explained, is like finding yourself in a pre-birth dreamspace. Its a good way to recover from trauma, because its a memory of what its like to exist before trauma can hurt you. The argument goes that flotation eases physical pain because you have reminded your body what it is like to live without it.

My birth was particularly traumatic. I was born via C-section but the surgeon did not count on the lumpy scar tissue around my mothers previous Caesarean wound. They cut the hole too small. When they pulled me out, my head got stuck. An emergency alarm sounded as I began screaming and my body went blue.

When I am instructed to picture a safe space I envisage a deep well, full to the brim with icy water into which I have been thrown. But do not worry: I will survive. I lie back and sink into the water, sucking oxygen through the fat gills at my neck.

When I was seven, doctors watched me drag my feet up and down a grey linoleum floor. They decided that getting my head stuck at birth must have triggered a brain haemmorage, which prevented my neural pathways from connecting properly to my legs.

Her brain is working very hard, the doctors said to my mother. No wonder she gets so tired.

At 17 I became so exhausted that I could not lift my body from its bed.

When I was 21, the doctors decided instead that my mobility problems were due to a genetic connective tissue disorder. This, incidentally, would have also caused my mothers abnormal scarring (which led to my head getting stuck in the first place).

When I was 27, I was hospitalised with feet and one knee the size of cantaloupe melons. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, seemingly unrelated to the above conditions.

The doctors said it was lucky the swelling got so bad or they would have continued to attribute the increased pain and stiffness to one of my other conditions, and refuse appropriate treatment.

They told me not to let myself get too stressed about things, or my condition would get worse.

They suggested I take up swimming.

In 2017 I received funding to attend a thermal water-based rehabilitation programme in Budapest, Hungary.