A moment of selfish pleasure ruined my life
Mark Hennessy was 40 when he took ecstasy before a night out. A month later he woke up on life-support ...
Mark Hennessey
Mark Hennessy. Photograph: Martin Godwin/Guardian
I love music and I've always loved to dance. Ever since I was a teenager all I wanted was to hear my kind of music as loud as possible. In school I stood out because of my love of gay disco, but I didn't care. In the late 80s I dabbled with speed to give me the energy to dance all night and started going to the London gay club, Heaven. I wasn't gay and I never got propositioned. I just wanted to dance. So I did.
Then came acid house and ecstasy. Suddenly, there was music that I loved complete with its own drug that let you dance like there was no tomorrow. When taking ecstasy the worst aspects of clubbing melted away: the sweat dripping from the ceiling, berks spouting rubbish, the interminable queues. You simply closed your eyes and danced your arse off. Bliss.
As for the warnings against the drug, such as the campaign that followed the death of teenager Leah Betts, they didn't bother me. Everyone knew she died because she drank too much water and her brain swelled up. She listened to the government scaremongering about the effects of ecstasy. Besides, I reasoned, I wasn't feckless. I combined my juvenile behaviour with very responsible jobs - until last year I was a manager with a charity. Also, as I got older I naturally went clubbing less and less.
Then, last year I went to see the Pet Shop Boys play a benefit gig at Heaven. I hadn't been to a club for four years and after turning 40 had promised myself that I would grow up and start acting my age. But the Pet Shop Boys had provided the soundtrack to my life. It seems I was not quite ready to embrace the questionable delights of middle age.
So, that evening I got home from work and got changed. And that's it. That's all I remember. A month later when I woke up I didn't even know I had left the house. I felt like the gig was about to start. I knew nothing about being in a coma, or my mum and brother deciding not to turn off my life-support machine. I didn't hear the discussions about what might happen if I woke up. I certainly did not know about my mum and brother being told on three occasions that I might die.
It transpired that I had taken powdered ecstasy, or MDMA, before going into Heaven. No one knows how much, except me, and I can't remember. The friend who was with me that night, and who ultimately saved my life, recalls me dancing oddly and being a bit unsteady. Thankfully, she had the sense to get me outside and call an ambulance. Soon I was unable to stand and, to all intents and purposes, I lay dead in her arms outside Heaven.
The ambulance took me to St Thomas's A&E department in south London. The MDMA had induced a toxic reaction in my brain, heating it up to 41 degrees. My cerebellum - the part of the brain that tells the body how to balance, how to make sounds recognisable as words and remembers how to write and hold a pen - was fried. Despite this I was incredibly lucky. I later found out that I was one of four people in the hospital that weekend to have taken an E - and the only one to survive. My friend was told by a consultant that you could take E or MDMA 100 times and suffer no ill-effects or you could take it only once and that would be it.
I was moved to Guy's hospital as all my vital organs packed up one after the other.
The doctors decided against giving me a liver transplant, but my lungs collapsed twice. I only had one kidney, as the other was removed when I was 16, which complicated the situation.
I spent a month in a coma before waking and being transferred to the high-dependency unit. In there I became convinced the doctors were out to kill me. In fact in my deluded state I even begged for a knife so that I could cut away at the plastic sheet I thought the mortuary assistants would bind me in. Next, I spent a week in a neurological ward before I was given a place at a rehab unit five minutes from my house, which I had passed by for 17 years without ever noticing.
I was sure my situation was a cruel practical joke and kept waiting for someone to say they could cure me with a quick injection. However, I quickly got used to the routine. Up at 8am, a compulsory shower and then nothing but endless therapy sessions - physiotherapy, speech and language therapy, psychotherapy. When I woke and realised it would be another day of not walking and another day of hearing the sound of my life being flushed down the toilet, what made it unbearable was that it was my hand that had pressed the flush.
My steady stream of visitors saved me. My partner, who worked in a hospital in Glasgow took time off. My best friend - my mum - came to see me at least three times a week and never once mentioned the terrible emotional strain I must have caused her. My brother travelled from Ireland whenever he could. I realised, for the first time, what real, genuine, friendship means and that I had it in abundance. Some friends played Scrabble with me. Some gossiped with me, as much as my limited Dalek voice would allow. Another arranged for me to have a haircut. You can't credit how much all this means or how small your world becomes when you are in a wheelchair and measure everything by how far the nearest toilet is.
As the weeks turned into months the unbelievable truth slowly dawned on me that I might not walk or dance again. I had plenty of time to dwell on how much a moment of selfish, thoughtless pleasure, that I can't even remember, had cost me. I felt a mounting and inescapable sense of anger but I couldn't blame anyone but myself. I wasn't in pain, but I was frustrated and bored. My cognitive and intellectual functions were intact, but the lack of fine motor skills meant that I could not stand, balance or talk. I still had the same thoughts but my body disobeyed me. Everything I once took as a given was gone in the time it took me to collapse.
Now the weekends gave boring a new, more boring, meaning. There were no therapies, nothing other than being woken up at 8am and the interminable wait until you fell asleep that night. The weekends seemed to last for an eternity. You see yourself becoming dependent on others, and while they chat away about plans, hopes and fears, you realise that yours mean nothing.
Eventually my discharge date focused my mind on the immediate future. The NHS, which had spared no effort or expense in saving my life, now began issuing me disclaimer letters to sign before I could go on weekend leave. Everything I did was at my own risk. On no account would the NHS countenance me even trying to walk upstairs. It felt as if it was more concerned with minimising the threat of litigation than in my learning how to walk.
Fortunately, my two housemates were incredible. They not only visited whenever possible, but saw this risk-averse attitude as an affront to commonsense. They devised their own walking practice - pushing me to a practice area, where I would stand up and hold on to their shoulders. One would then get in my chair and I would push it.
They have also endured the carers - strangers - coming into the house four times a day and leaving the house keys in a keysafe in the front garden for easy access. We moved and the same hardships they tolerated at the old house travelled with us. This could have been the perfect excuse to say: "We liked living with the old you, it's just that the new you comes with so much extra baggage. Besides, we've found somewhere, have you?" But they never did.
Most of the time I do feel devoid of any hope. I never thought that I would think, let alone write this, but I really hate being me. However, I am slowly learning to walk again and I practise every day. Recently a Bristol academic, Professor David Nutt, was quoted comparing the dangers of taking ecstasy with horse riding, but my life has been ruined.
I used to go out walking in the rain for no other reason than I could but you can't do that in a wheelchair. Taking ecstasy nearly killed me, and hadn't I always thought it safe?
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