Stephen Murray

About the Author

Resident Poet at Pen vs Sword at Inspireland – Web – + posts

Stephen Murray is the author of three critically acclaimed poetry collections, with Salmon Poetry and is the founder of Inspireland who have Poetic Justice, Spoken Word and Animation workshops across the island od Ireland for schools to inspire, challenge, and empower students.

Stephen Murray and the mother of all infections

Our resident poet and great friend of Promises Project, Stephen is a multi-award winning poet from the West of Ireland. His critically acclaimed debut collection ‘House of Bees‘ was published in 2011 by Salmon Poetry and chronicles his experiences growing up in the Erin Pizzey’s historic refuge for battered wives in West London and later on a children’s home. His second collection ‘On Corkscrew Hill’ was released in 2013 also by Salmon Poetry.

He has performed his work at some of the world’s most iconic poetry venues and has been published in journals across Ireland, Britain and the USA. He collaborated with us on a remarkable piece for our film Loved by Ghosts and is also director of Inspireland bringing creative writing to secondary schools and colleges across Ireland and Britain.

Here, in the only way a true wordsmith can and following on from his notes from a fever Stephen continues with this true life tale – “Woke up today and with the muscular pain gone, behind it is the mother of all infections. I’m delirious, and not right in the head at the best of times…”

For more cultural criticism on Culture & Capital, including art, labour, commodification and power under capitalism, explore related Pen vs Sword articles.

Stephen Murray - Notes from the ICU : Part 1

"Woke up today and with the muscular pain gone, behind it is the mother of all infections."

Stephen Murray

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Table of Contents

Hospitals don’t mess about with symptoms like mine

Daffodils, that’s right, two of them. The first two daffodils of spring, like a couple of trumpeters heralding the sunshine of March.

I needed the hospital, fast. I asked my wife to call an ambulance. As fortune would have it, our little boy, Ronan, had an appointment. She was going there anyway. I could barely breathe. I could barely talk. Every phrase, and every breath was getting shorter.

Hospitals don’t mess about with symptoms like mine in men of my age. Before I knew it, they had me banged up with pain drugs, oxygen up my nose and an intravenous drip in my arm. They put me in an isolation unit. Apparently, TB was going around. I perked up. The drugs were great. Tuberculosis seemed retro like vinyl.

The vets in Tipperary are better equipped than the hospitals

It was a Friday, in a small, rural country Tipperary hospital. The vets in Tipperary are bigger and better equipped than the hospitals. The junior doctor who checked me out and took my bloods, was nice chap from India. He told me I had pneumonia. Dreamy. Fluid on the lungs, he said. The drugs were getting better. Fluid. Yeah, man. Flow!

They would keep me in for the weekend

I would likely need a chest drain. Standard procedure. No big deal. They would keep me in for the weekend. I should be home by next week.

Then came the horn blowers, the cheering crowds, the drummer boys and the nurses pirouetting on the tipped toes of their navy Sketchers. The hospital porters clicked their heels and there was dancing in the wards of the sick. The consultants arrived on elephant-back to trumpets, and dancing, loud cheers and laughter.

The consultants arrived on elephant-back

My consultant was a handsome, but utterly charmless Venezuelan. He stood, side-on, silhouetted by the light that spilled through window. He spoke and his voice was like honey and rust and the world melted at the promise of his smile. What a guy. An expert. The man. With his powerful but tender touch, he lubed me up for an ultrasound and then skillfully he moved the cold hard steel of his equipment, like a ballet dancer on my chest.

There is no fluid on his lung, he scoffed, scornfully, at the lovely Junior Doctor from India. Keep him in for observation, take him off the IV and let him go home on Monday.

What a guy.

I looked forward to the presidential suite in the VIP wing

I had just recently upgraded my health insurance. I looked forward to the presidential suite in the VIP wing.

When I arrived on the ward, I wondered what the fuck my health insurance was paying for. A small room with 8 beds. Four on each wall opposite each other. On the beds against the wall opposite me, facing me, were four gentlemen in the fifties or sixties or eighties or thirties, who can tell, for sickness dictates the age of a man. Two were asleep, two awake. Two of them I couldn’t tell. None of them seemed particularly sick, but all of them seemed entirely fucked. There was no chat out of any of them.

I, on the other hand, was entirely chipper. There were lots of young pretty nurses from Kerala, South India, with dazzling smiles and kind eyes. Sile dropped in my iPad, chargers, a change of clothes and things were looking great. Well fine. Sharing a toilet with 6 sick old men, did nothing for my chirpiness, and as much as I tried to put it off, eventually, I had to accept that I was dying for a poo. I would have to brave it.

The toilet lived up to my worst nightmares

The toilet lived up to my worst nightmares. There was shit everywhere. Shit on the floor, shit on the toilet seat, shit on the mirror, on the handle of the flusher, the taps on the sink. There was shit everywhere, and I was bursting. Shit does not negotiate.

Clenching, I asked the nurse if there as another toilet. I was directed to a new one, near the ladies’ ward, and although it was a breathless 10 meter walk, when I got there, it was just right. I was like Goldiplops on Baby Bear’s Potty. However, wiping my arse, was no Teddy Bears’ Picnic. The drugs were wearing off, and my breathing was getting shallower.

It all happened so quickly, mid-wipe. Breath abandoned me. I started to seize up. I walked a few steps and felt like my heart was going to burst. I broke suddenly into sweats and started burning up. I called for help without the breath to muster a sound.

Every part of me screamed

Pain ripped through my body. I screamed a whispered howl, and my agony filled the room. Nurses rushed to me. Needles were stuck in me and still I screamed, voiceless, breathless screams. The way a fire screams. The way grief screams. Every part of me screamed and the nurses span around me urgently and the world went south in the screaming dark.

I fell into darkness and dreams. Emerging from sleep to panicking voices of doctors and nurses, my temperature rocketing towards the mid-forties, my blood pressure soaring, my blood oxygen plummeting.

I swam in their voices

“Hello, what is your name?”

“Atushi.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means red sky in the morning.”

“Ah Shepherd’s delight…”

I swam in their voices, waking occasionally to urgent mutterings in Urdu and Hindi, and the only word I understood was Sepsis.

When I found the breath to speak I asked Atushi if I would be okay, and she replied. “I have been texting and calling the doctor, but he is not returning my calls.”

She smiled her beautiful smile and her skin was the fertile soil of the earth and her teeth the music of laughter, and her eyes twinkled darkly with kind sadness.

The doctor, I thought to myself. THE doctor. Singular.

These small, regional, rural hospitals have skeleton staff at weekends. People, famously, die because of it. The doctor, singular, was dealing with another emergency. My emergency was in the queue.

"He sang to me, or chanted or something I do not know and cannot tell."

Stephen Murray

It was something divine and eternal

I woke again screaming, my internal organs exploding in my body. My hands and feet freezing to the touch, breathing, short shallow gasps of breath like a fish on the hot banks of the river, like my father’s breath in the moments before he died, like the last breaths of a man shot to death in a video on social media I wished I’d never seen. I could not lie down, I could not stand up, but I wanted to. I HAD TO.

A senior nurse manager, an SNM, in his forties, Manpreet, a Seikh from Punjab, who had an awful fringe and could have been fifty or twenty, who had two children at school here in Ireland and a good wife, and who said he loved the Irish people because they were kind, but didn’t say much else and I don’t know and I don’t care, because as I screamed and burned and froze with my internal organs bleeding and bursting, and with my sick lung collapsing as Septic Shock tore me to pieces, he put his arm around my waist to hold me up and with the same hand he held my hand and with his free hand gently rubbed my hand softly and a voice that was gentle and as dark and as deep as a river and as time and prayer, he sang to me, or chanted or something I do not know and cannot tell.

It was something divine and eternal, something sacred and human and beautiful and my body stopped screaming.

I had had too much medication

Dhanyavaad, I thanked him with a morsel of voice.

Then I fell away from myself and into his song and my children came to me, their faces swimming in the endless rivers of my tears and I wanted more than anything to cry for all time, to hear their names, their voices, but I did not have the breath to whisper or weep. I was going to leave them, to abandon them, like my father abandoned me.

“Arushi, am I okay?”

“We are trying to keep your temperature down.”

“Thank you, Arushi. Namaste.“

“Namaste”, she smiled back.

“I need something for the pain.”

“We cannot give you any more or your liver will fail.”

I had had too much medication. They could give me no more. Not for pain. Not for my deadly fever, or soaring blood pressure.

Only God knows, when it is our time

Then a doctor came, a nice Sudanese man. His wife had just had a baby. They had been in Ireland for three years and did not mind the weather, because the people, he said, were so warm. I asked him:

“Am I going to die?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and his face shone with a soft, kind light. “Only God knows, when it is our time.”

“Give him more morphine.” He instructed the nurse.

She looked at him and paused. “Just give it to him.”

“Shokran!” I replied.

I can say thank you in a hundred languages. I have made it my business to learn it and when the drugs kicked in I thanked them, namaste, shokan, dhanyavaad, shukriya, salamat, koszonom, dziekuje, multumesc, aciu, gracias, eskerrik asko, faleminderit, tesekkur ederim, spas, go raibh mile maith agat.

We are going to move you, he said. We cannot give you any more medication, but we need to get your temperature down.

Then they put me on ice. Literally. Ice packs under my head, on my forehead, under my arms, in my armpits, between my legs, at the soles of my feet and the ice felt good as I drifted away in the dark song of dark-skinned strangers.

"It means, a star and beautiful morning."

Stephen Murray

Death came darkly, to sit by my bedside

“Arushi?” I asked, when she came to check my temperature.

“No, she has finished her finished her shift.”

“What is your name?”

“Anusha”, she replied.

“What does it mean?”

“It means, a star and beautiful morning.”

“Let me guess, from Kerala.”

“Yes”, she smiled.

“Namaste”, I replied, and she smiled, and her smile said, thank you.

When death came darkly, to sit by my bedside, it wiped away my tears and cooled my burning flesh. Then, in the company of angels with dark skin and kind eyes, it showed me its secrets in a dream…