By telling us your country of residence we are able to provide you with the most relevant travel insurance information.
Please note that not all content is translated or available to residents of all countries. Contact us for full details.
Shares
Travelling mind It was around the time I was supposed to be in Jordan with my dad, exploring Petra and fulfilling my childhood Indiana Jones dream. Rather I found myself an inpatient on a ward in which the week previously I was working as a physician. Stage 4 cancer physically restricted me both at a cellular and organism level, yet I didn’t expect to find how my mind would suddenly fulfil its wanderlust through the writings of others - imaginings that offered escape, relief and analgesia against my body’s own devastation and that of the chemicals we were using to treat me. Each time I would have a few hours away from the ward I would persuade my mum to take me to the bookshop. Worried about public spaces, infection risk and the growing weakness of my shrinking limbs, she would give in at the sight of my eager face and need to return with another pile of books. It was during the second round of chemotherapy when doctors and pharmacists had agreed on a new cocktail of drugs that I opened Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago. The volume immediately followed Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children on my bedside pile, so I was conscious of the pressure I was putting on the work. Having completed a debilitating dose of methotrexate and unable to speak with mucositis I was, however, committed to burying my mind deep into the Russian winter. Pasternak’s literary instrument of including Dr Zhivago’s poetry offered transportation for my consciousness that I had not experienced through terrestrial travel. Nor had I previously undergone such irreversible immersion into the lives of characters, the beauty and savageness of landscapes and being overwhelmed by literary sensory architecture. As I write this, recalling the sensory and subconscious transformation is still arresting. A night where physiologically my mind seemed fogged with the chemicals I was connected to, enabled me to achieve a ethereal disconnectedness, away from the clinically bleached white surroundings to suddenly being overcome by shivers, imagining myself accompanying the characters through a snowy landscape, a room with a candle that flickers, the intensity of lovers gazes and the singular focus of a physician at his patient’s bedside. These journeys would occur at night, when I would be left alone, away from repeated blood tests, blood pressure monitoring and visits from loved ones. Being aware of the equipment I was connected to, at 10pm each evening after the last drug and nursing round I would silence all the alarms and lower myself deeper into hospital supplied linen. For the next six hours I would drift in and out of consciousness with the book held open sometimes reading whole chapters and other times only managing a few words or a line. The quantity, however, did not matter. The opening of the book alone was as though a teleportation device into other minds and worlds. My night journeys enabled a conscious wandering that allowed me to free myself from ruminating on the day’s events – the haemoglobin level that kept plummeting, the blood transfusion that was delayed, still not managing to speak. For those few hours I felt the thrill of a thief or trespasser – wandering uninvited into the liminal space between my mind and the mind of another. Despite Pasternak’s having been dead and the absence of a corporeal life of his characters, my imaginings breathed a life into his literary universe, enthralling and healing me. It offered hope and strength where I could give life to landscapes and characters whilst being unsure of the future of my own.