About Chris
Former patient at RIE
Chris experienced a stay in the hospital in 2002. The photographs in the collage are taken outside wing C, where the ward that he stayed in used to be.
One Building, Two Lives
Autumn 2002. I woke to the sound of hushed conversations behind closed curtains. It took a moment to work out where I was and how I had got there.
I was on a hospital ward in Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary. I was visiting from London. The day before I had taken an overdose. Forty-eight 500mg paracetamol tablets to be precise.
Not enough to kill me. But enough to seriously jeopardise my liver, as the intravenous drip into my arm testified.
Gradually in my stupor I realised everyone on the ward had taken an overdose. But we had all survived. After a fashion.
In my case the overdose had capped off a two-day binge of alcohol, anti-depressants and sleeping tablets. A binge that had come on the back of several months of depression and two stays in a psychiatric hospital in east London close to my home.
That hospital, like this one, had been a place of safety of sorts. Albeit a wretchedly dilapidated and underinvested one. I had been given a lot of drugs but precious little else.
In the end, far from home, I had sought a way out. And the only one that seemed feasible was not to be here anymore. Not to be alive.
I would like to tell you that the care I received on the ward in the days that followed was restorative. But mostly I was left feeling ashamed and admonished.
It was as if I and my fellow patients had brought needless harm to ourselves. I would not have wished to work on that ward. But the comfort felt cold.
Spring 2024. I am visiting the Old Royal Infirmary, now the home of the Edinburgh Futures Institute, for the first time since my sojourn there in 2002. I am meeting colleagues at the Scottish Prevention Hub, a collaboration between Police Scotland, Public Health Scotland and the institute. The hub’s purpose is to build a public health approach to prevention and wellbeing across Scotland.
Despite the inauspicious events of that visit to Edinburgh 22 years ago, I moved here the following summer, the year the infirmary moved to Little France. I have built a new life away from the emotional noise of my old one.
Those two lives are connected, of course. We take ourselves with us. Recovery was a trudge not a revelation. And I have experienced depressive episodes since. But a legacy of that earlier rupture is that I know the beast these days. I see it coming.
As I am shown around, I marvel at the refurbishment of the old hospital, scarcely recognisable from the cramped building I dimly remember. The gleaming white walls of its repurposed wards now workspaces for the prevention hub and other new ventures.
‘Were you here when it was a hospital?’ someone asks. ‘Yes,’ I respond. ‘You’ll have a story to tell,’ she replies.
She’s right. I do. My new life has come to meet the old one. And there is work to be done.
Christopher Creegan
Written for Edinburgh International Book Festival’s initiative Words from the Wards
