Chapter Four: Mr Toilet

Weaning off the steroids once again, I’m reminded daily of the meaning of the term ‘invisible disability’. 

In the aftermath of surgery, seconds bled into minutes and minutes scabbed over before they ever became hours or days. The flow of time congealed and clotted. All I wanted was to be here, now, where I am back home today. To have dreamt of this I’d have needed to sleep. But pain is a vice of consciousness, and sleep was as intangible as health or home. 

Whereas waves of agony and nausea acted as relativistic stoppers to time – constantly feeling ultra-alert and conscious of each moment’s pain – stopping the steroids has the opposite effect presently. Time flies and I am caught – lethargic and inert – as it passes before me. In hospital I bristled with anticipation for all the things I would do once I was free of the disease. Now I’m out, I don’t have the energy to fulfil these ambitions!

But it’s not all bad news. The previous three times I reduced my steroid dose, the disease returned with a furious flush of vengeance. Now my large intestine is somewhere in the bins out the back of St Thomas’ hospital, colitis no longer has any leverage to start another battle in World War Loo. 

As one of the great (footballing) minds of our day has plastered across his neck: ‘Tudo passa’, Portuguese for ‘Everything passes’. Neymar may be better known for silky skills and strange, saucy tattoos of his (admittedly) pretty sexy sister, but his neck artwork is a source of inkredible inspiration for me. Soon, the side effects of the countless dirty drugs my body has tussled with these last 13 months will fade. And then, I’ll return to my job as a secondary school teacher, a trade I learnt in the north-east of England…

Gateshead & Middlesbrough, 2017

I sprint the length of the corridor as my tie flaps and slaps my face. Pupils are given a bollocking if they don’t walk sensibly, or if they don’t wear their blazers, but thankfully they’re all in classrooms, as are their senior teachers, some of whom still don’t realise I’m a colleague, not a sixth-form student. 

My suit jacket is back in my classroom, along with my year seven, set seven group and my mentor, Adam, who said he’d watch over them whilst I dash. Where to? Quelle surprise. Les toilettes! 

Whoever designed the school clearly thought it’d be amusing to multi-task and attempt to break the world record for longest corridor while they were at it. The passage from the science department to the nearest loo was so bloody long they’d managed to install a poster along the wall tracking the entire history of humankind and the universe.

Fortunately, this school had some archaic creationist religious tendencies. So, the poster ended when god made the universe and all things bright and beautiful a mere few thousand years ago. This meant the poster (and corridor) were approximately 0.00004% of their true length. 

But I wasn’t complaining. I may not agree with the decorator’s loose relationship with science. My loose bowel movements, on the other hand, most certainly did. At last, I had reached the toilet.

…..

Crohn’s and colitis are invisible diseases. So invisible that I didn’t pay attention to the signs until the disease had spiralled beyond hope of recovery without surgery. When I look back on 2017, fatigue was the silent symptom. Disappearing to sleep in my car between lessons, I rushed to the loo so often people would just assume I was there again. I forced myself to be busy and constantly on the move, as normal, but if I ever paused and sat down for five minutes it was a losing battle between my eyelids and gravity. So much so, in fact, that the plonker prancing around the education lecture hall every Friday made it an unfunny running joke that I couldn’t stay awake during his talks. (Good one, mate. Shame your lectures weren’t as riveting and original as your banter.)

The plethora of ex-teachers on TV plying their trade as comedians means you will have probably heard some terrible stories about what we get up to while the kids sit exams. For example, the pac-man style game where you chase the other examiners around the hall, or stand next to the child most likely to fail, or pass wind next to your least favourite. Unsurprisingly and disappointingly, the teachers I’ve come across so far are too busy marking and filling in Excel spreadsheets to be so inventive. Besides, the last of those games would have been an extremely risky business for me, in particular. 

That’s not to say life hasn’t sometimes felt like a live-action episode of Bad Education or Big School. For instance, when urgently called out by my friend Cesare, from a formally observed lesson, only for him to ask me what time we were going to the pub (‘Later!’). Or when I nodded off during yet another religious assembly and the kids in my first lesson asked if I’d had a big night. Or when struggling to rush to a class, with arms full of plastic spheres sellotaped together (to demonstrate intermolecular forces), to a chime of ‘Nice balls, sir!’ and an outburst of giggling year ten girls.

In Middlesbrough I had doors slammed in my face. In both training schools I was called all sorts, from ‘Mr Tourley’ and ‘Mr Curly’ to ‘Miss Turley oops I mean Mr hahaha’, via ‘Oi’, ‘Mate’, and ‘Fam’. If the kids had been paying closer attention while I was ill, a much more fitting name, however, would have been ‘Mr Toilet’.

…..

When browsing Next’s array of £99 suits before starting my teacher training, I was chuffed to find something original. A colour I was convinced no-one else in the department would have. My mum wasn’t keen but that must have been because it was just too bloomin’ edgy for her to appreciate. A maroon-like chocolatey two-piece. Swaggy. 

Soon after starting work striding the corridors, muffled smirks and sniggers of “What neek¹ buys a shit-coloured suit?” suggested that maybe I should have listened to mum. But then, as it goes, if ever I didn’t quite make it down that long corridor, no-one would even be able to tell! So, who was laughing really? 

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Footnotes

¹A ‘neek’ is apparently a cross between a nerd and a geek, but I’ll take it as a compliment. You need skin a good deal thicker than the cheap bog roll in staff toilets to enjoy being a teacher.

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Next: Chapter 5: Wu Wang the Poo-man

Previous: Chapter 3: Cover Your Balls

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