I’ve never been to the Amazon. With lockdown delaying flights indefinitely and Bolsanaro’s government cutting vast swathes of trees incessantly, maybe I never will get to see the rainforest. But stuck in St Thomas’ hospital last year, awake 22 hours a day and wired on intravenous steroids, I found a way to continue travelling. 

In the day, doctors, nurses, family, and friends would all visit and keep my mind occupied and distracted from the miserable rut I was in. Days raced by in a flurry of faces and consent forms and pain and procedures. 

Blood tests drew blood, but it was the slow nights which drew dread. I didn’t want to be there, in hospital. Awake. Alone. Attempts to follow a normal sleeping pattern were fruitless.  I couldn’t focus on a book. Couldn’t maintain interest in a Netflix series. Social media was even more mentally wearing than usual; who wants to see summer holiday snaps when trapped inside? Friends and family were asleep, with busy lives worth resting for. 

Medication had brittled my bones to the point that writing, my trusty escape, was painful within paragraphs. At first this deterred my progress, but eventually I decided to return to the plot of Causa, my debut novel.

Instead of the usual method of handwriting first-drafts, I turned to my laptop, Google Docs, Google Maps, and Google Street View (other search-engines are available), and ventured out into the jungle.  

I wasn’t writing about a character who curled up in intestinal pain and trudged between the hospital bed and toilet (…although, I have since done that if you’re interested). No, my novel’s protagonist, Tiago Oliveira, was the action-man I couldn’t be. 

Into the night, in the window corner of Alan Apley ward, the tapping of my prematurely-arthritic fingers on the keyboard was the only noise set to the whirring backdrop of medical machinery, accompanied by the occasional agonal cry for help followed by hurried night nurses’ footsteps. 

No, I didn’t want to be there, in hospital. But after reopening the manuscript, absorbed in Tiago’s story, suddenly I wasn’t. 

Mental health strategies are particularly relevant, not just in this awareness week, but throughout lockdown. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy suggests keeping a thought diary as a useful self-help exercise. But I knew my sorry situation and I was aware of my thoughts. Sometimes, in fact, I did scribble some mopey musings down. 

What got me through surgery, however, was leaving my thoughts and travelling virtually with Tiago to the depths of the Amazon in Brazil. Street view and maps helped me visualise the heat, the thickets, the thunder. Painkillers allowed me to type. Tiago’s emotions provided a route to rationalising my own and, above all, when in the eddy of a particularly forceful flow of narrative, escape my circumstances altogether. 

Perhaps lockdown will be lifted in time for some summer travel this year. Potentially not. Maybe financial uncertainty will keep many at home even if coronavirus sets us free sooner that expected. Regardless of location, physical capability, or freedom, plunging myself into a story on the other side of the world had the converse psychological effect of keeping me afloat. 

It seems everyone is compiling lists about what they’ll do and where they’ll go after lockdown. But why wait? Create a character, write them a story, and you could fly anywhere in the world, tonight. 

By J. E. Turley