Time out of Mind

I confess a certain dread before settling down to read this book. Another celebrity falls foul of an illness and charts her decline or recovery. Almost always doctors come out of these accounts less favourably than we like to see ourselves.

Figure 1.

Jane Lapotaire

Virago, £16.99, pp 320 ISBN 1 86049 977 5

Rating: ★★★★

But Time out of Mind is in a league of its own. Jane Lapotaire, an eminent film and television actor and a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, uses skills and techniques acquired in her job to dramatise her life since just after the start of the new millennium, when she collapsed in Paris with a subarachnoid haemorrhage. The bulk of the book, starting with a chapter entitled “Nearly Dying is the Easy Bit,” plots her convoluted journey back to a partial recovery.

Lapotaire writes without sparing anyone's feelings. While it is true that she is probably harder on herself than anyone else, hardly any of her friends, family, or doctors come out of this account without criticism. Dr Vinikoff, a French neurosurgeon “who saved my life,” is chastised for sitting on her bed: “Doctors aren't supposed to do that, are they?” Nurses tie her to the bed in intensive care: “I was never told it was bad for me to move.” A British neurosurgeon, referred to by Lapotaire as “Mr H for Hell,” has “all the Rolls Royce attributes of the brain surgeon: softly spoken, luxurious office, Mont Blanc pen.” He is also patronising, condescending, and rude. He implies she is wrong about her second aneurysm: “statistically unlikely.” When she is upset and angry he accuses her of “over-reacting.” When Mr H sees her second aneurysm on a magnetic resonance image, he tells her triumphantly that breast cancer will probably kill her first.

The chapter “At the Doctor's” left me squirming. Lapotaire's general practitioner, who had been a friend, dismisses clinical depression with “Well, you are an actress.” When she asks her doctor why her attitude has changed, she is told: “I realised I was treating you differently from my other patients. I was losing my grip.”

During the course of the book Lapotaire makes a paradigm switch. Before her collapse she is a bit of a martyr, responsible for everything. By page 300 she has changed role to a fully fledged victim. She learns to censor outspoken rudeness and intolerance of others, but the feelings are still there. She has learnt not to blame herself, but her expectation that carers, friends, and even total strangers should show understanding, empathy, and selflessness is breathtaking.

This remarkable book—disturbing and hateful but also humbling—is one I am grateful to have read. I started by admiring the author's powers of description and style and finished with a new insight, seeing the shortcomings of our profession through patients' eyes.