Freedom!

Just spent the last three days in hospital. To be specific: fastened to a machine in a solitary hospital room, a camera following my every move and a microphone capturing every sound. About twenty electrodes were superglued to my head, another four selloped to my temples and shoulders. I wasn't allowed to leave the room throughout. I did leave it once, in fact, storming out on Tuesday after a dispute with the nurses far too lengthy and dull to relate here. But I returned quickly and otherwise I was good. All this was a test to find out why my brain keeps going wrong, basically; if I really do have epilepsy or if I have to tear up that membership badge and join a far more exclusive club. Or so they said. As these hospital tests get increasingly baroque, I'm getting the feeling that they've just given up and are messing with me.

I've yet to learn the results, thanks partly to leaving the hospital a day earlier than I probably should. However, you always learn some things from these experiences. Here are a few of my reflections:

Nurses are genuinely nice. All of them, without exception. The ones on Ward 38 of York District Hospital at least. Or rather, nice to your face – I overheard one, forgetting that my room was opposite the nurses' station, slagging me off to her colleagues. But I'd been a stroppy bugger just before and, in her place, I'd have said a lot worst.

Staying in hospital is embarrassing if you're not sick. And you're not sick really if you have my level of epilepsy. (Or whatever the hell it is). You have a few periods of lying helpless and twitching, and the rest of the time you're fine. So it's awkward when nurses, due to aforementioned niceness, are forever popping in to pour you glasses of water or adjust your bed. They probably get affronted too when you keep telling them you can do it all yourself. And then they slag you off behind your back.

Always being on camera makes you want to do terrible things. Rubbing my genitals in my case, I'm afraid. It was a constant temptation whenever I was lying on the bed. And it's not something I want to do normally – I'm lying on my bed right now and I don't feel the urge at all. Perhaps it was just a need to shock and get away with it. If I'd given in – and I didn't once, I'm glad to say – and been confront ed about it, I could just have yelled "There's something wrong with my brain! Why do you think I'm here?"

Hospital cleaners have a different status to other cleaners. Whenever I see them in offices or hotels or wherever, I feel sorry for them. They're doing a rubbish job for little money. Whenever I saw the woman who cleaned my room, I envied her. After all, she wasn't hooked to a bloody machine with fifty wires glued to her bloody head.

Hospital rules can be a little rigid. When they finally unplugged me, they sent a porter with a wheelchair to take me to the room where my wires would be removed. I told him I really didn't need a wheelchair. He replied that if sent with one, he had to push his target back in it "in case something happened." So if you saw a youngish man being wheeled through the corridors today, don't feel sorry for him. The look of acute embarrassment I wore wasn't the product of mental disorder. I was just embarrassed.

I smoke because I like to. I was a bit apprehensive about all those cigarette-free days, of course. As it turned out I coped absolutely fine, thanks in part to some seriously out-of-date nicotine gum pinched from my dad. And when I stepped off hospital grounds today, I instantly lit up. It was lovely; and so is the cigarette I'm smoking right now.

Freedom is wonderful, especially when abused. Upon getting home, after washing half a gallon of glue out of my head, I popped to a nearby shop for a minor purchase. Then I popped to another nearby shop for another minor purchase. Then I popped to yet another nearby shop for yet another minor purchase. Just because I could.

Being in hospital turns you into a self-obsessed narcissist. All the fussing over you, all the questions about yourself… it's natural, I think. This my excuse for lapsing into archetypal blog territory right now. Back soon, I promise, to dissecting trivial stories in The Guardian and musing on paintings I know nothing about.