Will The Real Raymond Fields Please Stand Up? The Truth Behind The Legs … That He Had But Didn’t Work. (A Parapalegic’s Tale)

Act III: Biographies: Meet the Rest of Planet Earth

Tilehurst, England is a suburb of the town Reading in the Queen’s England. The name comes from the word tile, which means tile and hurst which means wooded hill which means probably that Tilehurst in ye olde timey England was just a bunch of tiled hills. Blimey.

I’ve seen a picture of their water tower and it’s quite fancy.

The citizens of Tilehurst are mostly nice people but sometimes bad things happen to them. Raymond Fields was an unassuming man, assuming he didn’t do anything terrible that no one knew about, like have a stash of child pornography or write erotic fiction about animals.

In 2004 he was a man who could walk. In 2005, he had a spinal hemorrhage and everything changed and he never walked again.

He coped with it fine because by then he was 72 years young and you just sort of feel glad to be alive at that age. Or maybe you pray for death. Or maybe your mental faculties are so reduced that you don’t even know what you want.

We’ll never know what Ray, if we can call him Ray, wanted because seven years later, he died in a home for old people. Staff were alerted to his death because he didn’t answer their daily intercom call. Which says a lot about the state of home care in the United Kingdom.  Whatever happened to predictability? The milkman, the paper boy, evening TV?

There was no sign of head injury or trauma, so the final cause of death was determined to be a brain hemorrhage.

First hemorrhage took his legs, then it came for his life. What did Ray ever do to hemorrhage to warrant this legless, brainless fate? Hopefully, it wasn’t that Raymond fondled hemorrhage’s daughter or dog because that makes his a tale less kind.

Fade to Black.