Monday, 4/28/97 Pop star’s book renders vivid images of
suffering Everything but the Girl’s Ben Watt writes of triumph over
disease
By Mike Prevatt Daily Bruin Contributor One day, you’re gearing
up for your American tour with your band. The next, you’re in the
hospital with no clue why you’re there, except that you’re in pain.
As a month of endless surgery, experimentation and hypothesizing
from doctors goes by, you’re notified that you have a lethal
disease that only 25 other people in the world have been diagnosed
with. Your life will be changed forever – if you survive. "Patient
(The True Story of a Rare Illness)" is about a turbulent year in
the life of English pop star Ben Watt, half of the dance-pop duo
known as Everything but the Girl (known for their 1996 hit single,
"Missing"). Watt gives us day-by-day coverage of the physical and
mental anguish he experienced in a London hospital, and does so
with strikingly colorful language and technical accuracy of his
condition and operations. His story is both scary and moving in
itself, yet Watt doesn’t rely on blatant emotional rhetoric. Terse
sentences, dark humor, a full awareness of his surroundings and
psyche, and subtle mention of feelings that don’t beg for pity
allow Watt to come across as both the tortured victim and the
fearless dreamer. Rarely does an autobiographical sketch bring
together detailed accounts, poetic flair and emotional soul as well
as Watt’s. Watt fell ill in the summer of 1992, as Everything but
the Girl’s American tour was about to begin. What followed was a
sudden brush with death, as he was diagnosed with a rare, deadly
disease known as Churg-Strauss Syndrome. It is an auto-immune
disorder which turns the body against itself, consuming itself
until its tissue is devastated and the victim dies. Watt describes
the death process with intelligent medical technicality. He
articulates that when one develops the disease, "the result, as the
immune system’s antibodies battle overactively with the irritant in
the body’s connective tissue, is wrecked blood vessels and
interrupted blood supply (vasculitis), causing potentially fatal
organ death. The immune system then roller-coasts out of control
and no longer recognizes the body’s own tissue, producing
antibodies that devastate that, too." Throughout the first month of
his stay at Westminster hospital, Watt remained in limbo as doctors
tried to determine the reasons why he had severe chest and
abdominal pains. Four risky operations needed to remove dead body
tissue left Watt with only three feet of small intestine (most
humans have 18). Watt endured hours of pain, spasms and near-death
encounters. His health began to stabilize a bit during the last
month of his hospital stay. It was then, when the bewilderment
dissipated, that Watt’s lyrical musings began to describe his state
of being on a more spiritual level. Watt combines his amazing
metaphoric styles to describe several injections of a very
"serious" drug called cyclophosphamide and its presence in his
body. He writes that it is "a wrecker, a healer, a tampering,
meddling with the roots of life, like an insecticide washed off
fields of crops into the gullies and brooks, bubbling and frothing
up like detergent, running into my veins as into rivers, and down
through the topsoil and sandy loam, through underground channels
and soft, porous rocks like body tissue …" He then looks inside
himself and states, "All I think of is, if and when I recover from
all this, in the years ahead, will I be as I remember myself,
unbowed, organic and strong? Or will I always be a weak strain, in
need of shelter, susceptible to the wind and the rain?" Watt
further allows his metaphors and comparisons to fly through the
air, smack you and leave you stunned and surprised. When talking to
his mother, he thinks he can "hear her thoughts like tectonic
plates shifting back and forth." But Watt’s poetics don’t undermine
his thoughts and feelings like they can for some writers and poets
today. Watt’s superb sense of self-awareness reaches emotional
highs when he talks not of himself but of the people close to him,
unbearably watching him suffer and helping him swerve around death.
Watt included many special moments with his father, who seems to
grow closer to his son in a very subtle yet obvious way. Watt
rarely leaves Tracey Thorn, his companion and the other half of
Everything but the Girl, out on any given page, brilliantly marking
her pain, feelings and even thoughts despite the miniscule amount
of dialogue printed in the book. He also shares his feelings on
visitors and their feelings, noting that his every move would stir
something in their hearts. He says, "I’d feel I had inadvertently
created a moment of unbearable poignancy. And curiously, because of
this, I felt a huge amount of power over them. I realized I could
manipulate their emotions …" This ability to heal himself
mentally despite his ravaged physical condition begins a spiritual
ascent that leads him to recovery and discharge from the hospital.
As he receives a new car upon his return home, he goes for a
reckless drive with Thorn. He says, "I was exhilarated and I was
frightened too, but I didn’t say it. And we were bubbles within a
bubble. In an egg. Eyes forward. Watching different versions of the
world fizzing by through a smeared windscreen. Speed. Light. Sound.
Memory." And when Watt fully realizes his separation from the
repression of the hospital, he says it boldly, unafraid, and yet
still aware he has a condition that will be with him forever. The
end of his tumultuous year finds him finally in America, on tour,
where he ventures out onto a Rhode Island beach. When a big wave
approaches him, he says, "I couldn’t rise above it. It crashed down
on my head … dragged my body down. I let go for a minute. I felt
free and unafraid. I gave myself up. And then I was staggering to
my feet in the shallows, happy and victorious." "Patient" is a book
about life. It reflects the precarious situations we all at one
time or another encounter. It is the graphic and honest chronicle
of a man who combats sickness with wit, love and boundless vision.
Unlike most celebrity autobiographies, which reek of dull and flat
narration, Ben Watt’s reaches inside, finds the essence and beauty
of life and survival, and shows us the many ways our spirits can
remain unconquered. "Patient" brings out whatever possible emotions
lie in the heart and puts them all in front of our faces, reminding
us what it means to be human and alive.