There will be a new post on this blog every Saturday.


Just a few minutes ago an elderly-sounding lady rang my number, heard 'This is Danny Furlong's phone. Please leave a message.' and actually apologised for ringing the wrong number! I must have received over fifty wrong number calls this year but this was the very first one where the caller showed any manners by saying sorry. I'm old enough to remember when manners were the norm.

That paragraph wasn't just a random rant. I'll tie it in to today's ramble a bit further down.

Early on in my quad career I underwent a fairly intensive exercise and cross-patterning program for about a year. It involved 3-hour or 4-hour sessions twice a day seven days a week, requiring around 100 volunteer helpers in that week. A national TV current affairs program did a segment on me/us. A guy called Aldrick saw the program and contacted me, as he too had locked-in syndrome courtesey of a stroke and was virtually my double - a mute quad with minimal movement in his left arm only.

We corresponded on and off for the next ten years, then he and his wife came to stay with me for a few days. In his letters he seemed quite OK, but in person he was a long way from being someone I was gaa-gaa about. I, secure in my comfortable life, thought he was a whinger and that he had the wrong attitude to his disability - he believed it entitled him to special treatment; that he could DEMAND disabled services and equipment as his God-given right.

He saw that I was well-treated by disability equipment funding bodies and lamented that he had to battle hard for everything, sometimes even having to pay for expensive equipment himself. Why, he asked? I couldn't tell him he was missing out because he was an arsehole, which he was. Instead I talked about the desirability of being polite and friendly to the people who worked in those areas, to people generally in fact, and to always use your manners, just like that lady on the phone earlier today.

Today has been a noteworthy day for me, because before I'd even had breakfast my local wheelchair man delivered my new wheelchair. A&EP, the government aids and equipment funding program, has a limit of $7,500 for wheelchairs, but that's only enough for very basic chairs. Many people need a chair that's more robust or that has costly modifications to cater to their particular disabilities. It's amazing how the overall price skyrockets if modifications are needed.

My new chair was quoted at $16,000. I anticipated that I'd probably have to settle for a lesser chair and that I'd have a long wait while my case manager found even part of the extra funding required. However she told me 'Don't bother with all the goings-on needed to get the first $7,500 from A&EP. You know how I got you a place on the EACH program when you turned 65 last year - even though you didn't want it? Well, it's the end of the financial year. EACH still has money left over, so I'll use it to pay for your chair in the one lump sum.'

Aldrick, already a quad in a wheelchair when we met, got cleaned up by a truck a couple of years ago, but if he was still around he'd be baffled at the ease with which my chair was funded. It's always been that way for me. Over the years I've received a new computer supposedly to enhance my communication, an expensive portable communicator, my present laser-operated keyboard, a purpose-built new house and much more. I didn't even request some of these things. They just arrived unannounced because people in A&EP knew and liked me and knew I could do with them.

Sure, the people who control the distribution of disabled equipment, and public housing even, look on me more favorably because I'm apparently in a terrible situation/condition being a mute quad, but moreso because I'm friendly, polite and not demanding. Ah, Aldrick!
...
Oh dear, oh dear, I'm getting old. Fifteen years ago I thought nothing of staying up in my wheelchair all night so I could get more writing done. Go back twenty years and I was staying up writing one or two nights every week. It's a different story now. Last week I told you I got Ellydd Gate back from my editor and had been through the first 60 pages. It's not easy finding time to work on it, so I stayed up on Tuesday night. I got through to page 200, but boy oh boy was I wrecked the next day. I won't be doing that again in a hurry.   

Did I mention that my editor is also my daughter, Gemma? She is the digital rights manager (online publishing) for a Melbourne publisher. She does some editing for them and freelance editing too. It's a big ask, her editing my books - I mean, having to tell you dad over and over again what he's doing wrong and how to do it better?
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...


May 18, 1984 - Prince Henry's Hospital, Melbourne 
It's nighttime, about eleven o'clock I'd say. I can't get to sleep. So what else is new? I do virtually nothing now except lie in bed all the time, so I’m never the slightest bit tired.

When I was at high school there was a guy called Robin in the next class. I knew him to say hello to, but that's about all. Once I began work in the city I'd often see him in the crowd waiting for the train home from Flinders St Station. I admired him from afar, because he was everything I and every teenage boy wanted to be when it got down to the things which really mattered. He was handsome, likeable, outgoing, self-confident, and, most importantly, he had girls crawling all over him. I approached him and we soon became good friends. Initially I was hoping some of him would rub off on me, but the more I got to know him the more I wanted to be mates simply because I liked him.

We saw a fair bit of each other until my early midlife crisis at twenty-seven. I got divorced from Innocent then I went back to Uni to study psychology then I went on the dole and moved the country. Robin was working about nine hundred hours every week becoming a successful estate agent and I was fast going feral. We visited each other for a few hours every couple of years, but within days of Thor clobbering me with a lightning bolt Robin was at my bedside.

From that time on he visited me at least once a week throughout my long hospitalization (to the delight and terror of every female nurse on the ward). Last week he fashioned me a crude spelling board that I could use by choosing letters with my eyes. It was dreadfully slow, but at least it allowed me to contact the world outside my head. It only lasted two days though. On Sunday a nurse took it to be rubbish and threw it out. I had to lie there as my new lifeboat was cast adrift. I couldn't speak to shout ‘STOP’, I couldn't move to retrieve it and I couldn't use it to spell `Don't throw this away' because it was already gone.

May 25, 1984 - PHH, Melbourne
Speechy's padding in softly on her soft rubber soles, and her smile's reaching me before she's halfway here.

‘Hello, Speechy! What's up?’ I'm thinking at her, because I can see she's quietly excited, the bearer of good news. She shows me a perspex board-thing with the alphabet on it.
‘This'll definitely be your saviour. You can get out of your head at last. As long as you're trapped in there being unable to communicate-’
This is what I'm hearing, even though it's not her exact words. I'm having deja vu of the infamous morse code affair, because she's acting just like then and she's saying the same sort of stuff

‘- people will keep thinking you can't think. Even if they know better, even if they know you're not loopy, they'll still have doubts at times. It's only natural for them to be like that, but this'll make them know you're OK. I hunted around for something after I saw the one your friend made and this was in a catalogue. It's called an Etran board and it only cost twenty-five dollars. It's got the whole alphabet and the letters are grouped-’

It's a thirty centimetre square of clear perspex with letters in groups of four on it. The `user' (he or she) holds it between him and the Me, and the Me gazes at one group. The user watches where I look then he says each letter in that group. I answer yes or no, eyes up or eyes down, until we get the right letter then we work on through my sentence.)
‘Look out world im back’

There's no punctuation marks or stuff like that. It's bloody slow, but Speechy says it'll be faster when I've learnt where the letters are, just like with a typewriter.

June 4, 1984 - Prince Henry's Hospital, Melbourne
I’ve been here in hospital for about four months. My fuzzed-up head didn’t get to be crystal clear until about a month after I left ICU with its morphine drip. Only then did the appalling horribleness of my situation start to sink in.  Everyone else knew it from the very start. They all look so serious when they visit me. Some visitors say stuff like ‘I hope you don’t have any silly thoughts about not wanting to live’, but their eyes are saying ‘God, you’d be better off dead.’
Mum has got really thin and worried-looking. Rainbow’s not much better. They must think it too at times, but they cover it up in front of me.

You’re all saying Better off dead. Better off dead, but eyen if I wanted to how does a quadriplegic kill himself? Hold his breath and count to five hundred?

When my head was still fuzzed up with the after-effects of the morphine I had the vague idea of ‘when I’m better again’. The gradual return of clarity brought with it a gradual recognition of realities. I see my options closing off one by one.

Night after night I lie in the dark sobbing huge sobs and feeling so incredibly sorry for myself. Negative thoughts flourish and multiply in the darkness. They take possession of my head in the darkness. There's twenty or thirty long years stretched out in front of me - thirty years of nothingness - dependence - I’m useless - worthless - a complete waste of space - I’m just a pathetic dependant mute quadriplegic
I lie there crying my heart out and they show me the four thousand seven hundred and thirty four different reasons why my life is going to be one long, bleak nightmare from now on.

A few weeks ago the speech therapist located an alphabet board thing for me. It let’s me spell out things, but it’s painfully slow. Speechy says I’ll get faster with practice, but I don’t think I want to get faster. I mean, what’s the use?

Last week they noticed I’ve got this tiny movement in my right thumb, so they rigged up a light touch button on the buzzer. They tape it into my hand every night so I can call the nurse when I need to pee. Every day nurses wash me and feed me. Every second day they stick an enema up my bum to make me shit. Anytime I want I can buzz for a pee. Why do I need to talk at all, let alone try to get faster at it? It’s not as if I’ll ever be doing anything worth talking about.

For all those long years until I die I won’t have a life. I’ll just have an existence.
... -
After all that carry-on about my terrible nights I’ve got to admit that last night was fine. I slept right through. But it's ten past seven in the morning now and I'm running out of time.

Every morning after I’ve had an OK night I lie and think it away - that upstanding morning thing men get. I’ve noticed that I don’t wake up with it after those nightmarish nights I’ve just been talking about. I drop back to sleep around four or five on those nights, but I guess my sub-conscious is still too churned up between then and morning.

I have to think it away before a nurse comes to wash me. Away! Away! It's a training hospital here, so most of the nurses are spunky young trainees. They're too young to just accept it for the natural morning occurrence it is.

It isn't easy getting rid of it, I tell you. The trick's to keep your mind off it and off anything even remotely to do with sex - like Rainbow and spunky student nurses, in fact any nurses, any women. Today I'm not doing too well. I've still got a tent pole between my legs and here comes the nurse with water and towels.

My God, she's a new student, only been here two weeks, AND she's so - so - so perky. You know the sort , seventeen years old and pretty and a cute little face and a cute little figure and a short uniform and - and - ah, hell! Why isn't it ever this big when I want it to be? What chance it'll flag now?

 Perky hasn't washed me before, but has helped make my bed. I heard her telling the other nurses she's into massage and tactile therapy and stuff and that she reckons patients would benefit from it. Like when she does washes, she said, she tries to just use her hands rather than washing with a face washer - sort of a brief massage to relax patients.  I've had a few nurses wash me like that and it is better, not like the mechanical, paint-by-numbers routine most efficient nurses get down pat.

She'll see the tent, has to - no, wait, I've been reprieved for a bit. She just chucked the second towel down that way without even looking and it's all bunched up, obscuring it. Oh, happy days.
Nurses are trained to start with the face and work down, so I've got maybe four minutes grace. That should be enough time for it to fade, except now I'm panicking about it. It's all I can think about and it won't go away like that.

Concentrate now, boy. Get your mind off it. Concentrate on not concentrating on it. She uses the face washer on my face and not just her hands, naturally.
‘Gee, it's going to be a nice day, Danny - the rain's all gone.’
Think about rain. Think about sleet. Think about the worst winter in all creation. Think about boat-building in the worst winter in all creation. Think about anything at all, because it's working – your tent pole's beginning to droop.

She pulls the sheet back a bit and soaps up her hands. Long deep strokes with her palms and fingers all over my bare chest.
‘Don't you just love this? I do - er - I mean rubbing warm soapy water on my fron - on my skin.’
Mmmm - that'd be nice, soaping up Perky's pair of pearish - boing!
God! Think about boat-building. Think about animals two by two into that boat at Mt Ararat. Think about anything at all, because it's working - the tent's caving in again.

She moves on to my left arm after covering my washed and dried chest with a towel.
‘Your arms are all skin and bone now. I was told the muscles just dropped off them since your stroke. You need a lot of exercise.’
She lathers my arm, my armpit, and begins a two-handed pull from elbow to shoulder.
‘I like pulling-’
Boing! God, not again.
‘`Er - I mean - I like pulling up your soapy arm like this.’
Think about Mt Ararat. Think about Ararat. Think about Stawell, it's near Ararat. Think about running at the Stawell Gift. Think about anything at all, because it's working - the sheet's nearly flat again.

She finishes my left arm and my right without another word. Here comes the big test, but it feels OK to me. (I can't move and I can't talk, but, unlike many paras and quads, I still have full body sensation - meaning I can feel any touch anywhere and that I'm aware of what my body parts are doing just like normal people.) Dad used to tell me, with what I suspect was understatement, that even though his donk didn't look like much `it rises to the occasion OK'. Like father, like son, but right now I think it's midway between its normal states.

Perky's telling me about Acupressure - how it's like Acupuncture but not the same and how she can get a friend to do it on me if I want. Her mind's not on her job. She wets my rude bits with the washer and she soaps up her hands while she prattles on, then blithely, unthinkingly, she plunges them in between my legs and - Boing! Tent pole, be buggered! It's a flagpole now!

Why isn't it ever this big when I want it to be???

There will be a new post on this blog every Saturday.

This blog is intended to be mainly about me living with disability, but today I feel like writing about writing. Disability, my disability, is a subject that bores me a tad. You see, I've lived with this mute quad business for going on thirty years. Oh, I'll continue this blog about it, but you can't really hold it against me if I launch into something I like from time to time.

I've always had that ever-so-common desire to write, but for as long as I still had my physical faculties I was too distracted by life and loves to do more than dabble once in a while. Except for when I went to Greece to write the Great Australian Novel.

I did write it, too, while I was renting a little cottage on the Greek island of Chios. When I returned home I read it back without the influence of Ouzo, unlike when I wrote it, and realised that the best place for it was the rubbish bin.

Rainbow came into my life around that time and writing once again took up residence on the backburner. (Rainbow was the name I used for my first two kids' mum in an earlier post on this blog, so I'll stick with it here too.)

Some eight years later I fortuitously had the stroke that left me a mute quad. Fortuitous in that it stripped away many of life's distractions and left me with little worth doing except write, write, write. For instance, one 'distraction' was my family life, but two years after my stroke Rainbow left me and took the kids with her.

The very first thing I wrote was an account of that stroke and the following year that I spent in hospital. Once I'd done a few chapters I submitted them to the Australia Council and eventually received a $5,000 grant to finish the book. $5,000 was worth more back then. I'd already finished writing the book by the time I received the grant, because it took them about six months to access the submissions and to allocate the money. The book was a good account, a reasonable read, but even I could see it wasn't worth trying to find a publisher for it.

With the money I bought an old bus that had been converted into a camper and took off with my new girlfriend. We spent five months travelling the Australian outback, an interesting venture, then we returned home and me back to my writing.

Like most writers, I think, I write for writing's sake - for the pleasure and enjoyment I get out of the process. The thought of publishing the work so other people can enjoy it too doesn't occur until after it's finished, if at all.

I say if at all because just a few minutes ago I looked over at my bookshelves and realised something. I used to have each book, film script, stageplay bound at the local copy shop, and one shelf holds my books and other long writings. I realised that the only one of them I ever tried to get published was my autobiography from just over a dozen years ago. I used to write a book, get it bound for my bookshelves, then throw myself into the next project.

Every publisher who read my autobiography, Flipside, sent me a letter of rejection with much the same wording - an ego-soothing comment about the quality of my writing followed with a but ... but we feel it is too (medically) specialized to attract a wide readership. The next couple of years after that saw My Left Foot and the Butterfly and the Diving Bell, heralding the beginning of the current era of books and films about subjects such as mine.

I put Flipside to one side and haven't tried to get published it since. I turned it into a play that was performed in theatres in Bendigo and Castlemaine. The ABC Radio National serialised it in six weekly segments and a double CD of it was released in ABC shops around Australia. I'm using excerpts from it for most of the second part of each post on this blog.

Immediately before writing Flipside all those years ago I wrote a fantasy story with my two girls in mind - Gemma and Bedou. I set out to write another normal length story, but it grew and grew through two whole years of writing and ended up being about 1,000 pages long. It was called Drinsighe.

True to form I put it to one side (stored it on my computer) and started something else. Every few years later when I was at a loose end I pulled it out to reread it and change it somewhat. It was good, better than just good, except there was a hundred page section in the middle that I wasn't happy with. That bit needed a rewrite, but I couldn't be bothered doing anything about it.

In 2009 I looked at it once more and saw that it deserved a wider readership. I decided to work toward getting it published, and as a first step I rewrote the offending 100 pages. A hundred pages of typing is a mammoth task for me nowadays. It took me nearly a year, with many a day or week off because often I simply couldn't face more of that slow, slow, slow typing.

At 1,000 pages Drinsighe was much to long, too cumbersome to handle. The story was actually three separate, almost self-contained, sections of roughly equal length, so I split it into three more managable books. The first book is Ellydd Gate, the book I'd be working on right now if I didn't have to get this post finished. And finished I nearly am, because I've already cut and pasted the second part of it.

I had Ellydd Gate edited and made the changes called for. It was re-edited and now I'm 60 pages through checking this edit and making the more minor changes called for this time. Ellydd Gate is about 300 pages now, around 70,000 words. I lost about 50 pages in all to the editor's red pen.

Now I must away. Ellydd Gate is calling.    

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

May 15, 1984 - PHH, Melbourne
Things have got a lot clearer over the last week or two. I've got a much better idea about what went on in ICU and stuff. In ICU each patient has a separate room and constant individual care. After an angiogram that pinpointed a clot in my head I was wired to a cardiograph and a maze of electronic sensors and data recorders. I was hooked up to a respirator, had a tube to eat through, a tube to drink through and a tube to urinate through, and my temperature and blood pressure and pulse rate were electronically monitored and displayed by my bed.

My room was kept frigid at first, because my temperature was dangerously high. For most of the time I was continually bumping into the fluorescent overhead light as I floated freely, because I was kept fairly high on morphine. This drug was administered to me to negate the horrific mental traumas that I might have been experiencing subconsciously.

They say marijuana isn't addictive, but I'd been into it heavily enough to be hanging out for my first toke on a joint every afternoon at about four. The few times in recent years that I'd skipped a day or two I'd experienced mild withdrawal symptoms - a niggly headache and a niggly upset stomach. The up side of the morphine was that it helped me kick my grass habit without any withdrawals that I was aware of, but the down side was that it induced a few wierdo hallucinations.
... ... ... 

The young guy from the bed opposite just wandered off down the corridor towards the lift. He could be just going for a walk in the building, but I've got a funny feeling he's making a break for it. I wouldn't bet the shirt off my back on it, but still-

Ding! That's the lift. I was right.  

They wheeled him in last week - no, the week before - or was it the week before the week before? No - it was just the week before. He was a bit quiet then, still groggy from the op to his head. He just lay there in his bed oblivious to us all, even to the nurses. That soon changed though.

The next morning he had to be spoon-fed, because he was still too weak to move. I'll always remember that morning. There was a started yelp, a jumping nurse and ‘Stop that, Jason!’ The human body's pretty wonderful, I reckon - he was just ten hours past brain surgery, too weak for his hand to lift food to his mouth, but it'd had found her crutch.  

I'm the longest-serving inmate here and I've seen some amazing sights in my five months and five days in hospital (except there's no trusting that I actually saw what I thought I saw for the first month). Excluding that first month, and excluding the stroke cases and sickness stuff - just counting the car accidents and bike accidents and bashings and brain tumors, and all those other things needing head surgery, they must've wheeled a dozen guys into this room from theatre. More than that, probably.

Crazy-shaved heads with rows of metal staples across their skulls from ear to ear, or front to back, left side or right side, and the long wound painted red against germs. They're out of it at first, but a day later or two they're sitting up. Their minds are still a bit screwy, but still - `Strong enough to sit up' is pretty amazing, considering. Walking to the toilet after four or five days, and hair and senses growing back in no time.

Jason's like that. At first he couldn't even care where he was - the drugs saw to that. He didn't know where he was at times, and he didn't know what he was doing either, (except that breasts and crutches were magnets to him even then), and then he reached the dreamy-'n-vacant stage. That's where he is now. Once in a while he's quite lucid and he talks to the other guys. A lot of it's about when he gets out of here and how he feels trapped in here - mainly how he feels trapped. He drifts off dreamy and vacant again after a while, but another few days and he'll be back to normal.

‘Jason's never like this’, his Ma says to his bird, in a voice meant for all the room to hear.
Never’ his bird agrees with Ma, in a voice meant for all the room to hear.
‘You've bloody-well got worse, Jase’, his mate says to him in a voice he doesn't care if all the room hears when Ma and his bird aren't around. His mate knows him better than Ma or his bird, that's for sure. (I'm a ‘Mum’ and ‘fiancée’ man myself, but Jase says ‘Ma’ and ‘me bird’.)

Jase's twenty two, twenty three, about six feet tall and blond, going by the stubbly regrowth on his head. He's good-looking and as confident as can be. He probably plays football, too. He mightn't look all that confident now, but put some colour back in his face, some hair back on his head, some decent clothes on his body, and drop him at a disco and he'd be as confident as hell. He mightn't go the grope like in here, not as much anyway, but I'll swear he's not the angel Ma and his bird pretend.

He scared me last night, really scared me. I was woken at about two by someone talking to me.  I didn't know what they'd been saying before, but there was Jase talking beside my bed. He'd been talking to me quietly till I woke, talking little but staring a lot. He doesn't know what to make of me - his perception isn't always crystal clear yet. In all his time in the bed opposite I haven't moved or talked once. 
‘Do you, um - do you want a hand to get up?’
He was so concerned, wanting so much to help.
‘I'll, um - I'll help you up if you want’.
‘No, Jase.  Go back to bed - please!’ I think to him desperately. ‘You'll have me flat out on the floor again!’
Not that he's done that before, but I've been down there.

It wasn't long after I hit the neuro ward here, back when I still thought they were trying to kill me. Back when I was still coughing and jerking a lot and didn’t have the bed rails up. One night the nurses ignored my coughs for so long I jerked right to the edge of the bed. My body was jumping slightly with each cough and I knew the next cough would throw me out. I tried like buggery not to cough. I shouted silently for the nurses - and I shouted - and I shouted - and I shouted. But then I had to cough.

Back then they had an air tube attached to my trache - a thick, white, concertina tube from a wall outlet. It hung down beside the bed a bit then up to the trache. Air would condense in it and gradually water would build up in the low bit beside the bed, and every few hours they'd drain it out.

I hit the floor that night and I lay stark naked on the cold linoleum, (vinyl, probably). The air tube ran tighter from wall to me and a bit of the water ran down my trache into my lungs. Just a drop or two, but that set me coughing and jerking. That in turn tightened the tube even more, more water in the lungs, more coughing, more jerking, much more violent jerking - so much more violently that I jerked towards the wall and the tube slackened. No more water was running into my lungs, but in a miracle to beat any miracles Jesus ever did the nurses left their coffee to ease my distress!

They started putting my bed rails up after that.

I only had that air-tube for a few weeks, but the feeding tube up my nose and the nighttime pee tube stayed till last week. I've got the tiniest movement back in one thumb now, so they've made a special switch to put on that hand at night and now I can buzz for a nurse for a pee.

I hardly ever get my perceptions about the room wrong any more. Things changed slowly while the morphine effects lingered, but now I think and hope I’m as clear as a bell.

-
Now, there's a wonderful sight - down there, down on the road out the window. The neuro ward is on the fifth floor and my bed's at the window. There's a very wide main road flanked by large oaks down below with tram tracks in the centre. The trees are bare now, mostly bare anyway, with just winter wind and sleet and smooth wet bark for clothing.

I should've bet my shirt before, because I was right about Jase. He was making a break for it. That's him down there now. Oh, glory be, the fettered soul's free! White-clad, he's striding the tramlines fearless, his bare feet solid on the wet road with cars to his right and left. The cold road's icy but unfelt, because freedom's singing loud in his heart and in his head. He's got a red anti-biotic flash across his shaven skull, icy gusts are flapping the hospital gown wide - his bare back, bare legs and bare bum are there for all the world to see - but he's free! Free!

Of course he could be free and dead fairly soon. It's peak hour and the traffic's savage. It's getting worse by the second, just about, and his chances of being killed are getting better.

Oh, by the way - that night he wanted to get me up? He eventually lost interest and drifted back to bed, probably because I wouldn't answer him. He wouldn't lose interest now, not if he was up here with me watching some other escapee down there, watching and betting on how long he lasts.

Jase’s back. They recaptured him before the traffic wiped him out.

April 12, 1976 - Latrobe University, Victoria  
I’m nearly twenty-seven. The year before last I went back to school for something to do and now I’m at Uni. I'm meant to be at a biology lecture, but I'm at the back sports ground and this beats biol hands down. I'm doing light wind sprints - jogging laps nice and easy and every so often I sprint up to top speed and ease down to a jog again. There's a race I want to win in New South Wales next Saturday, so I'm just adding a bit of zing to my fitness. If I'm not fit enough by now I never will be.

Last year I did the first year of the Psych course. One particularly terrific morning, at least I think it's terrific now because of its consequences - one particularly terrific morning I stopped in the centre of the road waiting to turn into the university and a young woman ran into her car mine from behind. The Fiat's got a big tow-bar, so it wasn't scratched, but her car wasn't so lucky. She lives near the Uni, so I towed her home, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Her history's that she was to eventually become the other woman. She's a nurse and she doesn't work full-time. I'm often with her instead of Uni. I called in there today for breakfast and Uni went by the board. We're going to make a day of it with a picnic. That's bound to include plenty of naughty stuff and dope, so I'm getting a run in first.

This is the business end of the running season with all the big races coming up - Queensland's top race last weekend, New South Wales next weekend and our Stawell Gift meeting a fortnight after that. For the first time ever I'm going to those other states, because I reckon I've got a good chance and because it's good to have a few hard races before Stawell. Stawell's the national championships meeting for us professional runners. The Queensland race last weekend was a good start of my lead-up to Stawell.

Pro distance races have massive fields with anything from thirty to sixty runners, but they're spread right around the track at the start. Pro runners are handicapped so everyone has a roughly equal chance just like with horse races, but we get penalized distance rather than weight. The best runners start at the back and the front runner can be a lap ahead, sometimes more. My coach often berates me that it needs single-minded dedication to be a really good runner and that I enjoy my type of life too much for that single-mindedness, but for all that there aren't that many that start behind me.

I run in distance races, the mile and the two-mile, but I prefer the two. I should call them the sixteen hundred metres and the thirty two hundred metres that they are known by nowadays. I was in the thirty two hundred at the Gold Coast meeting in Queensland and I was handicapped to near the back of the field, just one guy behind me. It was ideal weather for running - it was a twilight meeting and it was still warm. I wasn't good enough to win though. Second place was all I could do.

 I better think about getting back to the Other Woman for our picnic - I'll do two more wind sprints first - - Christ! Must've over-stretched my knee or something -

April 15, 1976 - Lavington, New South Wales
This is one of the top professional running meetings in the state. All the top runners from the Eastern states are here, and a few from over in the west. I'm here, too.

As I’ve already said, professional races are handicapped to give everyone an even chance. The fastest runner is called the back-marker. He starts at the back of the field. Everyone else gets a certain number of metres start on him depending on how fast they can run.

I’ve never seen today’s back-marker before. I’m told he’s from Western Australia. He’s sleek and muscley and he’s got a long pointy nose. If you met him on a dark night you’d probably mistake him for a greyhound. I bet the bastard can run like a greyhound, too.  

The track is dotted all the way round with runners. There’s forty-seven of us. Greyhound's wearing the red singlet with the Number 1 that shows he's the back-marker, the best, and the nervous-looking guy just behind him is wearing Number 47. He’s the front-marker. He’s got just one metre less than a lap start on Greyhound. You could say he’s the rabbit.

They’ve put me in the number 2 singlet just five metres ahead of the greyhound, so the rabbit's got three hundred and ninety metres start on me.

‘Take your marks-’
‘Set-’
Bang!
... 
I'm plodding along feeling sluggish and slow, just waiting for Greyhound to streak by. This is bad, we're going so slow I'm listening to the race caller, ‘Rodgers leading into the third lap, Anderson and...’
...
Lap six coming up. Only two more to go, thank Christ. Greyhound's biding his time – in fact, everyone's biding their time, and that time must be just about now. I can't remember ever being in a race this slow. I've had time to perv on just about every worthwhile woman in the crowd. This is terrible -
‘Rodgers - Wilson - Anderson - that's Gary Anderson, the winner of this race in 197...’
It's a wonder they aren't booing for us being so slow - hmmm, she's not bad. I don't know what's wrong with this lot. They're all playing a cat and mouse game, all running so slow waiting to pounce they're damn near going backwards
What's wrong with me? I just can't get going -
‘Rodgers still doing well - In the number 8 singlet Harris from New South Wales is pegging him back slowly-’

Why the hell doesn't he scream through the loudspeaker for us to start running? God, I feel bad. I'm going so slowly I can focus on every number out ahead of me - 47, 31, 26, 24, 25 and 3. 47, he was the front-marker, must be Anderson - he's held the lead all this time - ‘Harris is challenging...’ there goes 7 past him - Harris from New South Wales - `Rodgers has gone...' 31 past him - 26, 24, 25 - poor bastard - he's stuffed - bell lap coming up soon. They'll pour it on for the last lap - there goes 3 past Andy baby - shit, where is everyone? There's only those six in front of me! I've plodded past a few runners, but - Harris is getting the bell - Hang on. There were about forty-five of them in front of me at the start, so - God, I've passed about forty so far!

Poor old Anderson, even I'm going to pass him.
‘Here comes Furlong, that pretty little runner from Victoria-’
Pretty? I suppose he's right. At least he would be if I wasn't going so slow. I do look good when I'm running fast - smallish - neat - economical. He's using pretty as a compliment - ‘Second place last weekend at the Gold Coast-’. Shit, why did he have to say that? All eyes will be on me now. I better try to do something for them. ‘Furlong flies past Anderson and- away he goes at the bell for the last lap. Look at him go!’
... ... ...

Now there's a strange thing - for the entire race except the last lap I was convinced we were all just plodding around, it definitely felt that way to me, but it turns out we were doing one of the fastest times seen here. Once I got the bell I came alive and started to burn to the lead, but that was just a few seconds extra off the time.

Hell, I wish I didn't have to walk out here for the presentation. I'm dying to limp, but that wouldn't look good for a pretty little runner, would it? The back of my knee's been sore since the I trained at Uni last week. I thought I was dying during the race, but not from the leg. It didn't hurt once then, but now the race's over it's worse than ever. Ah, well, at least the winner's cheque will keep the wolves from my door for a while - I wonder where Greyhound got to.

April 16, 1976 - Lavington, New South Wales Yesterday Harris ran second to me in the thirty two hundred, so I guess it was only fair that today I was beaten second to him in the sixteen hundred.

April 29, 1976 - Stawell, Victoria
It's Easter Monday and I think this is going to be a week for losers. Today's exactly a month to our fourth anniversary, but Innocent and I have to be in court later this week to file for divorce - irreconcilable differences. God only knows why all divorces have to go through the courts - it's not like there's any animosity between us.

Losers week? Just an hour ago I continued my losing form with second place in the Federation sixteen hundred metres at the Stawell Gift meeting. I was beaten by two metres. Sounds close, eh? Well, I've been beaten by this guy before. My coach trains him too, so we're friends in a way. If he's in the same race he always beats me and it's always by about two metres. It wouldn't matter if I ran a world record, because he'd still be that two metres ahead of me. I hate that. And who ever remembers the guy who came second, anyway?

I've just realized that in trying to show how life is for me, a mute quad living alone, I'm saying 'this is hard', 'that is bad' and a lot of negative stuff. Yes, there are regular problems and hardnesses, but to my way of seeing life these are small price to pay for my freedom. No matter how difficult the difficulties become I'll stay living in my own home for as long as it's physically possible.

I live in a Housing Department house, welfare housing. That brings images of a sort of ghetto of cheap houses with straggly grass in the yard and an air of poorness. I know that all welfare housing isn't like that and that in reality only a small minority is, but it's still what comes to mind.

This house is nothing like that. It's an affluent, large house in an estate of affluent large houses, not one of which is government-owned. You'd never know my house is Housing Department.

A dozen years ago I was living in one of a row of small housing department flats in Castlemaine with the then baby Jez and her mum Esther. They were unfenced flats on a main road and the residents were all elderly or definite welfare cases. It was hardly the place for twenty seven year old Esther or for a young child, so I wrote a well-reasoned applying for a larger house.

I'm pretty good with words, I'm not averse to using my 'condition' to pull at heartstrings and most people think I'm so badly-off in life I deserve help. Esther and I were told to choose any block of land in or around Castlemaine, then this house was purpose-built to my specific needs. An architect was engaged to see that those needs were met in the best possible way. 

Everything is designed to make it easy for me to move around in my big wheelchair. Outside there's largeish concrete areas and concrete paths. I mentioned the electronic door openers in my last post. There are no steps anywhere. All the doorways and halls are much wider than normal and the rooms are extra spacious.

It's slightly possible that I over-stated to the architect my body's aversion to cold weather, and hot. He put in extra insulation, large windows to catch the winter sun but really wide eaves to shade them in summer, air-conditioning, ceiling fans and a better-than-normal heater.

My kids have bedrooms here and there's another bedroom/spare room to store my manual wheelchair, the ceiling hoist, the standing machine and the other paraphenalia that come with being a quad. It's my home. I think the idea of living in collective quad accomodation or a nursing home is so unappealing to me partly because it's so easy living here.

Uh-oh, it's time to stop this. An email just came in from my editor with Ellydd Gate and pages of comments, changes she has made and suggested changes that I should make. I've been waiting on this for two months or more. Some real writing to do at last!

But first ...
I set up an autoresponder with a simple form asking you, my enthralled readers, to enter your email address so you can receive automatic alerts of new posts. However, I'm buggered if I can work out how to put that form onto this blog page. Unless you're one of my few Facebook Friends you'll just have to check back here from time to time. Now that I have Ellydd Gate to distract me again I'm cutting down to one post a week - every Saturday.

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...


April 14, 1984 - PHH, Melbourne 
They've just wheeled in a guy from Post Op and he looks like something out of a horror movie. There's a fresh scar from ear to ear and his hair's been shaven in a wide track. The whole track's been mercurochromed a bright red and his head's being held shut by about seven thousand shiny metal staples.

April 15, 1984 - PHH, Melbourne
The room's all settled apart from Mr Something-opolous. They're all quiet and still with the land of nod beckoning. A student nurse is seeing to Mr Something-opolous now. He's her last one. She's having all sorts of trouble with him - she just can't get him comfortable. She rolls him onto his left side and he groans like buggery.
‘What's the matter, Mr Something-opolous?’
He just keeps it up loud till she moves him. She rolls him back onto his back and he groans like buggery.
‘What's the matter, Mr Something-opolous?’
He just keeps it up loud till she moves him. She again rolls him onto his left side, but he still groans like buggery.
‘What's the matter, Mr Something-opolous?’

He never answers her questions, because he doesn't know English any more. He had a stroke at home last week and when they found him his English was gone. He's telling her in Greek what's wrong, but she can't speak Greek. It wouldn't make any difference if she could though, because even his kids don't know what he's saying now. Ever since his stroke he's been using a Greek dialect hitherto unknown to mortal man.

The student nurse has been driven to loud groans of her own, groans of frustration, and she rushes out to ask someone what's wrong. It's unlikely that whoever else is on will know, because Mr Something-opolous groans every night and frequently during the day - almost every time a nurse lays a hand on him, in fact.

It seems very few nurses have been told what’s wrong with him or, much more to the point, very few of them remember being told what’s wrong with him. In the one in ten chance that they do remember they'll explain to the student nurse that he fell when he had his stroke. Then they'll tell her that the fall broke his pelvis and that he's not to be rolled around the bed under any circumstances. The slightest movement is agony for him.
-
Nurses must have the worst memories in the world. Maybe it's because they're under-staffed and over-worked.

Nearly every time a nurse gives me my morning wash she's called to away to give another nurse a hand and about a quarter of the time she'll forget to come back to me for up to an hour. About three times a day they'll leave me with a urinal bottle between my legs for a couple of minutes so I can pee in private and it's quite normal for them to forget to come back for the bottle in fifteen or fifty minutes or more.

And I see this forgetfulness happening with all the other guys too.

May 1, 1984 - PHH, Melbourne  
I'm half-lying in bed in the daytime, the quiet part of the day after lunch with the others dozing or reading in bed, except the guy in his dressing gown. He's sitting at the table in the centre of the room reading the paper. The sign on my bed-head says `Nil by mouth'  and I'm being fed all day through a `Noso-Gastric' tube that goes up my nose and down my throat to my stomach. All day drip, drip, drip, a thick brown liquid slowly dripping into me. It's my fluid intake too, but I don't reckon it's enough. I'm always thirsty, always craving a drink, eyeing off my water jug and willing it into me. It doesn't work, though.

Here I lie absolutely dying for a drink. I can't move as much as a finger to get one and I can't speak to tell them I'm dying of thirst and torment. Here I lie with `Nil by mouth' written big above me. There's never a drop of water gone from the shiny steel jug on my cabinet, but every morning a girl replaces it with a fresh one.

That's just the tip of my iceberg of sufferings caused or exacerbated by my voice, by its absence. F'r instance, I spasm now when I cough, which is frequently with the bloody trache in my throat. As part of that same coughing/spasming business I clamp my teeth hard and fast and every now and then my tongue's in the way. It hurts like hell at the time. I get that salty blood taste with chunks out of the side of my tongue, but there's no way I can tell them.

Here's another f'r instance, which has already been mentioned before in this little whinge - the trache's a curse, a blight on my life. It's there to let me breathe because, I guess, my windpipe must have collapsed shut when the stroke stopped my muscles working (I wouldn't swear this's the correct story) but it's not a nose.

A nose has all those fine hairs to filter the air, but a trache's just a hollow plastic tube that let's all the airborne dust and junk through. Your lungs, my lungs in this case, my lungs get aggravated and try to cough it out, but they're weak now, or maybe it's my diaphragm's weak, and they can't budge it.

Hell, what are you moaning about? You're a bloody quadriplegic now - A quad! You're lucky to have even weak muscles.

Anyway - when my lungs are gunked up like this they have to be suctioned. A soft plastic tube is inserted in my trache and pushed down until my jerks and coughs say its hit my lungs, then the suction is turned on for a second or two to suck out the build-up of gunk.  

This wonderful procedure has been necessary every waking hour since the trache was put in, and a couple of times every night. Suctioning makes my whole body jerk and jump like with an electric shock. Often the pain that accompanied having the inside of my lungs prodded brings on my sobbing tears and a few times it's made my lungs bleed and I cough red for a while.

So I cough and cough and cough and have almighty spasming coughs, but I can't call for help and I can't move to press the buzzer. When I cough like this my legs jerk and spasm until they're between the bed rails and then every time I cough I spasm my shins against them - skin off, blood, pain, tears and sometimes at night two hours till the nurses do their rounds. Just three nights ago they started lining my bedrails with pillows each night and now my long, long hours in the darkened ward have become more bearable.

-
The speech therapist should be here soon. She pads in softly on her soft rubber soles and her smile reaches my bed before she's halfway here. She's so quiet the guy at the table barely looks up and the other two regular readers don't even hear her. I look very, very, very much as if I'm a vegie, so Rainbow, Speechy and the physio are just about the only ones who treat me like I'm normal inside. I’m a vegie on the outside, but those three believe I'll improve - Rainbow most of all. But then she was the one who kept telling me things even when my eyes told her I wasn't there just then. I wasn't there, but maybe it was sinking in anyway.

I’m so vegie to the eye that just yesterday the dickwit of a neurosurgeon who does the consulting on this ward told Rainbow that I’m as good as decerebrate, (A vegie with nothing up top) and that she should put me in a nursing home and get on with her life.

He's not the Neuro who saved my life, but he's the one we're looking to for hope `n stuff. He's not what you'd call a hands-on type of guy. I left ICU about two or three weeks ago I think, and though the young ward resident keeps an eye on me this Neuro's now my specialist. He's the guy who knows me inside and out (in theory) and it's he who calls the shots, but he hasn't touched me once.

He strides onto the ward with his entourage of student doctors in tow and goes from patient to patient asking how they're feeling today, any problems. He always stops well back from the bed with his learners. He only very occasionally and very reluctantly goes up close, actually touching the patient to check the stitches and the shiny metal staples - the staples that hold a few skulls together from his saw.

Then he comes to me. They all do. He stops six feet from my bed and they stop behind him. He discusses my situation with them, calling me The Vegie in everything but plain English. No use him asking how I'm going - I'm decerebrate, remember - so he asks any nurse in sight `Any problems here, nurse?’ then he strides away satisfied with his entourage in tow.

Like I said before, he told Rainbow that I'm well and truly stuffed for all time. She was here when he did his rounds so he took her aside and told her that I'd never walk or talk or progress beyond my present level.

‘I'm sorry, Rainbow, but your husband's decerebrate - ah - and he always will be. If you and your children want a decent life you've got no option but to let him be cared for permanently in a Nursing Home.’

I guess there's no point in you reading any more of this account, because it's being written by a Vegie.

There's a lot I can't remember about a lot of things. Rainbow could clear so much up if I asked her, but I haven't got any way to ask her, have I? God, it's frustrating! Until just yesterday I didn't know why I was still alive - the last I remember before those times in ICU with the covers right up they were going to cut me up for spare parts.

Yesterday Rainbow told me about it, just to have something to talk about at the time. Apparently they didn't have the expertise to `harvest' my organs there so they rushed me to a larger hospital that did - this hospital, Prince Henry’s Hospital (PHH). They rushed me here with the siren screaming to get me here fresh, and with Rainbow sitting not too happy by my side. They must have rung ahead saying who and what I was and why I was dying, because a homeward Neuro was told as he walked out through Casualty. He hung around to have a professional nosey. I don't know how, but the moment he saw me he knew I wasn't for Spares and he had me answering questions with my eyes before the coma came on hard. He put off going home to save my life in ICU, and I haven't got a problem with that.

He looked after me in ICU at first, but I don't remember him clearly. I sort of remember answering his questions when the ambulance brought me here, but I can't put a face to him. I don't know for sure if he was the one I imagined was a butcher attacking me and I don't even know his name! I just know from Rainbow that the neuro who sees me now is someone different.

Speechy's just come in. Here she comes padding softly on her soft rubber soles and her smile's reaching me before she's halfway here. Like always, she's so quiet the guy at the table barely looks up and the other two readers don't even hear her.

‘Hello, Speechy. What's up?’ I'm thinking at her, because I can see she's quietly excited, the bearer of good news. She shows me a pamphlet on Morse code.

‘This'll be your saviour. You can get out of your head with it. As long as you're trapped in there unable to communicate people will keep thinking you can't think. Even if they know better, even if they know you're not away with the fairies, they'll still have the gravest doubts about you from time to time. It's only natural for them to be like that, but this'll make them know you're OK. It's wonderful! Let's get you learning it right away and then-’

She stops, excitement fading, because I'm looking away at nothing in particular. I'm resolutely keeping my gaze from her, indicating that I disagree with her. God, here's another one of those incredibly frustrating times when I can see I'm being misunderstood and painted black because of it, and there's not a thing I can do about it. She thinks I'm being contrary or lazy; that I'm refusing her help, or that I'm refusing to make the effort to learn, so she's getting hurt and angry.

‘Hello.’.
It's Rainbow, come early because she has to leave early. Speechy tells her the Morse idea and that I won't have a bar of it for some reason. True to form Rainbow saves the day. She has this unconscious knack of doing the obvious with me now - at least I reckon it's the obvious thing to do. It's the thing everyone should do, but which few people do do. Few people look at my situation from my point of view or think much about my specific limitations when devising solutions for me.

She reminds Speechy I can't make any sounds at all, let alone rapid stuff like `Dot dot dah dah dot, dah dah, dah dot dah' and on and on. Then she asks Speechy does anyone know Morse code to understand me anyway. No one she knows, she says; no one I know; and probably no one Speechy knows either.  

May 4, 1984 - PHH, Melbourne   The room's settled for the night. It gets peaceful and easy once visiting time's over - just quiet music from my tape player, rustling newspapers every now and then and low voices closing the day.

Everyone's in bed except the old guy, because a nurse took him to the toilet before. Everyone's lying down, two sleeping, two reading and me just lying here like normal.

I can see everything now I can turn my head from side to side again - only very slowly, mind you - and I'm starting to get it up off the pillow with effort - just an inch so far - and, though it doesn't help me see more things, I can blink my eyelids.  

A nurse comes into the room slowly with the old guy by the arm, pausing between each step for his shuffling. He had his seven hundred and thirty fourth minor stroke last week and he looks like number seven hundred and thirty five will be the one that does him in. I bet the nurses sweat blood every time he strains on the toilet, just in case Seven Thirty Five strikes him there and then, in mid-motion on the crapper.

My bed covers are brightly coloured like the billowy material on the ceiling and walls. A Gypsy couple is dancing wildly and four or five Gypsy men are lazing around on the ground. She's your stereotype black-haired Gypsy beauty - a wild spirit with fire in her eyes and laughter in her heart. And her man's exactly what you'd expect him to be. Excitement explodes from their whirling bodies; passion explodes from their whirling bodies - -

Click! The nurse turns off my music and that brings me back - Seven Thirty Five's missed another chance, because the old guy's reached his bed alive one more time. The nurse turns off the lights with a quiet `goodnight' to the wakeful, but where have the Gypsies gone? - I think there were Gypsies here - - I can't remember - -

May 28, 1973 - Whittlesea, Victoria I put in about seven more years as a computer programmer after I got back from the west then I chucked in work to try my hand at cattle farming. Innocent and I sold our house in Melbourne and our five hectares of land up in the hills and sunk the lot into stud cattle. Murray Greys. We don’t know yet that a drought is going to hit next summer, and it’ll hit us hard. We’ll have to hand-feed the cattle for the next two years just to keep them alive. By then we won’t have any money to buy more feed. We’ll have to sell them just skin and bones in the middle of a drought.

If we knew today that we’re going to be wiped out in two years we could sell up before summer. We could get out of this impending disaster unscathed. Maybe even our marriage would survive. But life doesn’t work that way, does it? Thank God it doesn’t, says I. Life would be the pits if we always knew what’s around the next corner.

Right now I'm in the front paddock racking my brains for how the cattle get out, all thirty stud Murray Grey cows and calves and one big Murray Grey bull. They were on the road again this morning when I got up, but I'm buggered if I know how. We rented this property and put our every dollar into cattle and one attraction was all the new fences - that and the great feed in the paddocks.

Except for the big strainers at the corners of the paddocks the fence posts are all smooth, round, light pine. With the eight strands of wire they make a fine fence, so why have the cattle been out nearly every morning this last week? I'm stumped. I put padlocks on all the gates yesterday, so there can't be someone letting them out.

Innocent was here just now and she's as baffled as me. She's gone back to the house to make a cuppa, ‘Don't be long, Danny.’ Sad's panging my heart, ‘Pang. Pang.’ We've been good together the last five years, the first three or four were good anyway. It's not like it's all that bad yet, but everything's starting to unravel between us. We can both see the writing on the wall.

It's like when you've been on a roller coaster for a while - there's been a good few highs and lows and now it's chugging along flat and safe even though it's way up high. Then it comes to that almighty drop and for an instant everything cuts out for you. Your mind pauses, no more than an eye-blink, then it says ‘Shiiiiiiiiiiit.’ and the roller coaster rushes down so fast it pushes your heart up into your throat.

We're trundling along at the top right now. Our coaster's called Marriage, and it's turned onto the track to that drop up ahead, but what can we do? We can't reach the brake from here in the front seat, and anyway we don't even know what it looks like, so we're both pretending the drop isn't there. I think we know it's called Divorce, but we don't know it enough yet.
‘Pang. Pang.’ I reckon I can actually hear the sadness panging in my heart. ‘Pang. Pang.’

I'm feeling nostalgic for our old times, because today's our fourth wedding anniversary and because I think it's close to our last- I can see she'll be my ex-wife soon.
‘Pang. Pang.’ Sadness is panging in my heart. ‘Pang. Pang.’

‘Twang. Twang.’ Twang? Twang??? There it is again, and poetry be buggered, it's not my heart. It's the fence. Hell, what's that frigging bull doing? He's forced his bloody great head under the bottom wire and he's trying to lift the whole fence up. He's straining - straining - straining, lifting with his neck and all those nice smooth posts are just popping out of the ground.

He's just standing there, not a care in the world. He's probably chewing his bloody cud - if bulls have cuds. Not a care in the world, but he's got the weight of the whole fence on him, the whole lot, everything, the frigging posts and the star pickets and the wire and all. The wire's angling up over his shoulders from one corner and back down to the other corner

‘You bastard.’

He's just standing there waiting, holding the fence high and waiting, and all the bloody cows and calves are walking out onto the roadway. Now they're all on the roadside eating the grass out there, so he's going out there himself. The bottom wire drags along his back, up over his rump - dragging scrapping dragging scrapping, but he can't feel a thing. The taut wire drags off him and the whole frigging fence drops back into place, with the posts dropping into their holes like before.

The traffic's not so bad at this time of day, but its best I move before there's hamburger meat everywhere. I sprint to the cattle-yards and grab my whacker, then back to the road and belt hell out of the cows. The whacker's really good - it's just a bit of black polythene pipe, maybe a metre long. It doesn't hurt them through their tough hides, but it makes a noisy whaaack. That's what gets them moving.

I herd the cows up the road and into the driveway and start them running down the drive then I go back for the bull. He's big and he's strong, but he's docile for a bull. I don't mean he's docile docile. I skirt his solid head and belt his rump as hard as I can over and over again.

Cruelty? Think about this: those fence wires are strained so tight you could play a tune on them, and that's when they run straight from end to end. They'd be stretched so tight once he lifted them, just so tight. If his hide was in the least bit soft he'd be cut to the bone or if he had the normal animal's feeling to pain he'd be bellowing blue murder, but not him. I've got his papers - his mum was a cement truck and his dad was a Sherman tank. If I whack him hard enough and if I whack him often enough he'll go anywhere I want him to go - provided he hasn't got anything better to do.

So here I am shouting and cursing and whacking. Eventually he ambles towards the driveway. Right now I hate the big bastard, because I know he doesn't really give a stuff about me and my piddly plastic pipe - if he wanted he could just turn and scare the shit out of me. He's probably moving just to be with his harem.

We get to the driveway and I whack his side to turn him in, but he just stops. The drive's gravel, so it's not like there's good grass in there. He's just showing me who's boss. I lay into him like there's no tomorrow, but he's too disdainful to even react a quiver. I slip past him and dash for the distant house shouting ‘Get the bloody gun, Innocent. I'm gunna shoot the bastard.’

I tear into the house a million miles an hour, passing Innocent tearing out.
‘You're being stupid again, Danny.’
I don't know where she's going, but it's definitely not to the bull, because she's heading down the back as fast as she can go. I saw a small box in her hand, but she hasn't got the rifle.

It's in the wardrobe where it always is, but I can't find the frigging bullets. They should be up top in here, but they're not to be seen. They're not in the bedroom drawers. They're not on the fridge. They're not in the kitchen drawers. They're n- that bitch. That absolute bitch. She's got them. That's what I saw in her hand - she's got the box of bullets. She's got it and she's half a mile away by now.

Oh, she'll stop running about now. She'll stop and she'll turn for home and she'll stroll back nice as pie, because she knows it's over and I'll be feeling stupid about my antics - it only takes a minute for me to start to act sensibly again.

Like with the big vintage Fiat last week. It's in the large shed out back, the one with the sliding doors. When they’re open you can see everything from the kitchen. Itself in there with the four other old cars I’ve picked up this year. It was in pretty poor condition when I got it. I took it to bits and put it in boxes, and the body parts I covered from the rain. It followed me from house to house like that. When we moved here I fixed up the worn bits, which was all of them, and then I put it back together.

Last week I finally got the new pistons, (I've had the new bearings and everything else for months), so I threw the motor together and dropped it into the car. ‘Dropped it into the car’ is the sort of thing we guys say ever so casually to fool you we know what we're doing. So is `I threw the motor together'.

Actually, I didn't just drop the motor in, because try as I might it wouldn't fit into place - the clutch plate or something was stopping it. I had the motor on a block-and-tackle and I must have lifted it out and back in a dozen times. I wasn't very happy with it, so eventually I did the only intelligent thing left - I beat shit out of the car with some of that whacker stuff. It didn't work though; the motor still wouldn't click in, so I thought ‘It's my own damn fault’.

I figured it was my fault because I hadn't really belted it - the metal body on those old cars is thick as hell, and the Fiat's still undercoat grey, so I'd known a poly pipe couldn't hurt it. I went tearing outside and got a big bit of timber and I started to charge back in to give the car what-for.
‘Phone, Danny. They said it's urgent.’ Innocent shouted out the window.

Shit. What now? I drop the wood and go into the kitchen. She's holding the phone out to me, but she accidentally drops the receiver. Then it starts - you know how it goes. You both stoop down fast to get it before they hang up, and in her rush she knocks you off balance and as you tumble you knock the phone further away. You scrabble to the lead and pull it to you, but she's grabbed it just then and there's more time wasted there. At long last you're standing with it in your hand.
‘Hello? - Hello?? - Ah, shit. They've hung up.’

She's just standing there looking out the window, looking through the shed doors to the Fiat, and without even sounding interested, without even turning to look at me, she asks ever so innocently ‘Have I wasted enough time yet?’

I put the phone down carefully and quietly and I go out to the shed carefully and quietly, stepping over the dropped timber as I go. I try the motor carefully and quietly and it clicks in first time - naturally. All the time I'm muttering to myself, carefully and quietly, ‘You smartarse bitch, Innocent.’ but under it all I'm so glad for what she did.

Something funny happened last Friday morning. Oh, it didn't seem all that funny at the time, but just an hour later I was entertaining myself putting it down on paper - figuratively speaking. Here 'tis ...

I'm lying on my back in my bed, bored out of my brain. It's just gone six thirty and I've been awake for an hour already. More than that, actually. I hardly ever get tired enough to sleep right through till the morning carer gets here, because all I do all day is sit around not moving a muscle - nearly.

Eventually the carer arrives and gets me up and into my wheelchair and dressed, then I drive into the bathroom.  She stands me from my wheelchair and sits me on the toilet, then she leaves me to do my stuff. Three or four minutes later I hit the button on the wall with my head to buzz her that I'm done. She comes in and pulls me forward to wipe my bum, but the whole seat comes loose and slides forward.

She's got hold of me securely, so there's no drama. She merely pushes me backwards and the seat slides back. It slid so far forward before that my penis was pushed over the lip of the toilet bowl to dangle down in front of it. That's OK, but when she pushes me back the plastic seat comes thundering back at about three hundred kilometres an hour and jams my penis hard up against the bowl.

God, it feels like its being cut in two and suddenly I'm talking.  Screaming and yelling actually, but all that's coming out are loud and vigorous groans. She's heard me doing this before when I've been sliding out of my chair or starting to fall out over the side of it and at those times it's motivated by fear and panic. She thinks I'm panicing now about falling off the toilet, so she holds me firm and tells me “”I’ve got you, Danny. You’re OK. Just calm down.”

I'm yelling 'For Christ's sake stand me up!' and indicating 'Up, up!' with my head, because it hurts like hell, but the more I carry on the more she waits for me to stop panicing about falling. I realize through the pain I won't get anywhere while she's on the wrong track, so I surpress my agonised yells and jab my finger at my crotch, nodding at it too. She twigs the problem and eases the seat forward. The poor thing is red and bruised four centimetres from the end where it was jammed.

Not much movement below the neck?  I can live with that. No voice? No problem. But four precious centimetres gone?  Would anything be left??
...



I see clear blue skies out the window behind my computer. A warm spring afternoon. It's a great day to be alive. But then, aren't they all. (Even on the coldest, wettest, most miserable day in deep winter when I'm feeling dull and cold to the bone I wouldn't be dead for quids.) 

It's a warm spring afternoon at present, but give it another hour and it'll be starting to cool down. Even mild coolness makes the few working muscles in my one vaguely-mobile arm tighten. Nowadays I have God's own trouble reaching the control stick to drive my wheelchair at the best of times, so a tightened arm is something I try to avoid. Best I stop writing and take my dog Bruno for his afternoon walk right now.
...
I'm back at the computer again, with Bruno lying on the floor at my side. I've got a lead tied to my chair and Bruno is attached all day, except for lunchtime. He's desperate to be put on at the end of the carers' shifts. If ever I leave him out the back during the day he lies at the door and every now and then he whines like buggery. I crack and open the door after a while. He races in and lies down beside me for the rest of the morning or afternoon just as if he was on the lead.

My front and back doors and the security screen doors are equiped with electronic door openers that I can operate through my wheelchair controls.

Daylight saving started last weekend. I always start morning shifts an hour earlier from that time and push my dinner shifts back an hour, which gives me an extra two hours during the day in summer. My typing speed is getting slower each year in line with the gradual deterioration of my quad body. This painfully slow typing means it takes almost to lunchtime just to write the carers' notes of things I need done that day and to answer emails and the odd thing, so the extra time that comes with daylight savings is a godsend.

But even it's not enough. Ellydd Gate, the first book of my trilogy, was due back from the editor last Saturday, but apparently its still a couple of days away. When I get it I'll have to go through it line by line, making amendments and doing the seven hundred and thirty ninth final check before sending it to the online publisher. I can't see where I'm going to find the time to type my blog ramblings then, but I guess I will.

Here's an example of a carer's note ...
'Good evening Ruth,
Please load the Ezykeys CD into the computer.
More printer paper please. 
Exercises please. It's important I increase these stretches for my left arm as it's getting very hard or me to reach the wheelchair controls.
Please hang the washing out.
Please feed the dog.
Please steam vegies. Fry fish and make cheese sauce.
More exercises please.'


... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

April 2, 1984 - PHH, Melbourne   Nurse's piling all my stuff on my bed, and here's Rainbow in for the afternoon. They hardly ever pull the covers up over my face any more, so I can see everything nearly all the time. Right now I can see the pile growing down near my feet - clothes, shoes, cassette player, tapes and all the Get Well cards from the rellies.

Rainbow always comes. At least I think she does. I remember she told me she does and she said she talks to me even if she isn't sure I'm here - what with the morphine and all the drugs. I'm off the morphine drip now, but its effect still kicks in from time to time, she tells me.

It's good now though, because I can remember some of Before right back to when Innocent was here - of course, that might've been just yesterday or it might've been months ago. I'm still not sure about those things - I can't remember -. But I do remember Innocent saying Rainbow came every day, even back then.

A male nurse just came in to get me, but Nurse is making him wait while she tells me about the ward I'm going to. She says it's the neurology ward and its got six rooms all the same - three for men and three for women, but one's being fixed up. Neuro gets head injuries like from car accidents and diving accidents and then there are strokes like me.

The male nurse wheels me to Neuro with Rainbow beside me. I remember once Nurse said some things might seem weird because the morphine they've been giving me makes me hallucinate, but it's never seemed that way to me. It's awful the way they try to kill me at night, and lots of things happen I don't know why, but nothing's struck me as weird.

Seeing the Neurology ward made me think about that - it made me think ‘Maybe this's what Nurse meant’, because at first glance it was weird. But just for a second, then it was just - I dunno - a bit different maybe, but not weird. It just is.

The room  isn't all that big, but it's really crowded. There must be about a dozen bunk beds around the walls, all two and three bunks high with patients in them - sitting, lying, reading, sleeping, talking, but mainly talking, and mainly talking low. Some of them are wearing hospital gowns and some of them are wearing street clothes and there are lots of busy nurses everywhere. I've never seen a ward like it. It's not weird, though.

I'm not in a bunk. I've been transferred from the stretcher to an ordinary hospital bed.

-

It's quiet now and the bunks have all gone. Now there are just five men in beds like mine and they're all eating dinner. The girl with the food trolley didn't leave me anything and I thought ‘She's forgotten me, but one of the nurses will see I'm not eating’.

They didn't, though, and that made me know something I've never thought about before now - I never eat anything. I can't remember them ever giving me food, but I know this time it's not just me not remembering. Somehow I know I don't eat, just like I know I don't talk. They don't expect me to eat, just like they never expect an answer from me. They know I can't speak and they know I can't eat, and I know it too now. Up till now I knew I didn't speak, but it just now came to me I can't speak, and I think that came because it hit me that I can't eat. Why didn't they tell me?  

Let's think about this for a minute - I reckon when I was in ICU Nurse and Rainbow probably told me everything about everything and I just can't remember them doing it. I know I had a stroke while we were staying at Mum's place for the night. I know I can't talk, I know they did a trache-thingy to me in ICU and I know I can't eat or drink. Now that I've concentrated on remembering all those things I can see someone must've told me when I wasn't here. I reckon most of it came from Rainbow. She tells me everything about everything in here and stuff from home - things about Gemma and Bedou and stuff.

She brings them in sometimes and she puts them on my bed. After Bedou has pulled my beard and settled down Gemma says ‘When are you coming home, Daddy?’ and then I cry.

Something else I know - this'll sound dumb, but I reckon that stuff I said about them pulling the covers up over my face all the time in ICU? I reckon it wasn't like that. That's what I thought they were doing, but it must've been me. I know it was me. A lot of the time I was lying there with my eyes wide open and I'd be hearing things, but I couldn't see anything. It wasn't blackness though, and it wasn't white. It was just being, I suppose, and then I'd drop right back into nothing for a while. Rainbow probably told me how I was drifting in and out and I just know the rest. I wonder when I realized it?  I can't remember -

I remember the Birds though. That's strange - I don't remember them like in remembering what they looked like. I don't remember ever actually seeing them, but somehow I know they were a mask and tubes or something and they made me breathe something for my throat or lungs or something. Nurse must've told me, or Rainbow, because I'm certain they weren't a dream. I think they weren't, anyway...

May 2, 1967 - Mt Goldsworthy, Western Australia
I’m working at Mt Goldworthy, near Port Hedland in the Pilbara. It’s an open-cut mine, the inside of a hill, a hill of iron-ore, red iron-ore. They call it a mountain up here. I'm the lowly battery attendant. Its not hard work, in fact it's a bludge most of the time. My vehicle's the mine's only Moke. They've got plenty of huge machinery - Haulpaks and scrapers, buckets and dozers, locomotives and mile-long trains, and they've got tray trucks and Landrovers, cars and trucks and God knows what else, but there's just this one tiny Mini Moke. I zap around the mine during the day, a battery or two and a few tools and water and stuff in the back, and I check, repair and replace batteries, and I feel so absurdly tiny. Everything else is so big - big, bigger, and huge.

I'm only the battery attendant, but I wouldn't change my job for anything. I get to zap around, as I just said, in this great little Moke all day; I have very little to do; and I'm practically my own boss.

When I was being employed I admitted that I didn't have an endorsed license for trucks and heavy machinery and stuff. I didn't have a license at all, thanks to the courts back home, but I saw no reason to tell them that. My license in Victoria’s still suspended, but when I did the truck driving test here the cops issued me one without even checking.
  
I didn't have a license, but now I've got one endorsed for all sort of trucks and heavy machinery, and all because of call outs. Most of the bosses only do dayshift, so the night-shift guys call me out of my bed to fix a battery and while I’m up they teach me to drive anything I want. As far as base salaries go mine isn’t the best, but three or four nights a week I'm called out to get something or other started and each call out is worth three hours extra pay. I'm called out even more than that when my roommate's on Nights, because he and his mates put in bogus calls for me.

Some nights like tonight I park my Moke at the top of the mine, just to watch the truly wondrous scene down below. (It's just gone three in the morning, so it's the third now, May the third, my birthday. My 21st birthday. What a great place to spend your twenty first. Yeah, sure, Danny.)

From up here everything looks small down there in the mine. Everything looks small and reasonable, but it's not like that by a long shot. Hundred tonne Haulpaks loaded with another hundred tonnes of ore labour up a zigzag road level by level to the top of the mine. Once there they barrel along a wide flat road to the crusher - the dust-hidden ore crusher hidden with red iron-ore dust. Haulpak drivers throw caution to the wind on this road, frantic as they are in their attempts to shift the most ore. Heaven help any mere mortal in their path.  

The road has a steep slope down from its edge, a slope of about fifty degrees, and it drops from one level of the zigzag to the next to get down to where the ore is. At the top it runs around the top of the mine to get to the crusher. A grader keeps it flat, smooth and wide - wide enough for two hurtling Haulpaks to pass each other safely.

It's not really flat. There's a gradual dip near one end, but loaded Haulpaks can still reach about one hundred km/h on it. I know one hundred's not an earth-shattering speed, but if a Haulpak loaded with its hundred tonnes of ore hit a brick house at a hundred it'd probably still be doing eighty five out the other side.  

I'm still parked at the top of the mine watching the scene down below. I better get back to my bed soon, because I've got to start work in about four hours. Down there in the mine there are a few electric lights dimmed by reddish iron-ore dust and surrounded by unfathomable blackness. It's like the whole world's contracted to the one spooky red-pink glow. In that hazy glow I can make out men the size of ants and monolithic earth-moving machines - but somehow the confining glow and the haziness make everything seem peaceful. It's all roaring, moving activity and here am I saying it's peaceful! Restful, maybe - to the remote observer like me, that is.

Times like this when I get that really peaceful feeling about this place I wish something would happen to break the peace, to liven things up briefly. I mean, look at the life I lead - work six days a week, a run in the scrub and the heat most Sundays to stay a bit fit, and the odd run after work, a beer or two every other day and pissed out of my mind Saturday nights. It's not a very exciting life, just a way to make big money fast.

Ah, well - back to bed. There's a Haulpak nearly out of the mine. I'll just wait till it's gone past - I'm a bit wary of those big buggers, especially at night. The weather's beautiful in the north-west most of the time - clear, blue, sunny, stinking hot days, but it's that good dry heat. It hasn't even looked like rain in my five months here so I never have the canvas hood on the Moke up. That means its bonnet/motor cover is its highest part, except for the small windscreen, and the bonnet's just over half a metre off the ground. Half a metre, with my head and shoulders above that, but the drivers of those roaring ore-carrying monsters are about five metres up. Their massive wheels are three times as high as the Moke, nearly as wide as it is, and each one weighs twice as much. The drivers could easily not see me and that'd be curtains for me. Can you blame me for being a bit wary?

There goes that monster past me, climbing through its umpteen gears to top speed, but still I look hard in both directions first. I've nearly been run over by a Haulpak before, and all because I didn't look both ways and more, like when we were kids. All clear? I'm off, home to bed, and- Christ! A frigging great Goliath's erupting out of that dip in the road! God Almighty!

I crash my foot down hard on the accelerator. Hard? I just about smash it through the floor. Mokes aren't all that great from a standing start, but I've got the motor straining its guts like never before. This definitely isn't fair - a tiny vehicle with a nine hundred and eighty seven cubic centimetre motor trying to get away from an enormous monster with an engine about seventeen thousand times as big, and Monster's flying up behind me at the speed of sound!

Nine hundred and eighty seven cc? See that litre milk carton on your kitchen table? Well, a litre is a thousand cc, so I'm trying to escape death and I haven't even got a litre of milk under the bonnet.

Seven km/h - eight - nine - ten -
Monster's looming larger and larger in the mirror. If ever I'm going to let prayer feature in my life now is the time. 
Thirteen - fourteen - fifteen - sixteen -
Terrified white knuckles tight on the steering wheel, heart crashing in my ears and Monster's blaring air-horns reverberating in my head.
Seventeen - eighteen -
Why's that mongrel driver doing this to me? Why doesn't he just pull up? He can't just pull up, that's why. No brakes on earth could make a fully laden Haulpak stop suddenly from that speed. 
Twenty -
There's no time for prayer. It looks very much like I won't get to spend eternity playing a harp -
Twenty one -

I wrench the wheel violently, slewing over the edge of the road, with Monster like an express train missing me by a hair's breadth. I aim the Moke directly down the steep drop to prevent it rolling over and I stand on the brakes with all my weight.
Twenty one - twenty - fifteen -
Stop, you little bastard -
Eleven - seven -

It slithers to a stop a fraction before its bumper bar gouges the zigzag road on the level below. I'm shaking uncontrollably, my heart crashing against my rib cage. I'm deathly pale, but I feel so - so - so - so alive!

To reinterate ... I'm a mute quad confined to an electric wheelchair. I live alone in my own home in Castlemaine, near Bendigo in country Victoria, Australia. Carers come in morning, noon, night and nighty-night for just an hour at a time to do the basics for me. For the rest of the time I'm alone here, except for my German Shepherd dog. (Hmmmm, what else could a German Shepherd be if not a dog, Danny?)

I adopted him early this year through the German Shepherd club's rehoming service. His owners were moving overseas. He's six years old and his name is Bruno. It's an appropriate name. He's big, bigger than that, and he looks and sounds VERY SCARY. But he's ever so friendly and he loves me. I must remember to get Jez to bring her camera and take some shots of him when she comes for her weekly access time tomorrow.

Jez, Jezabel, is my twelve year old, the youngest of my three daughters. Gemma and Bedou are well-and-truly grown up - thirty one and twenty nine.

Today is not a good day. Actually it's only half a day for me because I had to lie in bed until the lunchtime carer arrived. Every now and then a carer will forget it's her shift. I'm not rapt when this happens, but I don't make a big deal of it. It's not intentional on their part and it doesn't happen often.

The morning 'girl' didn't turn up today, so the lunch carer had to get me up, dressed and breakfasted. By the time I'd had a cough-laden morning drink and toast there was no time for the bathroom, let alone whatever I would've had done during a normal lunch shift.

Today is not a good day, and that's because lying down for that long makes me 'chesty' - phlemy. The moment the carer got me vertical, sitting in my wheelchair, I began coughing and spluttering. It settled down a lot after a quarter of an hour, but every mouthful of drink set me off again. The toast too.

It's two hours later and I'm still not a hundred percent. I should have just given up on breakfast, but last night I missed out on most of tea and nothing to drink. You see, it was a new carer for tea and things didn't go too well. She won't be so nervous tonight, though. 

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
March 20, 1984 - Prince Henry's Hospital, Melbourne, Victoria  
I think Innocent's talking to me. I think she's been talking on and on in that innocent voice I'd know anywhere - it's so open, so trusting, but I can't remember anything she's told me. I think she said she got a plane home from England, a twenty four-hour flight or twenty-six maybe. I can't remember. I think she said she flew home as soon as Mum rang and told her, except first she went to the bank to borrow the airfare - I can remember that -

I can hear her talking from down near my feet, but I can't see her. They're got the bed covers pulled up over my head. It's always like this, but I don't know why.

Innocent's saying I'm in ICU, the Intensive Care Unit. I think I knew I'm in a hospital - I think. She's saying she's been coming in every morning and she's going back to England on Saturday, whenever that is. She's saying she hands over to Rainbow about lunchtime, and Rainbow stays until five and Mum comes in after dinner.
-

Innocent must be gone, because I haven't heard her talking a while now. At least I can't remember if I have, but I can hear the nurse. I can't see her - the covers are still right up over me for some reason - but I can hear her English voice and her personal way of talking with me.

Talking with me `cept I don't talk. She talks non-stop when she's making my bed and stuff, talking away as if I'm looking at her and she can tell I'm interested. But how could I be looking at her from under here, and how could she tell if I'm interested under here? I don't think I've even got my eyes open - Actually, it's funny under here - I can't see darkness like from a blanket that's up over my face and I can't see lightness like through a sheet. I can't see anything; but then again I can't not see anything. I don't know - I just don't know -

I can't remember seeing anything here in ICU, but I know exactly what Nurse looks like, sort of. I think she's got reddish hair. And I know exactly what this large white room looks like, sort of. I think there's just my bed in it, no one else and a desk way down the end where Nurse writes stuff. I don't know how I know I'm in a hospital - I just know, like I've always known.
-

There's 2 hefty policewomen kneeling on the shiny creamy linoleum squares right in the corner of a bare hospital room. I don't know what makes me think it's a hospital - I just know it is. They're holding down a slight man in track shoes and jeans, and he's bare-chested and struggling like hell.
and he's coughing,
and he's choking,
and he's coughing fit to die.

There's a big butcher kneeling on his chest and he's trying to ram a bloody big bolt or spike or God-knows-what into his throat. There's blood everywhere. He's ramming it downwards from below the slight man's Adam's Apple - from the bottom of his neck.

I can see the slight man better now and I see he's me. I can hear his coughing, coughing, coughing coming from me and I'm jerking up off the bed with every cough - jerking up close to the butcher's face.
-

Nurse's talking while she washes me all over, uncovering me a bit at a time. Her hair's more auburn than red and she's got a watch pinned on upside-down, so she can look down near her left breast to read it, I suppose, but she's moving too much for me to focus its hands. She's pointing at the big fan near the bed and she's talking away in her English accent, but all the time she's busy washing my bare chest.

‘We have that fan going every night, because you burn up even with no pyjamas and you never have more than a sheet on you. It's freezing in here, but you still soak the sheets, soak them with perspiration. The stroke threw your temperature control out badly, badly, but that should settle down in time.’

She's washing further down now and she's saying I might think things are weird at times, because I'm still on a morphine drip. It's not as strong as at first, but it might make me imagine things.

She's saying it makes me see things different to what they really are and it makes me just drift off - like when they were doing the tracheotomy, when they were putting the trache tube in my throat for my breathing. She could see there was panic and fear in my eyes, but the doctor said I was probably hallucinating. I don't know about that, though. I mean, how - how could she see what's in my eyes with the covers right up over me all the time?

 She's not right about things getting weird though. I don't know why things are happening sometimes, but I just can't remember to think about it. I can still hear her, but I can't see her any more. The covers -

March 24, 1984 - PHH, Melbourne
I never remember to think why, but I never speak to anyone any more, not even to Rainbow. People speak to me, people like Rainbow and Nurse and Mum and everyone, but it's like they don't expect me to speak to them. Like they don't expect me to answer, I suppose. I've never thought about that before -

Why do they do this to me? Why do they stop me seeing anything? I'm lying here with the covers right up over my face like always and I'm thinking - I can't remember. I mean, I can't remember if I was thinking. I can't remember before right now -

They've got me sitting badly-slumped on a low couch so I'm mostly lying down, and they're got something they call the Birds on my face and over my mouth. I'm breathing in hot mustardy air.
I don't know what the Birds are and I don't know why they do it. I can hear them doing it, but I've never seen it because they always have something covering my face. Right up over my eyes.

It's hot and dark in here and the Birds are hissing and they're making me breathe hot air and it tastes horrible. Won’t this ever end? - Why do they do this to me???  

I can’t remember much, but I can remember one thing. Nurse had to take the afternoon off yesterday to go to the dentist. I think it was yesterday - I can’t remember. Anyway, when Nurse took that time off, whenever it was, they got an agency nurse in to take her place. They had the covers up over me at the time, but Nurse introduced the agency nurse to me and he asked how I was feeling and stuff like that just like I wasn’t under the covers.
 ‘I’ll leave you two, then’ Nurse said to us.
An odd thing happened after she left. The agency nurse had been talking to me like a house on fire, but then he just stopped dead.
 ‘Ahhh, this is garbage’ he blurted out. ‘Talk to him like normal, she said. You never know, he might just be hearing you, she said  A brass band could be playing in your ear and you wouldn’t hear it. You can’t hear anything.’

Of course I can hear. They’ve got the covers up, but I can still hear under here.
 ‘It’s karma, you know. You must’ve done something awful in a past life to deserve this.’
To deserve what? I know I’m in hospital, but I don’t know why. It’s not like I’m hurt or in pain or anything. I can’t see what’s wrong with me from under here. Nurse might’ve told me, but I can’t remember -
 ‘God, if you could only see yourself. You look like death warmed up.’
How could he see what I looked like under here??
 ‘You’re being kept alive by machines.’ he said. ‘No-one would want to live like this. I wish I could switch them off for you and let you just drift away.’

Machines are keeping me alive?? Why? Why do I need machines? What’s wrong with me???
He said no-one would want to live like this, but it’s OK for me under here. I wish they’d take the covers off and let me see things more often, but - but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to live. How could anyone not want to live?? Sure, if they’re seventy five and screaming with pain and dying of cancer, but otherwise how could anyone not want to live? I want - I want to - I can’t remember -
-

It's Hand Over out there. The whole place goes quiet except for the murmur of the nurses' meeting. Nurse told me that at the end of every shift all the nurses get together and tell the new shift what's going on. Things like ‘Mrs. Harris keeps giving herself manual enemas’, and ‘Mr Ross won't stop playing with himself’’. Some medical stuff, too.

It's Hand Over to the night shift and I always hate it from now on. I try and try to stay awake, but by now it's dead quiet out there and soon I forget to try and then I'm asleep. I always wake up just before they come for me, though.

They try to kill me all night every night, but so far I always make it to morning, and then Nurse is back, or the other dayshift girl. I always mean to tell them about it, but they're too busy to talk early on and then I don't remember about it until nighttime again like now. The night shift here are really killers in nurses' uniforms. But they're smart and they never get caught, because they make them all look like natural deaths for hospital patients.

They're here! There's one of them at the foot of the bed kicking the brakes off and the other's doing the same behind my head. There are always two of them. They don't say anything, never do.

They're wheeling my bed out of my dark room, along the dim corridor and straight into the waiting lift. Now they'll take me down to hell. They press B for basement, but we keep going for ages to hell. They push my bed out of the dim lift into the extraordinary brightness and the extraordinary heat and the extraordinary silence.

I can't bear to open my eyes more than a blink or two yet, but I remember now what it looks like. It's a wide wide room that stretches forever with beds packed as far as the eye can see. There's lots of pipes overhead like in a basement, but there's never been this many pipes. They're all shapes and sizes, some are wrapped and some are bare and they're all going everywhere. There are two huge furnaces side by side with a space between them, and there are two huge black men with loincloths and huge shovels for the huge piles of coal. The white killers leave without a word as the loincloths push me close to the furnaces.

It's hot and silent in here. So hot the sweat's already dripping off me and so silent I can hear the drips from my neck hit the bed beneath it, but the other patients are sitting up happy, wrapped up in blankets, scarves, beanies and gloves. They're happily drinking hot coffee and reading papers while I'm dying under here.

Someone must've pulled my covers right up over my face again. There's no light and there's no darkness - it's just not-light and not-darkness.

April 1, 1984 - PHH, Melbourne 
I'm still in the ICU where Nurse is. I know its called ICU, because she told me so,. I think she said I've been here three weeks.

I can see Rainbow coming in the door out of the corner of my eye. I wish I could at least move my head so I could look around sometimes, but Nurse told me I can't even make my eyelids blink - or maybe Rainbow did. I can't remember who it was. I can only look at the things directly in front of me like down the end of the bed and the desk, which is really a small table.

I can hear Nurse telling Rainbow I'm being moved to the Neurology Ward tomorrow. She told me too, just before Rainbow got here. Before? Before! I just remembered `before' - I can remember Before!)