Danny Furlong
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Post twenty six

18/7/2014

2 Comments

 
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do - Isaac Asminov

    It's going on three months since my last post. Three months of stuff to do with writing, and many a game of Solitare to put off doing things like this blog. The big thing in my life is that I've published Ellydd Gate online, both as a hardcopy paperback and as an ebook for all sorts of devices. Check it out on my writer's page at www.dannyfurlong.com. 
    Publishing it wasn't simple. There was a cover to design and have made by someone proficient in Photoshop, ISBNs to learn about and purchase, book proofs to check, and a seemingly endless number of corrections of things that I'd forgotten to do - like forgetting to credit my editor on the frontspiece of the book.
   The even bigger thing in my life is that concurrent with publishing Ellydd Gate I did the same with my autobiography, Flipside. It too is online as
a hardcopy paperback and as an ebook. Check it out also at www.dannyfurlong.com.
    I wrote it and got it ready for publishing about ten years ago. I've been adding bits to it on and off for the last twelve months. Seeing I had to do all that stuff getting Ellydd Gate online it wasn't all that much more trouble to get Flipside online at the same time.
    And once I'd put those two books out there I had Gemma quite sensibly hassling me to market them. This is a problem for me and many an author. Writing is our thing. We begrudge having to spend time marketing our books, trying to get them to sell. I know I'm not doing anywhere near enough work in that area. I put it off and put it off, but every now and then I make a token effort.     One afternoon I put together a publicity letter for newspapers. It begins with 'Hi. I’m Danny Furlong. I’m hoping for publicity for two books I’ve recently published onlie. My somewhat unordinary circumstances would make for an interesting article, so I’m also hoping you will see this as a win/win situation.' After that introduction I actually write the article, in the third person about Danny Furlong past and present -  so that the paper can lift all or parts of it. I figure the easier I made it for them the more likely are they to do it.
    I sent it to our local paper and they did a small article. I sent it to the Bendigo Advertiser (Bendigo - the closest big town, population 60,000) They sent a reporter with a photographer to see me and ran a double-page feature article. An article that ended with my web address printed wrongly. Luckily they added the Amazon web address for my books. A big feature article sounds good, but all that resulted from it was one paperback sale and a few ebooks.
    I've only sent it to two papers so far. Now that I'm talking about it I'll try another paper or two this weekend. Maybe a city paper.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 

Granny Thomas Gully, Campbells Creek, Victoria. 1987.
     Since early this century our town, just like most towns, has had the right attitude about its frailer elderly residents - out of sight, out of mind. The Castlemaine home and hospital was built right on the extreme edge of the town's only industrial area. Its closest neighbours are a large factory, a sprawling woollen mill, a less-than-pleasant bacon factory and the stinking abattoirs. It's perched at the very top of a piton-and-safety-rope hill about two kilometres from the town centre, so even if its aged prisoners knew how to absail they could never make the round trip to the shops. After all, Councillors wouldn't allow themselves to suffer the indignities of age and infirmity - or would they? God, I hope so.
     I attended the day hospital section specifically for rehabilitation therapies, but I got very little more in a whole week here than in any one weekday at PHH (which hadn't been all that much, anyway). I was getting nowhere very slowly so after three or four months I called it quits. I'd realized very early on that they were just giving me maintenance physio instead of putting in the time required to get me up and running again. Most of my time at the hospital was spent sitting and waiting or having lunch. I knew my days were being totally wasted, but I had one important reason for attending. It meant that I was away from home for most of the day three times a week and so Rainbow had some time to be by herself or to visit friends.
     I placed an advertisement in the local paper asking for volunteers to help me exercise at home. About fifteen people offered their services, so we organized a five-days-a-week roster whereby they each came for a separate half-day session with me about once a fortnight. Naturally they were all novices at physiotherapy, so I paid for two sessions with the new local private physio. Luckily, she had only recently gone into private practice after having been a physio at the home and hospital. We had worked together for over a month, so when I took my volunteers to her for the two-session crash course she knew exactly which exercises were appropriate for me. Physio exercises are repeated time and again, so my helpers soon became confident and combatant. The quality of my physio dropped to about eighty five percent, but the quantity jumped by eight hundred and fifty percent.
     Oops - I'm a few months ahead of myself. Rainbow and I went to a fairly quiet new year's eve party to herald in nineteen eighty five. We went to three or four parties before we moved to Melbourne in June of that year and they were all equally as much fun for me. I was never the life of any party even before my stroke, except for a few memorable drunken, stoned or sex-crazed occasions. Usually my idea of a good time at parties was to sit quietly in a corner to soak up the atmosphere and the music and to share a few joints with one or two good friends. In my younger days I'd often collar onto some stray skirt during the night, but of course I never even flirted mildly after I'd met Rainbow (???).

`And to share a few joints with one or two good friends'. How often in my lifetime has that happened to me at parties? Two, three times? The smell of dope has a strange effect on the few creepy ex-hippy guys that turn up at every party after the pubs shut. They can detect the smell from two smoke-filled rooms away and they hunt out the joint with the single-mindedness of a missionary seeking out natives to save. Sometimes just one of the creepy ex-hippies would sidle up to me and my mates - sometimes six.
     ‘Is that a joint, Dan old pal? We'll help you smoke it.’
    After my stroke things were different. I couldn't just sit unobtrusively in a corner somewhere, because a wheelchair is obtrusive. It doesn't merge into the background. It shouts: ‘Here I am! Danny's sitting in me! Remember Danny? He used to be your friend once. Of course, the stupid bastard had a stroke, which put him in hospital for nine months. Nine months in which you couldn't be bothered even sending him a card. Act as if you're still his friends and come and talk to him.’
     Maybe I'm not very nice, because I'd be happy to never see all those self-centred mongrels ever again. I didn't even want to go to the few parties we went to, but I had to make a bit of an effort for Rainbow's sake.
     The Etran board caused many problems. Although it's very simple for an initiate to use it does require practice, so for a novice it can be difficult. The difficulty isn't in recognizing each letter as I gaze at it, but in remembering those letters long enough to form words and then sentences. Most novices are so on edge that they concentrate so hard on guessing the letters that after a few words have been spelled they forget a word or two. The simple sentence ‘Wouldn't a beer be good?’ becomes ‘Would a beer be good?’ or, even worse ‘A beer wouldn't be good.’
     I'd spend ages getting someone to become comfortable with using the board then I wouldn't meet them again for months and so they'd be on tenterhooks once more - back to square one.
     For people to talk to me at parties would most often mean them holding one-sided conversations which wouldn't last long, because the pressure to fill in the frequent awkward silences would soon make them crack and find an excuse to leave me. Many people see my board as some sort of intelligence test and they often feel they're failing dismally, so they lunge at any reason to escape and to avoid any subsequent conversations with me. I don't look forward to most party chat because of the excessive effort and dissatisfaction involved on both sided, so I often subconsciously put on a stern, uncommunicative face which scares people off me.
     Have you ever been to a party where there hasn't been a party bore? Have you noticed how everyone that Bore buttonholes slides away at the first opportunity? This is normally his fate at every party, but just once in his lifetime God sees fit to give him a captive audience which surpasses his wildest dreams - me. What could be better for him than having a mute quad to bore? I couldn't interrupt with sarcastic or derogatory remarks and I couldn't escape. There's no way anyone else at the party would save me because as long as Bore had me he wouldn't annoy them.
     You're beginning to see why I didn't enjoy parties much. Add the following to those things.
     ‘Do you want a drink, Danny?’
     ‘Cant swallow thin liquids without choking.’
     ‘Have some nuts them.’
     ‘Cant chew - Ill choke.’
     ‘Try a sausage roll. The sauce will make it soggy.’
     ‘Vegetarian ten yrs.’
     I couldn't eat or drink; I couldn't have conversations or chat up women; I couldn’t the drawback to smoke dope; I couldn't mingle or dance; but I could sit - and sit - and sit.
     Before my stroke I was heavily into marijuana. Now I can no longer control my diaphragm to hold smoke in my lungs - the few times I've tried dope recently it hasn't been in my lungs long enough to enter my bloodstream, so it's been ineffective. I used to be addicted to it.
     ‘But grass isn't addictive’ all the outraged heads amongst you readers are protesting.
     Boy - have I got news for you. Before my stroke I rarely smoked on weekdays before about five or six in the afternoon, but by then I'd be hanging out for a J. If for some reason I had to go a whole day without dope my head would ache and my stomach would feel awful. Dope mightn't be physically addictive, but it sure grabs you psychologically. Maybe it doesn't get you if you're just a social smoker. I grew a lot - for personal use only, so I smoked nearly every day of the year for a few years.
     No reason was ever found for my stroke, but it wasn't caused by dope. Hard drugs like heroin and crack do that. Soft drugs like grass and Valium don't. I should have suffered withdrawals in ICU, but my very abrupt halt with grass was more than compensated for with the morphine that I was being administered. I was given morph for a week or two to block out the psychological traumas brought about by my stroke. It MAY have done that, but it gave me some very disturbing hallucinations/dreams as well. Whenever I'm around people who are smoking dope nowadays I get a slight nostalgic yearning which I rarely try to satisfy, because my new coughing and choking for so little result just isn't worthwhile.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 

June 1, 1977 - Todra high-plains, Morocco
     The Kombi's parked beside a smallish stone-fenced paddock, not a square paddock, a near-round paddock that's packed with parked donkeys. We're at a windswept village market, a weekly open-air market (souk). The village is half a day from the Berber tents - half a day for the Kombi, but maybe a week or so for the Berbers' camels.
    This souk replicates souks throughout Morocco. There are vegetables and herbs and used cloaks, jilubas and dresses in small piles on the ground. There are tethered goats and sheep for sale; tiny tented stalls of this `n that - carpets, new cloaks and jilubas, aluminium tea sets, and other stuff; two barbers under a tree; hundreds of farmers and villagers, even a few women; and two Westerners - us.
     We buy a few days' food - milled wheat for couscous, a few vegies, bread flat round and freshly-baked - and, would you believe it, we find butter. It's dolloped out onto paper from a tin under a counter. Bit dicey that, but we never see butter. I haggle for a second-hand cloak for the ever-present wind and I get it not too cheap. I get it not too cheap and now Rainbow says ‘We'll be in Marakesh tomorrow and into the desert soon after that. You won't need this then.’ She says it now, mind you, not before - she always does that.  
     I see a barber standing sheltered from the wind by a hut, and there's a straight-backed chair for his victims. It's not in the wind either. My hair blows in my eyes too much up here, so it's a haircut for me. I sit in the chair and I'm having second thoughts now I'm here. All Moroccan men have neat hair and I'm yet to see one with long hair. This barber's got short back-and-sides just like barbers back home in the Forties, and I'm offering up my shoulder-length hair on trust? No way, Hose'. I hastily mime a beard-trim and ‘don't touch the hair’ displays.
     Rainbow's at a tree waiting, no wind that side. An old man's watching her watching the barber, watching her from three metres away in the wind. He stokes his kif pipe carefully and  approaches her with it held out. They do small things like this for her, because she looks good. They do small things for her smile, for her voice, for her notice, however fleeting - they clear a path for her, dust a seat for her, charge less for her. This one's offering kif to her. Why aren't I good-looking like her? Not that I want the men's attention, but I'd go some of their women, though.
    She smiles the old man her thanks, she sucks on the pipe lightly, cautiously, she pauses, she sucks deeply, confidently, then she turns deathly pale. The top of her head lifts three feet, a metre, more, more. She's coughing, coughing, coughing. She plonks down coughing, dying, coughing, and dying. The old man retrieves his pipe from her hand and fades away, judiciously. Half an hour she's white, getting less deathly slowly.
     And me? I've got a neatly trimmed beard, hair ever so lightly trimmed, I'm wrapped warm in my cloak, and I'm glad she's the attractive one.


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Post twenty five

25/4/2014

1 Comment

 
You only live once, but if you do it right once is enough - Mae West

I said in the last post that I'd talk about the problems my lack of speech causes, but I really don't want to at present. It's THE most negative part of my situation, and I'm averse to talking about negatives. I reckon this mute quad business could possibly get me down if I dwelt on the negatives. I've got through thirty years of quadriplegia by being superficial about it, by not often going to too deep into its shitty side. Let's keep it that way for now.

My writing ... Ellydd Gate is all finished and just awaiting some fiddling of the cover design for the web sites. I'm back into going through Book 2, Arathae, for one last time before I send it off for editing. I'll probably stretch it out for months and while I'm working on it I'll probably avoid pushing Ellydd Gate out of the nest. I hope that's not the case.

I'm up in the air right now about this writing-versus-publishing conundrum. I think I'll give this blog a miss for the foreseeable future and concentrate on the books, whatever I decide to do with them.

See ya!

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 
Granny Thomas Gully, Campbells Creek, Victoria. 1987.      
     I'd come home from Bendigo Home and Hospital for the Aged about a month before Christmas, so once the festive season had passed I began attending the local home and hospital for the Aged for physical therapy. As was the case at my two previous hospitals, the staff there spared no expense on me. Two of their social workers and two of their occupational therapists visited me at home regularly to ensure that I had no problems. Of course I had problems, but they were my problem. My major problem with these people was convincing them that I had no major problems that I wanted them to tackle.    
     My therapists didn't take long to realize that I was trying fiercely to retain and extend my limited independence, and they actively encouraged my willingness to try nearly anything to improve my lot. Those staff who weren't regularly involved in my rehabilitation, including many nurses, were hard pressed to believe that I didn't need or want anything remotely like full-time baby-sitting. Often they'd see me as a poor defenseless quad who needed coddling, whereas I saw me as sort of invincible. Expert doctors had once written me off as a hopeless terminal case, but I'd survived. I was confident that I would only get better at my new life as time went on.
    I'm sure I've never come across any hospital therapists who weren't expert at their job and totally committed to it. It was quite understandable that I'd try to buck the odds to improve myself. In fact I believe this must be the most common course of action for quads. Quadriplegia is the pits. It's a lousy way to live. It’s shithouse. I can't imagine any quads not trying to make their situation better. Of course, I've got it easy. Twenty years of training as a distance runner shows I get a perverse pleasure from having done hard work. Also, I'm a typical determined, stubborn, pig-headed Taurus. I had every reason in the world to try, but not so my therapists. The task of rehabilitating me must have seemed impossible to them, yet day after day they tried as hard as they could.
     My stroke left me totally immobile below my neck, but Physio and OT and time all contributed to my minor but obvious physical improvement. Over time various physiotherapists and occupational therapists could take slight heart from my gains, but my three successive speech therapists have always been well and truly behind the eight ball with me. From day one until day seven hundred and thirty three or whatever it is now my vocal improvement has been absolutely nil. At each hospital the relevant speechy handled my Etran board well. Their regular work with non-talkers made them sensitive to my need to communicate, so they'd take time to talk with me.

‘I've been looking up the medical journals, Danny, but I could only find seven other cases of locked-in syndrome (LIS). In every case they died within two years.’
    This is a misleading fact. LIS sufferers are usually elderly and frail, so the stroke itself and the completely isolated non-life it causes makes most sufferers peg out fairly soon. Prince Henry's had more comprehensive files than BHHA so Physio found fifty documented cases worldwide. Not one recovered fully. Rather than faze me my odds of recovery gave me more motivation to try. I used to prefer to win races from way behind, because it looked good. The idea of beating these insurmountable odds appealed to me.
     ‘Does it ever depress you, Danny?’
     Of course it does - I'm not stupid. In some ways I'm lucky. Unlike most people, I've got the chance to really try to make something of my life. God - this sounds a bit heroic, admirable. I'm not like that at all. All I'm doing is trying to make my unfortunate situation better. There are a lot of quads who exist in pain or depression or misery and have literally no way to improve their lot. Many are unable to do anything about this, but a lucky few find some way to end the agony by killing themselves. At the other end of the scale are some even luckier quads like me. Our particular situations or our inherited mental make up let's us feel hope. I may never improve much, but I can still be seen as having been extra lucky to have always been sustained by hope.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 

May 31, 1977 - Todra high-plains, Morocco

    We're not the Marakesh express travelling non-stop and straight. We're wandering to Marakesh, stopping often and detouring at fancy. We detour off the direct bitumen onto unsealed roads and back roads and tracks. The sign ahead is pointing to the left - `Gorge de Todra 20 Km.’ Rainbow checks the Michelin's and it says, in a mappish voice - ‘North up gorge de Todra for maybe twenty kilometres, forty kilometres of dirt road west to gorge de Dada, then south down Dada to the Marakesh bitumen once more.’
    We drive twenty narrow kilometres to a stony car park and a kiosk. There's a tour coach with Morocco plates and four cars with Morocco plates in the car park, and the kiosk's any kiosk anywhere. Through the wide windows we can see tourists and souvenirs and postcards and tables and stuff. We don't go in.
    The attraction's a two metre wide crack in a rock-face and the wider gorge beyond. The crack's fifty metres long, fifty high, with a hard-packed gravel base, a road. The Kombi fits, but the tour coach wouldn't. The gorge's ten metres wide, sometimes twenty, with a gravel track/road beside a dry river. There's fordings a-plenty, but no bridges - and no tourists - no cars all day from the rock gap.
    Gorge Todra wanders roughly north south. It's a fissure in a windswept flatness, in a flat high plain with springy grass tufts. The windswept flatness is fifty metres above us, sometimes a hundred. There's no wind in the gorge, and it's warm to hot down here today. The gorge runs northwards for ten kilometres or twenty or more then it fades up to the plain overhead to become a windswept flatness, a high-plain with springy tufty grass, grey-green and springy - the kind of grass that launches hares from bound to bound.
    The high plains are edged with far-off snow-capped mountains, indistinct grey-blue mountains with a white topline and high in the sky above them I imagine I can see gliding eagles that press the mountain air to earth. There's always a cold wind up here, I reckon. It just looks like that sort of place.There's a shepherd far-off with his flock and soon there's a second flock closer with a second shepherd. Flock? Sort of. It's a herd of goats and two hobbled camels.
    There are low hills ahead with two low tents snuggled against them, snuggled against the leeward side, out of the cold wind. Two large dark tents, low and sweepingly romantic - heavy, dark, woven camelhair tents hugging the ground with the wind flowing over their low-slung shapes. They're an excuse to stop early.
    We camp the Kombi windward of the hills in a gully with the cold wind just sweeping the roof. Soon there's cautious approachings from the tents and not so cautious approachings from our Kombi. The approachings meet halfway. Two young Berber women sit amongst the springy grass tufts with us - they're attractive with multi-coloured colourful clothing and shy white smiles. They giggle shyly, blue tattoo lines on their faces, not very many lines though. Berbers.
    There's a two-year-old girl too. Same clothing, same shy smile. She's got no blue lines on her face, but she's a Berber still. She giggles shyly and an older woman joins us from the tents - wrinkles and many more blue tattoos, faded. The kid's Nana? They speak no English, no French. Our Arabic's just single words, but today very few of our few Arabic words are understood. It dawns on us slowly that there must be a Berber dialect of Arabic or something like that. Spoken language is no barrier to communication though. Body language, hands, expressions, voice tones, ground-scratched drawings, exclamations, claps, smiles, laughs - all these things can say volumes.
    The two shepherds are the young women's husbands, and the two families are semi-nomadic - they leave the high plain each year when the snows and sleet arrive.Names, ages, diet, herd numbers - such things are easily asked and understood.We're man and wife and we're trying hard for children - which are both lies to please them. We're English, seeing they have no knowledge of Australia's existence.
    Yes, we'll eat with them tonight when the men get home. We're students on holidays, and yes, we'll eat with them tonight when the men get home. My father's a sheep farmer, because they can't catch on to anything much from the world beyond.And yes, we'll eat with them tonight when the men get home. Rainbow's father is, would you believe it, a sheep farmer too, and yes, we'll eat with them tonight when the men get home.
    When the men get home the women make dinner and to their delight Rainbow works with them, adding fresh vegies to their months-long plain diet of wheat-and-herbs couscous and goats' milk.  



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Post twenty four

4/4/2014

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Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company - Mark Twain

    A carer takes me shopping every Thursday afternoon. It's my one and only regular outing. Every now and then I go to Melbourne and stay with Gemma or Bedou for a day or two, or Jez's Mum Esther takes me to a school function or school meeting for Jez, but these times aren't that frequent. During shopping afternoons we do my weekly shopping and sit and have a coffee until it's time to pick Jez up from school. She comes home with me until after dinner, then my dinnertime carer runs her home.
    I lived in a unit in Castlemaine about a dozen years ago and became friends with Pat - an older woman from directly across the road. In those days I had enough movement in my hand and arm to peck out messages on a Lightwriter laptop communicator, so I could converse/argue/talk in a slow fashion.
    I've kepr contact with Pat ever since that time, always getting her a Christmas present and taking her for coffee a couple of times a year. She is very, um, forthright and forceful with her opinions. Some of the things she says beg
a reply/rebuttal/retort, but nowadays I often have to sit there and say nothing. Pat is now in her eighties and can't /won't use my Etran board, so when I want to speak to her I have to go through the carer. I used to have a carer who was as fluent with the board as my daughters, so I could say full sentences quite quickly, relatively. My present shopping carer is new and is still grappling with the board. In the hour or two that we were with Pat on Thursday I only tried addressing her remarks half a dozen times, but probably four of those times ended with me giving up after a few words because the carer couldn't get it right.
    I'm not blaming the carer. Fluency with the Etran board takes a lot of time and practice. I'm definitely not blaming the carer, but by God it's so frustrating not being able to say even the simplest thing. Even more frustrating with someone like Pat. I value her friendship but know I'm not doing my share - not engaging her in the manner that made me her friend in the first place.
    Difficulties with communication have ready fucked up my life, but that's a big topic. One I'll leave for my next blog post.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 
Granny Thomas Gully, Campbells Creek. 1987.
    Rainbow and I have a friend called Flute Earth. She is a poet and an adventuress. She was about to work as a cook on an ocean-going trawler and intended following that with six or seven months travelling through Chile. She said she had no immediate use for her super-dooper electric typewriter and she gave it to me. Our house wasn't connected to the electricity grid, but we worked out a way to run the typewriter from the car battery with no adverse effect on the car.
    Actually, I saw through Flute's little ruse. Her typewriter was small and flat and also ran off torch batteries, so it was ideal for her back-pack and rolling decks and for remote South American villages. She was just trying to cover up for being a good guy. She saw how great my need was, so she put a casual friend before herself. That typewriter has been my main lifeline ever since. I'm using it now. It types without a ribbon; it's computer compatible; it plays three octaves of musical notes; and it can type in either English or Japanese. I'm sure that if I knew the correct combination of keys to press it'd jump right off my desk to dance the Pride of Erin.
     This gift was - is - just about the best thing which has ever happened to me. I could write Rainbow long notes with it, so she could read them at her leisure without having to work with my board, and could then answer me as she went about her daily tasks. This wasn't ideal, as it still meant delayed conversations drawn out into bursts over many hours, but at least it meant I got to say things fully and got to say them the same day I thought of them. I'd been cut off from any real communication with the whole world out there for twelve months - except for maybe a dozen slowly dictated very short letters - so now I began to make up for that with a vengeance by typing reams of looooooooooog letters.
     Of course nothing came as easily as it sounds for me at that time. My typing was a veeeery slow, error prone and painstaking procedure. I didn't have the use of my shoulder muscles or my arm muscles to lift my arm, so my elbow was supported by a sling attached to the ceiling by a spring. I'd type with the side of one finger of my left hand. I'd swing my left arm over the keyboard to select keys ever-so-slowly at first, but after a year or two of practice I could type without the sling. Initially, a reasonably-sized letter would take me all day to type, whereas after six or seven months I could whip out such a letter in less than half a day.

Not long after this we bought a cheap ‘communicator’ from Dick Smith Electronics for one hundred dollars. It was really just a businessman's pocket machine for printing office memos on the paper shops print receipts on. It made the Etran board redundant, but my typing speed with it was so slow that I'd generally confine my everyday remarks to as few words as possible. The communicator freed me to talk more, as it didn't require the person to whom I was talking to have any special ability, except the ability to read. I used to be virtually at a loss for words with most people as they weren't, um, very fluent with my board. Even when I got my little communicator I still needed to use the typewriter to give detailed explanations of my thoughts. The typewriter is also the means of expression of my active imagination, allowing me to pour out children's fiction stories and the odd adult short story.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 
May 17, 1977 - Ketama, Morocco
That lie about buying kilos later on is all that gets us driving now, driving on for Fez, but there's a bit more sales talk first and a bit more hashish smoking. We're pretty well hashed out by the time we finally start driving, so we stop after just ten kilometres even though it's not midday yet - stop, camp, and get straight for travelling. We're nine thousand miles from home and everything's too different to miss from too much dope. By tomorrow we'll be clear-headed again and all seeing.
    We're camped at a bubbly stream, a shallow creek at the bottom of a steep rocky hill with a stone farmhouse small near the top. Watery coolness midst the rocky heat down here and up there there’s not even any water by the look of it. There's a donkey labouring up the steepness to the farmhouse. There's a man and a boy aboard it and there's another beast of burden trudging behind it. That second beast of burden's got a huge bundle of firewood on its back and a baby slung on breast - it's the everyday beast of burden in Morocco and many other Moslem countries, it's the man's wife.
    Wives here scour countrywide for branches and sticks for half every day, more sometime. It’s their firewood for cooking, - flat arid country, rocky. Then they trudge the homeward miles laden in the relentless sun, laden with their burdens like beasts of burden.
May 24, 1977 - Fez, Morocco
    Fez's really two towns hard up against each other. There's new Fez which is just any modern city and there's old Fez which is a very old walled town gradually being surrounded by new Fez. Old? It's ancient. Ancient and teeming, with its rabbit warren Medina teeming merchants and craftsmen and traders and the buying public. There's narrow cobbled alleys dim with no cars, no wheeled vehicles at all; tiny shops and stalls; pushy Arab merchants and hawkers, camelhair blankets hawked in the `streets'; and chi. There's chi shops with kif smoke in the air, kif's that weakish grass mix Ahmed told us about, that weakish grass mix that keeps you toking all day. There's spivy youths hawking hash sneakily, and there's the odd donkey.
     A laden donkey slips on wet cobbles and it falls - flailing hooves and legs, load too heavy for it to regain its feet. An interested crowd gathers to watch silently while the owner beats the struggling animal - dare I say mercilessly? It's struggling to rise from the thick staff beating and it eventually makes it to its feet to stay alive.
It's a donkey's life in Fez medina.

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Post twenty three

28/3/2014

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The thing to do is enjoy the ride while you're on it - Johnny Depp.
Autumn in Castlemaine - generally the days are clear, sunny, warm and the nights are crisp. Lovely.

My recent bad experiences with service providers pushed me towards self-managing my care. We, my carers and I, have been going it alone for two weeks now and are getting along fine without a service provider. Better than fine. The two 'old' carers who came with me have both said they're happier this way and that I should have made the move long ago.
I began training the first of the three new carers needed to make a full team about a month ago and am presently getting the third of them up to speed. Once these newies are settled in life (carer life) should be easier and less hassle for us all.

Two or three months ago I sent Ellydd Gate, the first book of my Drinsighe fantasy adventure trilogy, to Gemma for the final, quick proof-read. Naturally I hoped uo get it back in no time at all. Yesterday Gemma emailed that she would be finished by Monday. Thank goodness, because I want to get it to the publisher as the first step to getting it out of my life. I'm so over it.
In fact I'm over the whole trilogy. I'm meant to be doing changes to the second book, Arathae, to get it ready for editing, but I keep putting it off. I've always written because I've enjoyed the creative process, but I've let Drinsighe drag on for so long it's become an unentertaining chore. I open the Arathae.doc file every morning intending to work on it then I usually squander the day playing solitare instead. Today? At present I've got good intentions, but ...
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Ever since my stroke it's bugged me that a few people treat me as a mental defective and that a considerable number act as if I'm simply not present. Whenever someone came to see me, both in hospital or at home, Rainbow would stress that even though I could no longer talk I could hear and think quite normally and I could communicate slowly. Nonetheless some people would look at her exclusively and ask about me and my wishes as if I weren't there.
‘Do you think Danny wants some of this?’
Time and again she'd have to remind them ‘Danny can answer for himself - ask him.’
I remember an ambulance officer and an elderly nurse who each used a ‘There, there, little boy’ tone and attitude with me and shouted slowly and clearly something like:
‘Sun nice. Want drink?’
Nowadays I have a communicator so when these sort of people surface I type very politely ‘Get stuffed.’
That condescending sort of thing has all but stopped now that I look more alert and with it, but the problem of people addressing my helper instead of me still hasn't abated. Until I learned to actively project my presence some people ignored me a lot.

On many occasions in PHH nurses would help each other with the hospital trick of making beds with bedridden patients lying in them. I'd lie in bed while two bed-making nurses rolled me back and forth and chatted openly to each other about their sex lives and proclivities and the bowel performances of every patient on the ward. Replacing the bottom sheet requires considerable handling of the patient, but as I couldn't talk they acted as if I couldn't hear - or, worse, as if I didn't matter.

There have been a few times when my present difficulties and the forty years of difficulties that lie ahead have so depressed me that I've wished my stroke had clobbered my mind as well as my body. If this'd happened I'd be in some happy little world of my own, oblivious to just how badly off I am. Of course, at these times my cursed never-say-die attitude would surface and I'd restart the daily battle. I say cursed because if it weren't for that attitude I could give in and lie back and I'd have my every bodily need catered for. Pity there's more to life than just bodily needs, isn't it?

Before I left BHHA one negative older nursing sister said to me: ‘You'll find it's hell at home and you'll be back here within six months.’ She was half-right - it was hell, at first. As I couldn't move the manual chair I had then I'd bake in the sun or freeze in the shade.  Mossies, flies and ants had a field day with me. I'd get the urge to pee so badly sometimes while Rainbow was out shopping that I'd wet myself - it was hell, but there was no way I was going to voluntarily go back to prison.

For the first few months it was hell, but the only one who can be partly blamed for that was me. What quad in his right mind would live in the isolation of the bush in rather basic conditions with just his grossly overworked wife to give him assistance? What mute quad in his right mind would choose to be left for hours well away from the house in a manual wheelchair? There wasn't any way I could attract attention when I needed help. When I finally got an electric wheelchair this problem was overcome as I could drive back to the garage and repeatedly run into the shut door until I attracted Rainbow's attention.

In hospital there was usually a charge sister with four more nurses under her control. All of them were well paid to do nothing but care for the ward's patients. While existing on my invalid pension, Rainbow had to do every bit of the seemingly endless work involved in caring single-handed for all of our family under less than ideal conditions. It's obvious I was expecting too much of her, as those pressures and the workload contributed to our eventual break-up. I'd been used to our pre-stroke GTG lifestyle and I'd loved it. Timing. Two years later I would've been more amenable to renting an `all modern conveniences' house in town to make our life so much easier, but back then I needed GTG. I had been confined both mentally and physically in ordered sterility for too long. I needed a few months in the bush environment to get me back on an even keel.

Just like everyone else I need to pee sometimes. I could easily not have mentioned anything about it anywhere in this book, but I'm trying to give you as full an understanding as possible of as many of a quadriplegic's problems as I can.  Just about my entire life now is scheduled around, or determined by, my need to pee. Many quads have no control of their bladder, so they have to have a catheter fitted - down there - to allow their urine to drain automatically into a plastic bag strapped to one of their legs. Catheters are bad news as they are often left in place permanently and are sometimes a prohibition to having sex.

I have bladder control and full-body normal feeling, so I can tell when I need a pee and can hang on a while. A urinal bottle must be placed between my legs for me to pee into, which is no great drama in itself. If you're visiting friends, or if you're out somewhere, you can usually disappear for a pee without causing too much disruption. If I want a pee just about everything stops, as my companion must terminate the conversation totally while she wheels me somewhere private and helps me. I hate my need to pee being such open public knowledge and it causing a major disruption, so before we ever leave home I must think about how long we'll be gone, whether to pee beforehand, or whether I'll be OK until we return.

Rainbow had to go to the laundromat nearly every day because our baby and our three-year-old were still in nappies. Before she left she always asked if I wanted a pee, but I'd usually be totally devoid of the urge. Just two minutes after she left I'd often feel some slight stabbing pains in my bladder, and my heart would sink. I knew I had hours of agonizing battle ahead of me before she returned. Sometimes I wouldn't be the victor. I'd be on top of it for every loooooooong minute of the three or four hours, and then I'd hear our car picking its way along our track.

That last minute or two was usually the worst time by far, and sometimes I'd actually pee myself in that little time before she arrived.

Rainbow tried, I'll give her that, but so often our days would end in long bitter arguments. After being on the go all day she'd get dinner then after it would be bathe the kids and get them to bed. Up to that time of night she would've been putting me off and putting me off, as she felt she was too busy during the day to spend much time letting me talk. I'd be looking forward to this peaceful end of the day as I'd be anxious for us to talk. Often, we would have gone two or three days without me being allowed to spell more than a couple of sentences. I'd eagerly indicate that I wanted to say something, but my hopes would be crushed.
‘Not now Danny, I'm too tired to concentrate. I just want to watch TV until it's time for bed’.
After a few nights of this I'd complain, we'd talk about it, I'd accuse her and she'd accuse me. We never reached a satisfactory settlement, but both filed away those barbs and they became more straws on our relationship's back.

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 
May 16, 1977 - Ketama, Morocco
Fez's a large dot on the Michelin map of Morocco, which was colonized by the French last century. Fez's obviously a large town, going by the size of the red Michelin dot, a small city maybe. We're taking a roundabout route there - a hundred or a hundred and fifty kilometres along the Atlas Mountains. Or are they the Rif Mountains? I'm not sure which name's right, but the map will tell me later. We're winding along a mountainside and Rainbow's been staring down a four hundred foot drop for a while now.

Out of nowhere we’re attacked by an old Toyota. It's got dented guards and no doors. Its horn's blaring and the four youths in it are yelling and waving threateningly. The passenger side youths are leaning out, thumping on my side of the Kombi. We slew and stop with a slither as I brake hard. Our attackers stop too. They pour from the old heap thumping both of our hastily-locked doors.
‘Buy our hash!
Double A, Number One Sputnik hash!’
‘Extra good shit!’
They're all on one side of us now. They're rocking the van and Rainbow's staring down the four hundred-foot drop.
‘BUY SOME! BUY SOME!’
We thrust money at them for the hash and the Kombi stops rocking. Effective sales technique, that.

Some time after our spontaneous purchase we pull up at Ketama village five kilometres on, five shaky, slow kilometres, with the glove box holding the recently-bought hash. We pull up at an old mud cafe with the universal faded Coke sign, (ubiquitous?). A policeman and two friends sitting on a bench sip chi impassively while seventy-three screaming youths surround the Kombi vying to thrust blocks of hash in our open windows - pandemonium.
‘Buy my hash!’
‘Stay at my home!’
‘Hash!’
‘Sleep at my home! Eat at my home! Meet my family, my mother, my grandmother! We are very honest and we like hippies very much!’
‘Buy...’
‘Double A, Number One Sputnik Good shit!’
The policeman elbows through to the Kombi and surveys all around silently. He points at one of his seated friends ‘You go with Ahmed – now.’
Ahmed climbs in, we go, and the policeman goes back to the bench. Ahmed speaks Arabic - and he speaks good English, Italian, German, and French of course.

Ketama's where a lot of the dope's grown in Morocco. It's the `hippy' Mecca of North Africa during the holiday season in Europe, Mecca for `hippies' speaking English, Italian, German or French. The local youths learn it all, learn it from the two or three pilgrims each week, many more in summer. City youths have a smattering of foreign tongues for the tourist dollar, but Ahmed's about thirty, no touting youth. He's a farmer, a dope farmer who has learnt them all to cut out the middleman whenever he can.

We turn left off the main road after the third field of marijuana from the cafe, up the rocky hill between more such crops, and there's Ahmed's wife and baby at his one-roomed house. Rachid, his Berber wife. Attractive, colourful, smiling, shy Rachid with a silk scarf around her shoulders. Unnoticed, she kills and cooks the rabbit, the `special event' rabbit. She kills and cooks the rabbit that's on the couscous tonight because of us, so proudly atop the couscous.

Ahmed beams so proudly with meat on the table and I'm looking for a small rock to hide under. I'm feeling so small telling Ahmed small-ly ‘We don't eat meat, can't. It's been so long we'd be sick.’
Beams fading, Ahmed questions mutteringly - ‘Are you Hare' Krishnas?’
Even worse, Ahmed - we're vegetarians. He plucks Rainbow's meat for himself and mine too, Rachid not even considered. Being a Moroccan female she sits and eats apart, never to join us and Ahmed, who rolls a J or two, and who after we've all eaten the couscous makes hash.

At Ketama they know hippies with vehicles come to buy kilos to smuggle back home, big buyers, so we get royal treatment. At Ketama they take car-driving `hippies' home -
‘`Sleep at my home!’
‘Eat at my home!’
‘Meet my family, my mother, my grandmother!’
‘We like hippies very much!'‘

They take us home at Ketama, they fete us at Ketama, and they ply us with dope at Ketama, just like Ahmed's doing now. But no ‘Double A, Number One Sputnik hash!’ from him and no ‘Extra good shit!’ either, because his hash speaks for itself. It's speaking in my head now. It is what it says it is, and it says it's Double A, Number One, Sputnik hashish!

Ahmed always says hashish, too. But he's no nonsense. No sledge hammer tactics for him, no Toyota attacks or screaming appeals, just small hammers always banging away -
‘We can weld a secret spot under your van.’
‘The secret spot it will carry five kilo, ten, no problem.’
‘They will not find the secret spot’.

He shows us how hashish is made. He strips the leaves off a large armful of dried plants from the mountain in his storage shed, he ties Rachid's scarf over a basin like a drum skin, he takes a handful of leaves and rubs them on the silk, not hard, the dry leaves crumbling.
‘The marijuana dust falls through my wife's scarf.’
He sweeps the crushed leaves off the drum.
‘For very good hashish I do not rub hard.’
He rubs a fresh handful, not hard, the dry leaves crumbling.
‘I rub only the marijuana dust into the basin.’

He sweeps, he rubs, he talks, he sweeps, he rubs, and he talks.
‘Many of the farmers rub too hard and a lot of leaf crumbs fall into the basin too.’
He sweeps, he rubs, he talks.
The armful of whole leaves is going down; the pile of crumbled leaves growing.
‘We make kif with these broken leaves.’
(Kif, Moroccan man's best friend, except sometimes hash is. Kif's often sold by local cops in the country; call at the gendarmerie and ask for it at the counter. Ahmed tells us they mix tobacco and rubbed leaf to get kif. He lights a pipe of kif and shares it around. He sweeps, he rubs, he talks. The whole mound of leaf is going - going – gone.

 He removes the scarf to show a mat of grey-green dust, he moulds the dust into two golf-ball shapes in foil and rolls the balls flat with a an empty bottle. He heats them, still flattened and foiled, on a hot plate, but not too much heating. Too much heating makes the hashish blocks black, crumbly and weak. He rolls some more, all done. All done. There's about an ounce in all.
We try it then we buy it at the going rate, the street rate, the Toyota attackers' mountain road rate less a bit - sixty dirhams an ounce, fifteen Australian dollars.
‘We'll be back for five kilos at the end of our time in Morocco. Maybe even ten.’
That's a lie, but it's a lie to stop the hammer blows that never stop. A lie that lets us say goodnight, to Kombi-sleep near the marijuana shed.  

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Post twenty two

7/3/2014

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    The heat of battle is as sweet as the victory - Bob Marley

    I'm absolutely not interested in writing this post today. It's five pm. I've spent the entire day emailing carers back and forth trying to find a way out of the impending crisis. As I've probably said before the Bartay service provider took over providing my carers about five weeks ago. They thought it would be a walk in the park, but I knew we were in for trouble unless they accepted my help and active participation. Unfortunately the public face of Bartay turned out to be a control freak. Every move of mine to help with carers encountered very hostile rejection.
    My case manager had origonally recommended Bartay, but after just one disasterous week she suggested I look into self management of my carers - immediately. I did, but the wheels of burocracy (?) turn slowly. By the time I got the go-ahead Bartay had written to me that it was all too hard and giving me the required one month's notice that they were going to withdraw service.   
    My two experienced carers wanted to stay with me, so I needed just three more. I advertised for carers
and was deluged with applicants. I interviewed the six most upbeat, positive-sounding of them and hired three. We spent the last ten days training them as much as possible with just the two experienced carers to train them during their limited number of shifts. We still have some training to do. We will get it done in time, but that means training until the very last shift before Bartay pulls the plug. Only seven days to go, but we will make it.
   
Then this morning I received the following email from one of the new carers ...
'
I have been thinking a lot about working with you. I do feel at the moment I am not qualified enough to help you to the best of my ability, and I am the sort of person that likes to give my best in all situations. Alongside this Andrew also got a job and I have been factoring this into the equation. He will be working late shifts Mon-Fri and some overtime at weekends. This also means I cannot give you the time I could before as I have no one to look after my kids on a tea and bed shifts. Therefore, I believe at this time it would not be fair to you to keep on. This has been a hard decision because I like you a lot ...'
    I've been working all day to try to find a way out of this mess. It's going to be an interesting week.

  … … … … … … … … …
Luckily I prepared the rest of this post days ago ...
December 13, 1986 - Campbells Creek, just outside Castlemaine, Victoria
Today is exactly two years since I left BHHA and came home to live.  Rainbow drove me home to Campbell’s Creek nine months and one day after I was taken by ambulance to Maroondah Hospital. I could no longer walk or talk, chew food to extract the flavour or drink liquids without choking. I couldn't easily join any conversations, chastise or protect my kids, make proper love to Rainbow, and a thousand other things. Hell, I couldn't even wipe my own bum!

Rainbow visited me nearly every day I was in hospital, every weekday anyway. She geared her whole life and our kids' lives around these visits, as she knew how important they were to me. I desperately needed her emotional support and I relied heavily on her to act as a go-between when I had any detailed communications for the staff. I often felt guilty because I'd get her to do much of my dirty work, but I had no choice. Usually she was the only one around who could use the Etran board fluently enough to decipher my involved messages - unfortunately they were messages of complaint to the nurses more often than not.

In a way she had a more difficult time than I did. I only had relatively minor worries about me and my life in hospital to contend with, and my every bodily need was catered for by hordes of nubile young nurses. She had the real worries to cope with, like the worry of raising our two small children without my help. To be within commuting distance of Prince Henry's hospital she'd moved in with my retired mother, so there was the worry of the standard mess our kids would make of her mother-in-law's `clean-as-a-pin' suburban house. She had the worry of having a hospitalized quadriplegic for a husband and the nagging worry that he just mightn’t be the full quid any more.

Because of my stuffed-up emotions I couldn't show her much of my love or appreciation of her. Whenever I spelled out a simple ‘thanks’ or ‘I love you’ to her I'd be swamped with tears of emotion before I was halfway through. Tears that'd grow into anguished sobs as I flashed on my future, our future, and her future with me. So I learned to avoid telling her how valuable she was to me. I did this to lessen the trauma on my own emotions, but she was also going through the worst period of our lives and had a real need for the emotional support which I couldn't lend. For months she suffered my extreme and sudden swings between laughter and sobs then more guffaws, and she had to live with the disconcerting thought that just maybe her future was tied up with an oddball.

I deliberately put a lot of effort into good personal relationships with the nursing staff at both PHH and BHHA to ensure good and better and best care. Rainbow will probably read that and say, ‘Why didn't you put more effort into our relationship, Dan?’ I guess that if I really try I can talk my way out of that one, but on this rare occasion I'll try to be honest about me. She was already committed to me in her heart and her mind. I was her lover - no, I had been her lover –and I was the father of her children. She had decided to hang in there to help me see this through and I took her for granted. 

I could have acted the whimpering, disgruntled shit and the staff would have still tolerated me. They would have understood that my lousy situation made me this way. Occasionally I'd get so depressed I'd break into violent sobs, but this actually endeared me more to most nurses because I'd soon pull myself together and face the future with a `brave' smile. From early on after my stroke I've continued my lifelong belief that I'm terrific - too terrific to be fazed by that minor setback for long.

I guess I realized that the nurses weren't anywhere near as committed to me as Rainbow was. In some things in my life I haven't been very nice, but I cultivated my `niceness' with many nurses to ensure that I received the best possible nursing care. Sure, my relationship with Rainbow needed my input too, and it didn't get it.

After I left BHHA we lived back home at Granny Thomas Gully, about two kilometres from Campbells Creek. It was summertime and summer in the bush around there is terrific. From a distance a bluish haze could be seen emanating from the trees. A similar blueness gave the Blue Mountains their name. I think I read once it's the blueness of evaporating eucalyptus oil. The Blue Mountains bush looks more vigorous and deeper blue than the `our' sparse bush. I love our bush. Its gum-trees are a dusty olive-green. In summer it rarely rains, so a layer of dust dulls the greenness that glints from the trees after autumn's downpours.

GTG is nineteen acres completely surrounded by state forest about six kilometres from Castlemaine town. Nineteen acres is, um, a fraction over seven and a half hectares. About half of it had been cleared way back in eighteen hundred and fifty nine and had been farmed for nearly a hundred years. When we brought the property it had been derelict for over twenty-five years - its old weatherboard house had disappeared into locals' fireplaces and rapacious coffee bush had covered every cleared area. We'd decided to do more than just build a home there. Actually, I decided this but we both worked towards it in our different ways. I decided that building our home would not only mean building a house, but also creating our own total environment.

I cleared the coffee bush, put in dams, planted and watered and built and worked to realize our dreams. I'd built a good-sized flat-roofed mud brick garage amongst the trees at one edge of GTG. As soon the building inspector approved it I put in dividing walls, wood and gas stoves, gas lights and fridge, shower, toilet, sink and all the trappings of a basis two-bedroom house so we could live comfortably while I built our dream-home.

Dream-home - visions of a new two-story brick veneer with four bedrooms, billiard room and study, tennis court and swimming pool. Not quite. Our dreams were less grandiose and much more adventurous. We planned a two-storey, two-bedroom, mud brick house with barrel-vaulted mud brick roofs over two small rooms, red-gum tree trunk rounded sections set in polished and sealed dried mud for the kitchen floor, built-in indoor lily ponds and much much more. I built ten metres of creeper-covered arched walkway, a bush-log gazebo that supported prolific passionfruit vines, thirty fruit and nut trees and more. Everything was coming together, but then I had my stroke.

Now the whole place had an untended, down-at-heel, feel about it. For the five months that I'd been at PHH GTG had been deserted, but Rainbow had moved back in when I'd transferred to BHHA. She was flat out raising the kids and spending five or six hours every day visiting me as well as all the difficulties that go with living in the bush without electricity. What with all that and all the worry about me and everything she didn't have the time, the energy or the desire to maintain our dying dream.

We'd put in a special little dam for swimming, with a patch of lawn beside it. In summer this watered lawn was the only cooling green grass within a couple of kilometres, so I'd built our shaded gazebo there. There are masses of honeysuckle and passionfruit on two sides of it and overhead and the deep water hole nearby to attract hordes of birds and mosquitoes as evening began to approach. Magpies, kookaburras, sparrows, the occasional ibis or crane and wrens galore. One hot afternoon I counted fourteen different types of wren darting around and splashing in the cool water. There were probably more types, but by fourteen I couldn't tell new from old.

I'd sit in my wheelchair in the gazebo for hours every day with my typewriter on my lap and the garage we lived in about fifty metres behind me. Often I'd just sit and reflect on the half-completed house that I could see just up the hill a bit. It wasn't huge in area, but its 600mm-thick mud brick walls and its solid tree trunk beams screamed its solidness. It had the unseen solidness of reinforced concrete footings that were more than three times as big as normal and very heavy steel girders hidden in each wall so it'd withstand hurricanes or earthquakes. Neither of these have ever occurred around there, nor were they ever likely too, but after just two years or so I could easily make out the beginnings of a problem which could destroy the house much more slowly but just as effectively.

I'd designed and built a flat-roofed house with no eaves - in fact the roof is inside the walls. I'd intended using a modern clear sealer to protect the walls, but alas, I didn't get that done in time. Storms had worn a lot of the surface smoothness off the bricks and gentler rains had further eroded them. I reckoned if they were given a free hand for about a hundred years they'd wash away the entire walls to return to the very soil they came from. I'd wanted my dream home built by my own hand, but as that was now impossible I was attracted to that gradual 'recycling' idea. I wanted to have the roof removed so the rain could have a fair go at each wall from both sides. Rainbow sensibly vetoed that idea.

In time I came to accept the inevitability of all the deterioration. I saw it as just one more loss in a whole litany of things I'd lost since my stroke. I accepted GTG's on-going deterioration, but it hurt - I'd sit in my wheelchair for hour upon hour `reading', but turning pages was so difficult I'd soon leave the book and just gaze around and think. The interrupted mud brick dream on the hillside was being eroded away by the rain; a dead tree had fallen and crushed a section of the arched walkway; fruit trees were dying from thirst (clogged outlets in my automatic watering system); blackberry bushes were re-sprouting; etc etc. No matter which direction I looked there was deterioration, unkemptness, and heartbreak.

My spirit wasn't faring too well out there in the gazebo and the mosquitoes made sure my physical being didn't do much better. During the day in summer the bush around there is hot and parched - in fact you can smell the dryness. You don't come within a bull's roar of a single mossie, but as soon as the sun gets low whole swarms of the little buggers appear out of nowhere.

The gazebo was cool, moist and shady, so it was alive with mossies from about four every afternoon - it became open season on quads then. Three or four mossies would lob on my face or my bare arms and bare legs and I'd struggle with very little success to dislodge them before they attacked me with their miniature drilling rigs. No sooner would one have had her fill and left me than an even bigger one would take her place. (God - why don't mosquitoes use the Pill?) It's said that if you don't scratch mossie bites they won't itch. Pig's Bum! I didn't scratch them because I couldn't, but I still itched like crazy.

After a few weeks I admitted defeat and arranged for Rainbow to wheel me back inside before mossie snack time. For the next six months I was rarely outside late in the afternoon, so I got to know every ripple of our mud brick walls. In the few hours before dinner each night at least a couple of those little marauders would find a way to get into the garage. They'd head straight for me like ants making a beeline (or ant-line) to a picnic. I'd duck and weave until eventually Rainbow saved me.
… … … … … … … … …
October 22, 1976 - Maldon, Victoria
Swirling red, orange, green, blue, purple and more, but mainly red, swirling red. Red when she's turning slow and it's swirling low, but a rainbow of colour when she swirls faster, higher, and the unnoticed wide pleats of her dress part. The ceiling's swirling around above her head, the dance floor's swirling beneath her feet, and she's swirling in loops through the packed dancers with her long dress swirling.

Her eyes and mind are closed, she's oblivious - the music has become her world. It's filled her mind, her heart and her soul. And she's filled it. Her soft face carries her rapture so rapturous. The dancers parting for her swirling loops envy her rapture and they're taken by her. They're lifted and dance freer with her unknowing example.

Her long black hair swirls to the music. Her long red dress swirls to the music. Her rainbow soul swirls to the music.

October 23, 1975 - Campbell’s Creek township, Victoria
I remember years ago when I met Innocent for the first time. That was the same day I got back from the Northwest. Within a week we were together solid. I reckon that's happened again. I got back from the UK last Saturday and I hitchhiked home from the airport. The last ride I got was a friend going home and she talked me to a bush-dance that night. She reckoned I'd get on well with some girl there, a new friend of hers, someone new in town since I went away.

When we reached home I started my vintage Fiat off her car to charge its battery after all these months. That night I watched the rainbow dancer at the buth dance. She's the new girl and she's here with me now. It's a bit soon to be thinking about us long-term, more than a bit, but things are shaping up OK so far. When we got back from the dance we spent the next day or two in bed, barring some meals, and that's been our favourite place ever since. She's going home tomorrow to her rented farmhouse just ten kilometres from here.

April 5, 1977 - Toledo, Spain
Like many travellers I couldn't get travelling out of my blood after my time overseas last year, so I sold my cottage soon after the New Year to go again. House prices have gone mad the last two or three years and I'd done heaps to fix it up - stuff like wiring and plumbing and fixing the rising damp and carpentry and painting. But there was still the mortgage to pay off and the deposit for nineteen acres in the bush for Rainbow and me in both our names (we're that far gone for each other).

We still had a few thousand left after that stuff, and Rainbow's parents loaned her a couple of thou more, so here we are travelling in luxury in a Kombi camper van. It's her first time overseas and it's not five star hotels and stuff, but it's luxury compared to carrying a backpack and hitching to save your money for food.

We're lying on the bed in the Kombi in Spain, and the Kombi's in a sea of goat music. It's a well-equipped van, homely and warm and lived-in. Its fifteen years old and we bought it on the street outside Australia house in London - once around the block and ‘Yair, we'll take it’.

There must be a shepherd out there somewhere, but we can't make him out. We've got the back of the van open to the warm night, but it's black as Jim Johnson's backside. It's not really as black as that, because the stars are bright above the olive grove we're in. It's as if God scattered diamonds across the heavens and pushed them down so they can nearly be touched.

The starry sky's filling with music. The tinkling's getting closer, more than faint tinkles now. Louder, clearer, but it'll never be really loud and it'll never be really clear, because goats don't shake their bells hard enough, and because the bells are made from softish tin that gives a clunk more than a ring. Musical, yes - Notre Dame clear, no.

1 Comment

Post twenty one

28/2/2014

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Let deeds match words ... Plautus

It's a great day to be alive - warm and sunny and oh-so-pleasant. I wouldn't be dead for quids! I'm just can from taking Bruno for a few kilometres. His second walk today and we'll get in another one if I can tear myself away from my writing. I sent Ellydd Gate to Gemma last week for a final proof-read before the publisher, so now I've started going through the second book in the trilogy before getting it edited - by, I hope, Gemma. This book is called Arathea, which as I'm sure ever in the world knows is the magical home of the equally-magical faerls.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

Bendigo Home and Hospital for the Aged. Continued ...
I didn't want to be in hospital. I was starting to hanker bad to be home, but I had no choice. I still had a trache, and traches need regular cleaning. Only much later did I learn that trache maintenance can be done at home by the wearer or any helper, but my lack of this knowledge turned out to be to my benefit. If I'd been full bottle about traches I'd have been content to leave hospital with one permanently in my throat, but as it was I got rid of it completely.  

Two days after the nosogastric was taken out my impatience got the better of me. That day the ward doctor popped in to say good day like he does from time to time.
‘I want the trache out today’ sez I (spelt I, actually - with the Etran board).
‘Hello, Danny’ sez he. ‘How's life?’
‘Ha ha - I want my trache taken out’.
‘No way’ sez he. ‘It's too dangerous.’
‘How do you know?’ asks I. ‘You told me I'm the first trache patient you've ever worked with I want it out’.
‘Maybe next month’ sez he, ‘or maybe the one after. It's too early yet - you'll aspirate, you'll die.’
‘What's aspirate mean’ asks I.

He said stuff about me filling my lungs with my drinks and choking on my food if I didn't have the protection of the trache. (Traches have an inflatable cuff around them to prevent any food or liquid dropping into the wearer's lungs from their mouths.)  Neither of us could be termed a medical expert on traches, but he was close to being in the dark. I at least had a rough idea about my present capacities. That's rot - I had absolutely no idea if I'd be able to breathe through my own airway, but I figured it like this:
What the hell - let's give it a go. At the worst I won't be able to breathe, so I'll suffocate. I'm, um, not too keen on that idea, but I'm in a hospital. There's no better place to be if I do aspirate and need resuscitating.’

Remember that bill of rights, Danny I thought on, but then I decided it'd be less agro to get there by other means. We compromised - seemingly. The cuff would be deflated for progressively longer periods every day for the next month, after which I'd try eating and drinking with it down. If I handled all this OK, the trache would be taken out in about six weeks time.

I didn't tell him I had no intention of waiting that long.
 
We started the six-week training regime that very day and ten days later I was trache-less. All it took was a few lies, a bit of bluff and the pretence of a positive attitude. The first time the cuff was let down was that day at eleven thirty for an hour. Lunchtime was normally at midday, but I was instructed to delay mine until after the trache cuff was reinflated at twelve thirty.  At midday an innocent nurse brought me my lunch, and asked me if my cuff had been reinflated.
Go for it’ I thought fleetingly, giving a casual Yes answer.

She'd nearly finished feeding me my meal before the doctor came in at twelve thirty to check on me. I was choking and coughing like hell at the time and he guessed why. He started carrying on like a pork chop at the nurse, but once I’d recovered somewhat I let him know I’d tricked her.
‘Now we know it's safe' sez I. 'I'll eat all my meals like this.’
‘Ah, yeeeeees, I suppose, but promise me you won't try liquids yet’ sez he.  

After lunch I was wheeled to wait in the hallway to be collected for my daily physio and there Sister Murphy went up in my estimation. I was waiting near the open door of the nurses station and I overheard her talking to the doctor.
‘I could've easily become defensive that time he complained about the night nurses, and I nearly went and gave him a piece of my mind for lying to my nurse today, but in a way these things are good - they show he's beginning to take positive interest in his life again.’
‘Positive interest? He must think he's James Bond with the foolhardy way he acted.’
‘No, he's terrified about this trache business, but he knows that unless he takes the risk we never will.’

The nurse who fed me dinner had been warned not to trust me, but after eating I asked if my cuff could please be reinflated so I could have a drink. I did this again the next lunchtime to get back in the nurses `to be trusted' good books. At dinner that evening the nurse asked me about my trache and I told her it was OK, so she gave me my meal and drink as normal. I coughed and spluttered quite a bit while drinking the liquid, but that happened sometimes. After I'd finished the drink I couldn't suppress a huge grin. She saw it, and she knew what it meant.
‘Oh, Danny - your cuff's down. I'll get into trouble for trusting you. ’

We reached an agreement whereby she'd give my drinks with the cuff down and I wouldn't let sister Murphy know what she'd done just now - not that I would have anyway. After about a week I was drinking well enough to prevail on sister Murphy to test my drinking ability. Two days later my trache was removed.

The doctor had been right about the aspiration bit, but not about its degree, because I didn't die. The first three or four or fifteen meals without the trache in my throat ended halfway through with me coughing and choking all the way to tears and sobs, but I sailed through number sixteen. I sailed through and only choked badly twice and those two times didn't get me crying with fear and pain.

It would've been so much easier if I'd let them vitalize the food smooth, because then it'd slide down no pain, but I had these visions, y'see - visions of gummy oldies in the dayroom with their minds lying topless on Costa del Sol sunning themselves. The nurses call these oldies Love and Dearie and shovel vitalized mush into them, and wipe it off their tufty chins asking, ‘Have we had enough yet’.

I choked on nearly every spoonful, but not too badly, except for those meals which ended with me coughing into tears and the nurse scared I was going to die. I wouldn't have it vitalized, though – apart from giving them the foot in to patronize me like with the oldies I was determined to beat the eating business if it killed me.

Most of the other patients ate communally in the ward dining room and many had worse table manners than I did. Some patients had suffered bad one-sided strokes and looked quite yuk as they battled to feed themselves. Other patients whose minds had left to see St Peter years before their aging bodies oozed mush down their chins as nurses crammed it into their mouths.

I ate in my own room. I knew that were I in the dining-room when I was choking and dying I'd become the centre of attention. Many times in my life I've done outlandish things to make others react, but I didn't want all eyes on me when I wasn't calm and controlled. Besides, I imagined elderly patients dropping like flies as my noisy bouts brought on their heart attacks.  
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Continued travels. August to November 1976. Greece to the UK.
The Traveller
Whole planeload milling Singapore Hilton,
or was it the Holiday Inn?
Unscheduled stopover for repairs,
New wings or something.
Getting rooms like bees swarming honeycomb
He hangs back ‘til swarm fades.

Now just him and a girl waiting for honey-cells
‘One double left. No more. You share. Yes?
Yes, you share?
One room. Two beds. Yes?’
Both tired, too tired to fight
‘Yes’

He drops his backpack one side of the double bed,
She the other side.
‘So much for two beds’ she says,
‘You stay on your side, I’ll stay on my mine’.
She climbs in, clothes and all, but not her shoes.
Her simulated coma says ‘Stay away from me.’

He rummages his pack for a mate’s Going Away present
‘Don’t open it ‘til London’. He opens it anyway. ‘Holy shit.’
Peanut tin crammed with marijuana -
He’s smuggled grass to a county where they machine-gun drug crims.
He rolls a joint and she revives at the smell.
Both indulge, and again, and again, and -
Dope can cultivate sexual activity - even in the comatose

Thessalonika
Grey-black storm clouds banking over blue sky, foreboding doom
‘It’s going to bucket down’
The traveller leaves the empty highway, dashes ‘cross empty wasteland
Empty warehouse - forsaken industrial dream.
‘Home for the night’

Water bubbling vapour from the small billy
on a tiny gas-can cooker.
Nescafe bottle, bagged sugar, teaspoon, mug,
Small pan ready for eggs, bread for toast.
A kingly hot meal with rain drumming the industrial tin roof

A battered car coughing outside, tappet concerto
On its last legs.
Four figures scampering through the drumming rain
Drawn to the warmth and home of his candle in vast industrial blackness
Moths with moth-eaten wings, Gypsies poor and worn as church mice.

The traveller rummages his pack -
More eggs, more bread, olives, cheese,
Tinned fruit with tinned cream for dessert and biscuits.
Two days rations for one meal.

Pour one coffee, empty canteen into gas-heating billy.
Steaming mug and sugar to one, gesturing to the laid-out feast.
‘All join me please’ with his smile
Better-than-nothing and friendship for five

The chapel on the rocks
You’d reckon storm waves could crash right over it in a gale
Must be OK though.
It had a seaman flavour inside, and seamen know where it’s safe to build close to sea,
but it seemed so perilous metres from the sea in rocks ‘tween shore and land.

It was a small whitewashed chapel, Orthodox Greek
Alter paraphernalia, icons, pictures, cloths, chairs for half dozen devout
As-new whitewash - no water stains, no water wear
Untouched by hand of God.

Tall Swedish girl and the traveller been roaming Lesvos daily out from Mitilini,
Lesvos from Greek myth, home to the first lesbian.
Leggy Swede a bit of alright - lilting accent, tall, blonde, legs all the way to her bum.
He reckons he’s in with a chance.

Been cultivating her for a week nearly.
Tonight could be the night
‘Lovely place to make love on rocks here near vee church’ Swedish telling the traveller
‘Is all vee do in Sveden, but I having holiday from that.’

Discretion
Village of whitewash, donkeys, shrill chatter from laneways, cafenions for men.
Sitting under a carob tree by the highway, patient for a lift from cars that never stop,
Patiently the traveller chews another sickly-sweet carob pod.

Woman from a nearby house brings out a covered plate shyly -
feta, olives, fresh-baked bread oven-warm.
She waits shyly while he eats
Then she takes him shyly to her house for coffee
She brings a decanter of ouzo, a jug of cool water, one small glass.
He knows the drill -
scoffs half the straight ouzo she hands him, tops the glass with water cool,
sips it empty while they ‘talk’

‘My husband drives a truck’ she conveys to him in Greek less shyly now.
‘He’s away many days at a time to Germany and France.
This time he’s gone to England, all the way to Ireland where the bombs are -
Dublin’
‘I’m so lonely’ she says imploringly and cow-eyed
(The traveller can hear cow-bells sounding loud in his head - warning and alarm.
‘I’m desperately desperately lonely,’ she says.

She pours for him another ouzo, like for her husband home from away,
then begins to unlace his boots unshyly now.
Images of a shotgun booming in a darkened bedroom and the traveller stands up
‘I’m out of here.’

Priorities
Toasty toast waiting for eggs scambling and cooking in the pan
Paprika, salt and lemon go in too.
He eats unhurriedly, water on the boil for coffee
Last night memories awash in his alcohol-fuzzy head.

Memories of the cafenion with retzina and ouzo and calamari nibbles from the sea,
guitar on fire, men dancing like Zorba , plates smashing
And not a woman in sight.
On top of the world last night, cotton-wool hangover dully drumming a funeral in his head this morning.
Sleep must be to blame.

The traveller with one ear out for any traffic, no ride since midday yesterday.
Kombi noise distinctive through the village
Carefully placing breakfast, the traveller assumes the kneeling supplicant role,
hands clasped on chest beseeching a lift.
‘To Munich we’re headed
With someone else in here already’
‘You beauty. But only if there’s time for coffee first’

The squat
Together they sat in the back of the Kombi
Politely sharing the Germans’ hash at times,
Then bussing together to England
She was English, going home from three months diving in Red Sea.
First time scuba-diving with first time female lover – a new holiday experience.

‘I’m heading to a squat in Hampstead Heath’ he said. ‘Crash for the night, clean up before you go home’
‘Let’s go to the pub’ the squat leader said once they’d stowed their packs
‘I’ll get changed first’ she said, unbuckling her belt
The traveller ambled to the door, but the squatter stood stock still, waiting for more
‘Excuse me?’ she said nodding to door. ‘But you stay, Traveller’.
Jeans off, shirt off. Knickers only, no bra - good night ahead for the traveller?
‘I want to tell you ‘cos I’m practicing for my parents’ she said to him, dressing afresh.
‘I liked it lesbian. I’m staying that way forever from now on.’

Dreams
London City is an oyster shell.
Smooth-glazed mother of pearl with St Paul’s cathedral, Tower of London, Hyde Park, Big Ben and more inside.
Many indeed are London’s pearls.
London City is Christopher Robin’s London just as it should be.
London’s suburbs though - London’s suburbs are dark mussel shell
‘Very ordinary’ springs to mind. ‘Very much the same’ springs to mind.
Featureless, humble, bland - English.

A chance meeting on the high street in Hampstead Heath
A five billion to one chance, or destined certainty?
A long street with a pub, Sainsbury’s, a betting shop, three travel agents and sundry other small businesses
It could be any of dozens of London’s suburbs

‘Last I heard you were motoring Switzerland in a vintage sports car’ said the traveller
‘On your way to Egypt, I heard.’
‘Plans change’ the traveller’s brother replied. ‘Met Lord My-Shit-Doesn’t-Smell in the Alps.
Milord offered me work restoring his mansion out Windsor way’

Back home the traveller’s brother built stone houses - stonework that is a pleasure to the eye.
Solid, neat houses to last a thousand years without English correctness and regular lines
His houses were undisciplined Aussie privates –-
They didn’t salute British officers but by jove you wanted them on your side in a fight
His houses were the free Aussie feel of Cold Chisel’s music pumping out of a sex-selling Bangkok bar.

‘Milord’s hundred kilo daughter giving me the eye and he’s saying
‘Son, this could all be yours’
‘Stuff that. Cold cheddar cheese life with cold cheddar cheese sex.
I’m leaving, driving home to Australia on Friday. Want to come?’
‘Sorry, busy this year’ mused the traveller. ‘Dreams beckoning.’

Pursuing dreams, the Life gourmet’s caviar.
Reykjavik icily off Greenland’s coast
Istanbul minarets pale blue in a Moslem moon
Timbuktoo staging camels sailing Saharan seas
But first Lumb Bank, a small village up near the Scotland border’

The office
The traveller travelling the world with typewriter in backpack, books, typing paper and no change of jeans -
Just underwear, teeshirts, shorts, sleeping bag.
A writer’s workshop at Lumb Bank, small village before Scotland
Hilly country and green
Learning such important stuff as ‘No word in the English language rhymes with orange’
and
‘In his latter years Shakespeare suffered from hemorrhoids’

Margaret was a skinny single mum nearing thirty, two kids at home in stifling Sheffield.
This a stab at life.
To her the traveller’s no-rush, no-fuss, everything-in-his-relaxed-stride manner
and his Australian accent set him apart, attractive, desirable.

He was her one-night stab at life
Bonking like rabbits bare-arsed on the darkened office floor - no cold cheddar Margaret.
‘Click’ - bright white overhead light.
Lecturer entering, showing six would-be writers his first editions.



0 Comments

Post twenty

21/2/2014

1 Comment

 
He who stops being better stops being good ... Oliver Cromwell.

I mentioned in my last blog three weeks ago that we were in the middle of another heatwave here in Victoria. I was so engrossed in my writing after lunch that day that I didn't realize the house was getting too warm until it was too late. The stroke that caused my mute quadriplegia also clobbered the body temperature control centre in my brain, making me react adversely to hot or cold weather. That hot afternoon I realized I had to drive to the wall and nudge the big switch with my elbow to turn on the air conditioner (A/C). I reached for my wheelchair controls, but my arm muscles had already tightened with the heat. I was trapped at my computer, unable to move my chair to turn the A/C on and get the temperature down.

Just half an hour later I could feel a 'Turn'
coming on. Occasionally I have these turns -going pale, sweating profusely, feeling sick, too weak to move, etc. Long ago a doctor told me the name for it and said its not uncommon. I find its brought on be extreme discomfort, or prolonged pain, etc. It passes within the hour.

So I knew I was fast going dead white, I could see my jeans and teeshirt turning dark from sweat, I was repressing the heaving that leads to vomiting and I was slumped in the chair too weak to even lift my head. Dying would have been good right then except that I knew it would pass. I prayed no one would turn up, because they would (understandablly)
panic at the awful sight of me and would want to call an ambulance. I was fine again an hour later, except for being wiped out for the rest of the day. Would you believe it - the next day was just as hot and the exact same things happened.

My feet swell in summer from the hotter weather. That heatwave made my right foot swell more than ever. So much so that a small amount of the fluid buildup began to ooze out around one toenail. Whenever Bruno was let off the lead he would make a beeline for that toe and lick it clean. Not a bad thing as we all know dog saliva is good. 

A few days later red splothes appeared on my thigh, the next day they had spread right down my leg and covered my now grossly-swollen foot, and the day after that I was in hospital being treated for Cellulitis - an infected and badly-swollen leg and foot. Cellulitis, I was told, is often passed on from animals through an open wound - hmmmmm. I was released from hospital a week later, but I used the fuzzy-head and stomach from the high doses of anti-biotics I was still taking as an excuse to skip another week of this blog.
But I'm back now.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

1984. Bendigo Home and Hospital for the Aged. Continued ...
For six months it's very doubtful that I ever got a real deep long REM sleep. The bottles of thick and yukky liquid food that drip-fed my nosogastric tube lasted two hours and I was being fed ten bottles a day. I'd often be down at physio, occupational therapy or speech therapy without the drip feed for some of the day and it'd have to go on until well in the night to catch up - even when I was asleep. Every two hours I'd wake for between five and ten minutes because a nurse with a torch would be fiddling about changing the drip-food bottle - occasionally for longer because the tube would block up and she'd spend ages unblocking it with my overhead light turned on.

At different two-hourly intervals the nurses would do their rounds and they'd roll me onto my opposite side to prevent me getting bedsores. The more diligent and less feeling nurses would vigorously rub my behind, thus ensuring good circulation and most especially wakefulness. And then I had the extra problem that only by lying on my back could I get comfortable. After being put on my side I'd sleep no more than a hour before pain and discomfort woke me and prevented me getting back to sleep. No, I didn't get much sleep.

Not long before I left Prince Henry's hospital I began having tentative feelings that I was more in contact with my condition than anyone else did and the move to BHHA cemented these feelings. In fact, in some areas it was an accepted truth. A few senior nurses had seen traches and noso-gastrics many years before, but trache patients were so rare in Bendigo that the vast majority of nurses who were locally trained knew of them in theory only. I think it says a lot about these nurses that they had the commonsense to learn from me - many nurses get to be up themselves because they're Registered Nurses, and as such would rather do a thing wrong than be guided by anyone other than another RN or a doctor.

I recognized at BHHA that five months of intimate experience had made me the most knowledgable person there when it came to traches and nosogastrics and it seemed a fair bet that I'd also be more au fait with my general care too. Nurses are very aware that bedsores can easily appear on a bed-ridden patient who isn't turned regularly, but the two-hourly position changes that were inflicted upon me every night at PHH had been a bane of my life. I'd never had a hint of bodily pressure soreness there and I figured this was mostly because I was lying on sheepskins on a special `anti-pressure sores' air mattress.

When the BHHA nurses came to reposition me in my bed for the first time I decided to test if I really needed this regular turning. I lied that I hadn't ever needed this pressure care and they believed me. (From that night on I've never needed to be turned. I've slept on my back ever since then and we even ditched the air mattress soon after I left hospital.) The only thing that intruded on my sleep was the cursed bottle changes to my nosogastric tube, so I decided it had to go. I was handling oral feeds OK - well - I guess honesty requires that I admit that my meal-times were sheer hell, but I lived through each meal (just) and I figured that to be close enough to OK.

I spelled out that I wanted the nosogastric removed, but the medical staff didn't believe I was ready. At PHH a friend brought me the patients' bill of rights, so I said I'd have legal proceedings started if the nosogastric wasn't taken out. Later that day the doctor told me that I was ready.
‘We'll take it out tomorrow, Danny’.
I'd often had to have blocked tubes replaced at PHH, so I knew that tube removal was merely a matter of pulling its twenty centimetre length from my nose.
‘Uh uh - I want it out now.’

I was beginning to display the pigheadedness that was to make me strive for continued improvement for years to come. I'm still like that. It's a crazy way to be, considering I've been told time and again that I'll never improve significantly. I've made very minor changes happen in me but in terms of energy expended to achieve this it hasn't been all that worthwhile. Had I accepted those expert opinions I'd have given up long ago. That wouldn't have been too terrible a way to live. No more need for a brave front, no need to make myself appear positive and hopeful, no more work work work, no more obligation to try. My family and friends just assume I'll go on fighting because I'm me. If I gave in they'd be disappointed at first, but they'd understand and their pressure would be off. Imagine the waves of relief I'd feel as those pressures were lifted. I could spent a life of physical ease with nurses to tend to my every physical need. Wouldn't life be easy?

I can't give up, though, can I? People see me still fighting the odds and they think I'm brave, wonderful and heroic. Actually I'm none of that. I'm merely acting on my inherited characteristics. Don't praise me for being determined, for never giving up - I was born that way. Don't praise me for fighting the odds - I was born that way. Don't praise me for retaining control of my life - I was born that way. Don't praise me for not taking the easy way out - I was born that way. Besides, as long as I try there's very faint hope, and as long as I have hope life can be fine.


... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Continued travels. August 1976, Greece.
Would you believe it, I’m back in Greece. All that hassle with Sinister’s secret police and I still didn’t even consider the un-wisdom of coming back. Not that I’ve had any problems. All the young guy at the desk did when I was going through Greek Customs at the border was check my passport on his computer screen and wave me through. Sure, he looked at me hard for just an instant when he looked up from the screen, but considering my wild-looking hairiness -
‘Hitch-hiking?’ he asked pleasantly as I turned to go.

I’m beside the highway that runs all the way through Europe to the English channel on the Belgium coast. Actually, it probably only goes to somewhere like Paris or Amsterdam and roads from there get you to the ferry ports in France and Belgium. I don’t know – exactly. I haven’t got enough brains to plan ahead exactly and read maps exactly. All I care about knowing exactly is where I am at any given time – sort of. The highway doesn’t go through Athens, though. It comes from Istanbul and runs across the top of Greece before turning north into Yugoslavia and the rest of Europe. You have to go south a couple of hundred kilometres to get to Athens.

Last night I lay my sleeping bag out against a half-built wall in a construction site in Alexandropoulos. I was woken this morning by the cheerful voices of labourers pouring concrete just three metres from my head. I stopped for breakfast as I walked out of town then the very first car I thumbed brought me to the village back there. God knows what it’s called. I suppose I could get my map out and look it up, but do I really need to record another odd-sounding name?

I’m sitting in the grass beside the quiet highway tapping on my lightweight typewriter. At first I stood there expectant and eager, but cars are few and far between here. Most of them don’t even spare a second glance for a hippy-looking b like me as they whizz by, so it wasn’t long before I dug a book out of my backpack. I sat down to make a coffee after an hour or so of very little traffic and didn’t get up again. Once I’d had my bread-and-cheese lunch I gave in and pulled the typewriter out. It’s warm, it’s sunny, it’s really pleasant here in the long dry grass and most importantly I’ve got my typewriter on my lap. I don’s mind at all if no-one stops today. I’ll just lose myself in writing until it gets dark then walk back to the village to buy dinner.

It’s the next morning, about eleven o’clock. It’s yet another day of light traffic with no-one even slowing down to give me the once over. I can hear a car, but it’s coming from in front of me. Pity it’s going the wrong way, because it looks like it’d give me a ride. It’s slowing a bit as it passes me. Shit, it’s one of those big black jobs with two black suits in the front seat! It’s doing a U-turn and coming back to me.
‘Mister Furlong?’ One suit is out and ‘helping’ me into the back seat. ‘We will give you a ride to Athens.’
‘Thanks, but I’m on my way to the border. Just drop me where our roads part.’
‘We will take you to Athens. Mr Sinister is waiting for you.’
How did they know? Of course – that young Customs guy. I must have been flagged on his computer.
-
Sinister had come from Chois just for me. It seems we had a lot to talk about. Takes his job seriously, that one. It’s possible I was just a tad terrified at various times during that long night with him, but he knew he was just going through the motions. On the morrow his underlings took me to a travel office and booked me a bus ticket to England. A magic bus leaving the next morning at seven AM. Magic buses are simply cut-price coaches that cater mainly to backpackers. They run almost express to London – with stops for fuel and meals.

I was at the travel place just before seven, along with thirty or forty others – mainly young Germans destined for Munich. Sinister and his heavies were parked across the narrow street. Dead on seven a woman stepped out of the office.
‘The bus will be thirty minutes late.’
Many grumbles around me. Agitation. Me, I sat down on the footpath and cooked eggs on toast for breakfast. I was finishing my coffee when the bus pulled up. Everyone clustered around the door to pile on. Again I was the odd man out, taking my time to pack my gear and go into the office to fill my little billy with water. Why rush, I thought, we’ve all got pre-booked seats. Besides, the driver was still in the travel office. I followed him out to the coach and sure enough there was one vacant seat left near the back.

Sinister got on as the coach was about to pull off, a heavie with him. Plainclothes cops the world over look like plainclothes cops. He said something in Greek to the driver before coming to speak to me in a loud, threatening voice.
‘I told him you are not to get off before the border.’
Is he trying to intimidate me again and tell everyone I’m a bad man to be avoided? Doesn’t he know he’s just increasing my standing with this young crowd?
He left without another word, but then poked his head back inside the door and looked directly at me. He was smiling the first genuine, friendly smile I’ve had from him.
‘I received your postcard.’


1 Comment

Post nineteen

31/1/2014

1 Comment

 
There will be a new post every Saturday.
Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened. ... Dr Suess.

I'm under the pump with my service provider and the lack of carers at present, and this means I haven't had time to spend on my blog. Golden City Support Services has been winding down with me and their service has been increasingly bad for the past month. I've been left high and dry with no carers sent to me on numerous occasions. In the last fortnight alone I've missed out on carers for one morning shift, five lunches, two teas and one bed. Not having breakfast or lunch or even dinner is no big deal. Having to skip meals doesn't faze me in itself, but ...

A
fortnight ago we had a bit of a heatwave, five days straight over 40 degrees celcius. (100 degrees plus fahrenheit.) By lunchtime on these days I'm looking forward to something to drink, but if there's no lunch shift I have to stay parched until dinner shift, or bed shift. Similarly, I'm sometimes needing to poo by mid-morning. Because I choose to live in my own home I have to battle the urge until the lunch carer arrives and can sit me on the toilet, but if there's no lunch shift I have to try to battle on until dinner shift. Occasionally I can't hold it - imagine how wonderful it feels to be a grown man sitting in your own shit for hours.

Anyway, GCSS finished up last night and now I'm with a new service provider, Bartay. They're still in the process of hiring new carers to supplement the couple who came over from GCSS with me, so things are going to continue being rough for me for a week or two. But there's light at the end of the tunnel.
... ... ...
Today is another 40 degree day, the middle of another four or five day heatwave with tomorrow forecast to be hotter.

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

Campbelltown, Melbourne, Victoria
I’m standing on a small ledge about two hundred feet from the ground with someone’s hands on my shoulders from behind to steady me. I’m not very happy, at all. I can’t make myself look down at all now, but I know there’s a circular swimming pool directly below me. I guess that’s to stop jumpers like me splattering blood all over everything if the elasticized rope breaks - or if the bungy guys miscalculate and give you three or four feet too much of it. I barely glanced down the first time. Now I just fix my eyes on the far horizon and start fighting off that ever-increasing vertigo thing. It’s my third jump in the last fifteen minutes and every time is worse than the time before.

I don’t like being out on this ledge very much, especially not for this long. They’ve got a video camera rigged up on the ground to shoot everyone’s jump and they radioed up to us to hang five while they do something to it. It should just be three, two, one, bungeeeeeeeeeeee, but I seem to have been out here for ages.

My brother Rick is down there somewhere looking up at me, but there’s no way he’d be up here. Heights don’t agree with him, never have, and anyway he’s not stupid enough for this. He only came to drive me the one hundred and twenty kilometres here to the bungy jumping centre. That’s one good thing about me being a mute quadriplegic - it’s brought us closer together.

The actual bungy setup is basically a two hundred-foot tower with an elevator cage that takes you to the top. Once you’re up there a couple of the bungy guys strap the rope to your ankles and con you to step off the metal ledge outside the cage.

I watched from below while the guy before me went up and he definitely didn’t look like a happy camper. When he got out on the ledge he shit himself and he froze. The bungy guys tried their best to talk him into it for about ten minutes, but they had no hope. The unhappy camper wasn’t going to jump for love nor money, so they had to give up and bring him back down. I was the next one in the cage and it stank to high heaven, because the poor bastard really had shit himself!

Something’s happening up here at last. It’s about time too. It’s not nice standing for too long on this bloody high ledge. The radio spoke behind me just now. It seems the ground crew wants them to re-synchronize the camera up here with the one down there. That’ll take a few minutes, but I don’t mind that. One of the guys is lifting me back inside the cage to sit on the metal bench again and that will give my crazy fear of heights time to settle down a bit.

I’m glad the bungy guys are still fiddling with the camera, because just thinking about that cliff climbing and parachuting was starting to set me off again. Before the first jump we told them I could stay standing OK as long as someone held on to me to keep my balance. We also said that when it was time for me to jump to just push me off. Sounds simple and worry-free, doesn’t it? Well, it wasn’t for the first jump. They farted around for what seemed like ages lifting me out then getting me standing straight and steady. Those extra seconds allowed time for my ‘vertigo’ to lock in hard.

We pre-arranged that all I needed to do was to shake my head and they’d call it off there and then, but that’s not an option in reality. I’ve been scared out of my brain and just about frozen with fear out there on the ledge every time so far. I feel bad now and I’m still sitting inside, so when I’m out there this time it’ll be terrible.

The other times I was screaming in my head to call it off, but I told myself that I was frozen with fear and couldn’t shake my head. That’s not true though. The truth is I’m forced to go through with it by Rick down there and mum and Younger Sister and all my other well-meaning family and friends who have ever admired me for any of my exploits as a quadriplegic. They’ve got a certain impression of me and the last thing in the world I want is to wreck that. I’m sort of expected to do this stuff, so in times of trouble my well-developed ego takes over.

The bungy guys are done with the camera and one of them is kneeling to check the rope one more time.
‘You ready, Danny?’
I’m nodding yes and praying they haven’t noticed the dry retching that I’ve been trying to suppress ever since the last jump. When you reach the end of the rope on the way down it stretches out, then it pulls you back up, then down, then up until the movement fades out. I guess because I can’t move at all my body doesn’t give and follow the changing directions smoothly. I get jerked and jolted around a bit. Except for that one time horse-riding I don’t think my body has been jolted in ten years, not even the smooth motion of walking, so my guts can be excused for heaving after the jolts today.

‘5 ……. ‘
Five? -
‘4…….3 ……2 - ….’
Why don’t they just start at three and count down fast?
‘1……..’
‘Bungeeeee!’

Down I plummet! Straight towards the beckoning blue swimming pool, then the rope stretches tight and jerks my body around and back into the air! Up, up, pause, down, down, jerk! Less after each jerky whip of my quad’s weakened body. Soon I’m just dangling above that watery blueness like a worm on a hook. But I’m not brownish-grey like a washed out worm. My face is a stop light in hell - bright red and burning hot from an eternity in Hades’ fires; and my arms and chest are from a drowned pearl diver below tropical waves - clammy wet and morgue white.
-
Rick is wheeling me out of the office and I’m dry-retching violently from time to time. We’ll have to wheel through a big group of new arrivals to get to the car. The third jump wasn’t good, but at least it didn’t take long. Rick was the one who said no more to the bungy guys. I pretended disappointment of course, but really I would’ve said it if he hadn’t. I’ve done three bungy jumps and that’s enough for me - forever. I figure every man and his dog does one jump, some even do two, but three is serious. And three in a row by a quad - there won’t be too many of them around, and being a bit different to the herd is what it’s all about.

We’re picking our way through the waiting group. Just a minute or so now and I’ll be in the car and I can die without everyone watching me.
‘Excuse me, Mate’ one of the group is saying to Rick ‘We got here just after his first jump. Why does he need the wheelchair?’
‘Stuffed if I know’ Rick’s answering without stopping. ‘There was nothing wrong with him before we came here. They said to do a couple more jumps to shake things back into place, but when that didn’t work they just loaned us the chair and said he’ll come good in time.’

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Post eighteen

24/1/2014

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There will be a new post every Saturday.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. … Winston Churchill.

    I still haven't worked out how to amend the author information at the side of this page, so I'll introduce myself again here. I'm a wheelchair-bound mute quad in my sixties and I'm been this way for thirty years. Quadriplegics tend to introduce themselves with their C1, C2, C3, etc classification, but I don't know what my C classification is. I can't talk and I can't move except for minimal movement in my left arm. That makes me pretty well stuffed, which is all the classification I've ever needed.
I live alone in my own home in Castlemaine, near Bendigo in country Victoria. Government-funded carers come in morning, noon, night and nighty-night to do the basics for me. Little insights into my situation are sprinkled throughout this blog. (Hmmm, I think I'll save this intro for next time too.)

    I'm a writer. I haven't got enough movement to type like normal or to access a computer like normal, but I have a special computer keyboard that is operated by a head laser attached to my reading glasses. I've been working on a trilogy of fantasy adventure novels for years. (The Drinsighe trilogy.) I had the three books all written and ready to be published, or so I thought, so I let one of my daughters read the first book, Ellydd Gate. Gemma is an editor by profession. She did a thorough edit of Ellydd Gate that blew away all my illusions.
    Ellydd Gate is a never ending novel. Never ending in the writing of it. No matter how much I improve it Gemma always sees more I could do. It was a good story before I asked her to edit it. Her fresh eyes saw a few places where the story could be improved and lots of places where the writing could be improved. I've incorporated most of her suggested changes over the last few months. I finished that yesterday and now I'm going through the book yet again, looking for all the typos I've created during my recent work. And here, I hope, the never-endingness of Ellydd Gate finishes. No novel is ever perfect in every regard. After this proof-read I'm done.
    I let my sister read the whole Drinsighe trilogy a year ago. I love her because she said nothing but flattering things about it. How couldn't you love someone who reads a thousand page story you've written and says she was disappointed ... disappointed that it ended?
   
She nbserved that I must have a good imagination, but I don't think Drinsighe was anything to do with my imagination.
We sometimes hear authors say that the book wrote itself. I think this is more than a figure of speech. I think nearly all fiction writers are like me. We are really just scribes putting down a pre-existing story. The Drinsighe story has never been heard before, but I'm certain it existed somewhere, somehow, and put itself inside my head bit by bit so that it could take solid form.
    I didn't sit down one day and think up the story. I didn't plan it out. I didn't know how it was going to to end. Often I didn't even know what the next day of writing would bring. I didn't know what adventures my heroes would have along the way. I started with a male hero and his sister, but I was surprised to discover that he dies fifty pages before she wins the day, and wins it much better than he ever could. Yeah, Drinsighe wrote itself.

Must go now ... it's a lovely Saturday morning and my dog Bruno is telling me it's time we were out walking.

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

August 1984 - Bendigo Home and Hospital for the Aged, Bendigo, Victoria
Sister Murphy ran the ward and her sidekick was another fifty five-year-old introduced as sister Graham. Had they been under fifty they would most probably have used their first names. sister Murphy attempted to communicate via my board quite a bit during the next four months, but age's inflexibility prevented her mind from loosening up enough to become more than mildly proficient with it. sister Graham never once struck difficulty with it, because she merely avoided using it for my entire stay. In fact, I'm sure she never even asked me one single question that needed as much as my ‘yes/no’ eyes answer - and that doesn't leave much else. I think not giving me a chance to communicate was usually just a way for some nurses to get out of work, because if I'm not allowed to express my needs and wants I obviously require less care.

I'd arrived at BHHA during morning tea, so after a while two or three young nurses appeared. This mitigated my worries about communicating with the older nurses somewhat. BHHA had long been a training hospital for State Enrolled Nurses. These SENs were as competent and likeable as their city cousins were, but they lacked the big city poise and savoir faire. The atmosphere of farms and of small country towns clung to these fresh-faced freckled young girls, and that reminded me of my own youth. Long dry grass, the creek barely flowing into and out of the deep swimming hole, and my first dabbling with sex in a paddock on a warm summer's day with a girl exactly like these, but younger.

Sister Mary oversaw these trainee nurses. She was Bendigo born-and-bred, with a tomboyish attractiveness and an infectious vitality that hid her quick-witted intelligence. Ward work would slacken and sometimes dribble out in the quiet early-afternoon hours, so often she'd come to talk with me. She was very quick with my Etran board and at times I'd dictate letters to her. After five fairly 'solitary' months it felt great to once again be able to communicate with the world. While we were chatting one afternoon she asked me casually to tell her all about myself. All??? On the board???
‘I was a talker, a runner, a commando soldier, a house-builder, a doer. Isn't it ironic?’

sister Murphy never displayed much of a sense of humour, but on that first day I got my only hint that her style of humour might be linked more to subtle or understated irony, or something like that, because she had placed me in a two-bed room with an elderly gentleman introduced to me simply as Michael. Michael had the severe shakes of a Parkinson's disease sufferer, so he wasn't able to ever hold my board still enough for me to use it, and as the disease had clobbered his voice he couldn't even hold a one-way conversation with me.

He was one of those endearing gentlefolk you meet from time to time, and whom you instinctively sense wouldn't hurt a fly. I'm not like that - in fact I carry a can of fly-spray. Most people warm to lovable characters like Michael, but some see their gentleness as a weakness. They come down on them like a ton of bricks. The night-staff at BHHA were like this to him.
‘Bzzzzz!’
‘OK, Michael! We'll be down there in a minute!’
(Bad news, Mike Old Boy - a nurse's minute is anywhere from five minutes to half an hour.)
After ten minutes he buzzed for help much more urgently.
‘Bzzz, bzzz, bzzzzzzzzzz!’
‘Alright, Michael! Get your finger off the buzzer! I said we'd be down soon!’
Another ten minutes elapsed before I heard a clatter as the three nurses put down their empty cups and wandered down the corridor to our room.
‘Well, what is it? Spit it out, we haven’t got all night.’

The questions were shouted loudly and slowly as if there was an inverse relationship between a patient's hearing and comprehension and their ability to talk.

‘Shit, you’ve wet the bloody bed.’

I was mentally fingering my fly-spray. That particular trio were so moronic that I had nothing to lose by getting myself in their bad books. Even when they all combined they were unable to use my board more fluently than to take ten minutes or more to interpret my Etran spelling of ‘B - O - T - T - L - E’, so the following morning I reported them to Sister Murphy and insisted she tell them that I was the culprit. They needed to know someone was watching them with Michael. I figured that at the worst they'd just refuse to answer my nightly buzz for a bottle and if that was the case I'd merely piss the bed and make some much-hated work for them.

From that time on they treated me coolly, but they knew to always respond to Michael's calls immediately and with the utmost courtesy. I couldn't do anything to protect the rest of the ward, but I was already learning how to put the Fear of God into nurses.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

My former travels. April 1976, Turkey.
He led me this way and that until we stopped outside a very seedy-looking café/coffee shop. It was uninviting, heavy, sullen. I had no idea where we were. The ploy was obviously to have me so lost I couldn’t risk not paying up later on. The inside of the cafe was no better than the outside – poorly-lit, bare wooden floor, bare wooden tables and chairs, two nasty-looking men playing backgammon aggressively at one of the front tables, and all but empty.The atmosphere was seedy, heavy. Sullen. The only customers were an out-of-place couple eating at a table further back with an Ahmed clone. The Out-of-Placers were neatly dressed, had cameras with telescopic lenses slung from their chairs and had the word ‘Tourist’ tattooed on their foreheads. Ahmed said something in Turkish to the cigarette-smoking sullen man behind the sullen counter as we wove through the sullen tables to a side door.

 ‘That man is my cousin.’ Ahmed threw over his shoulder to me. ‘This is his restaurant. The food is very good. Turkish food.’
He opened the bare wooden door and we stepped into a different world. The room was light and colourful. There were rugs to-die-for, both underfoot and on three walls, two low couches deep and comfy, low tables holding a hookah and a silver coffee set and that familiar smell that reminded me of home – hash smoke. Sparsely-furnished, yes, but everything in the room was honest-to-God, non-tourist Turkish. Even, I was to learn, the dope and the company.

 ‘This is Damad. He is my cousin’ Ahmed said, indicating the well-dressed youth lounging on the closest couch.
‘Another cousin, Ahmed?’ I asked. ‘Another cousin???’
‘No, Danny,’ he replied with a smile, ‘this time he really is my cousin. And this is my brother Tahsin and my other brother Abdi.’
Tahsin and Abdi were sipping coffee on the other couch. They were both older than Ahmed – Tahsin an architect and Arbi a med student. Damad was also studying medicine. They all spoke only-just-passable English. Except Ahmed. He’d left his street persona at the door. Everything about him was more genuine, more likeable, and his English was more correct and much less accented.

An amiable afternoon followed, hilarious at times, serious when they talked about Turkey’s present politics.
‘The café out there, Danny’ laughed Ahmed early on. ‘It looks like that for the tourists. They are happy to pay us much more if we can take them to a bad Turkish restaurant like in the very old movies.’
As if on queue the sullen proprietor entered with a large silver tray of very fresh afternoon nibblies – dips, Turkish bread, falafels and some sorts of meaty things. He was smiling, friendly, interested - so different now he was serving Turks.

The afternoon quickly ran ahead into evening, with the liberal help of dope and raki (the Turkish equivalent of ouzo). The evening was an enjoyable blur for me. All I remember is that my companions wouldn’t allow me, their guest, to pay for anything. They all saw me safely back to my Star hotel that night, genuinely urging me to move elsewhere – anywhere elsewhere. The following morning Ahmed and Damad turned up in a car to show me the country around Istanbul and the morning after that Ahmed saw me to the country bus station.

I’d decided to catch a bus to the Greek border and then hitch-hike right across Europe to the UK. The bus for the two or three hundred kilometres trip turned out to be a comfortable, modern coach mostly full of mostly well-dressed country people (I guessed). The only noteworthy thing happened when the road to the border ran along the top of the Marmara Sea. There was just the sandy strip between the road and the water for kilometre after kilometre. As it was a weekday the beaches were pretty deserted, but there were a few people swimming in the more populated areas. All the women on the coach (and most women in Turkey as far as I’ve seen) wear longish to long dresses and tops on the street, but the few women on the beaches were clad almost exclusively in modern bikinis just like back home. Every time one such woman came into view up ahead nearly all the men from the far side of the coach stood up to get a better perving view. And not one of their wives remonstrated.
 
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Post seventeen

17/1/2014

2 Comments

 
There will be a new post every Saturday.
Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much. … Oscar Wilde.

I've been told my posts are too long, too daunting a task to read. I'm cutting this one down, even though to my writer's mind it's wrong to chop episodes so short. You tell me.
I was also advised to give a brief introduction to me in the bit about the Author at the side of this page. I don't know how to edit that, so until I find out how I'll just put a few words here in the body of the blog. I'm a mute quad in his sixties. A non-verbal quadriplegic. The only movement I've got below the neck is a slight bit in my left arm. My fingers have tightened up into fists, so to move my power wheelchair I nudge its control stick with my knuckles - or with the side of my fist on good, warm days when my limbs aren't so tight and I'm relaxed.

While
I was lying in bed waiting for the carer to arrive this morning I was racking my brains for something to write in this blog. All I could think of writing was the negative things that go with being a quad. God knows there's enough of them, but that doesn't mean life itself is negative or bad. I should explain that, but I'm going to leave it for another time. Either its complicated or I'm too lazy today - take your pick.

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
August 12, 1984 - Bendigo Home and Hospital for the Aged, Bendigo, Victoria
I was brought here to Bendigo today. Nurse Belinda the lovely was sent with me in the ambulance to watch over me. She’s very good at the Etran board, because when she was on night shift at PHH we'd sometimes talk away a midnight hour or two. We did the same in the ambulance. She asked innocently if I knew the road we were on. Did I know it?   It was the road to my hometown! Tears streamed down my face as I spelled out that the previous one hundred times I'd travelled this road I'd been the driver whereas now it seemed quite likely that I'd never drive again. When I'd regained my composure the ambulance driver offered to detour to call in at Granny Thomas Gully, but I said no. I knew that having to leave again for more time in hospital would just crack me up.

We'd been followed along the highway by a car carrying Physio, Speechy, and the PHH social worker. They were coming to Bendigo to tell their counterparts all they needed to know about me. Physio had always struck me as a bit of a moralistic prude, but she was a physio and an amateur psychologist firstly and she'd defended my `bit on the side' activities when at PHH. She'd argued that my, um, nocturnal activities with the Other Woman were good physical physiotherapy and would help my deflated view of myself. The social worker had reason to meet the Other Woman a few times at PHH and although she had urged her to cut and run she was going to Bendigo to try to convince them that they had no right to interfere with my private affairs.

I didn't go to Bendigo Hospital like I'd thought. Bendigo Hospital is for acute patients and it does have full suctioning facilities and stuff. I was transferred to the chronic illness place, Bendigo Home and Hospital for the Aged (BHHA). BHHA's geared to long-term care and rehab for old people, but it was my only alternative. I'd imagined an old and decrepit building, but the main building at BHHA looks great from the outside. It's a beautiful old three storey brick building that's painted virgin white and sprawls to left and right. I'm in the recently-built character-less appendage of a rehabilitation wing around the side.

They lop off the occasional limb at Bendigo Hospital and send the amputee here to the BHHA Rehab ward until they're ready to re-enter the real world or until they suicide - whichever comes first. BHHA always has three or four amputees on Rehab, but that the majority of the ward's patients suffer from the ailments of old age.

August 13 to December 12, 1984- Bendigo Home and Hospital for the Aged, Bendigo, Victoria
At first I had reservations about BHHA, but I was wrong. Most of the nurses were trainees and were typical country girls. Compared to their city cousins they were fresh-faced, naiveish, unsophisticated. But as nurses go they were every bit as good as the best anywhere. The facilities for a specialized stroke patient were lacking a bit and the qualified nurses were rusty on trache care and suctioning techniques, but they went out of their way to brush up on these things immediately.

I'd been spoiled at PHH, because the main qualifications for entry into its nursing training program must have been good looks and good deportment, though the training ensured that these young cuties became good nurses. Forty was ancient for these city nurses, so in five months and over three hundred nurses I only ever met the one who looked to be near that age. When I arrived at BHHA my heart sunk, because the three nurses on duty were all at least fifty. I'd found in my first five months that people over thirty five or forty often have more trouble grasping the concept of my board, and as they climb in age they seem to be correspondingly slower at learning to use it - often never reaching the `nimbleness of mind' required to think ahead from my first few words to anticipate full sentences.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

My former travels. April 1976 - Turkey  
I checked out the magnificent Blue mosque the day after I saw Krzysztof off, first washing my hands, neck and feet in one of the stone troughs outside specific to that purpose. While I was inside it crossed my mind that maybe it wasn’t really right that non-believing Westerners like me should be curiously in a mosque. Then I remembered how I didn’t question my presence when I was inside that little Greek Orthodox chapel on Lesvos, and in Singapore’s Buddhist Fu Lu Shou-Bugis temple and in the Catholic St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne, even though I don’t believe in those religions either. That made me wonder why we pussyfoot around anything to do with Islam, and Islam alone.

On the steps outside the Blue mosque I was accosted by one of the many young Turks who latch onto tourists and show them the sights – for a not-yet-mentioned fee. His name was Ahmed. His English was fairly good but pretty-heavily accented. Somehow he got my name out of me before I brushed him off and went on my way. An hour later he accidentally came across me sitting at a table outside a Turkish coffee shop finishing a late lunch and a coffee.

 ‘We meet again, Danny, my friend. I am here to see my cousin. This is his shop.’
He sat down uninvited and plunged into conversation, not bothering to go in and see his cousin. I sipped the last of my thick black coffee, but not the potent dregs, then I brushed him off and went on my way again. Another half hour saw me looking hard into a small carpet-and-jilubas shop. That’s an incongruous combination – carpets and clothing.
‘Do not buy a carpet from there, Danny. From there they are a lot of money.’ Ahmed had accidentally come across me again. ‘My cousin has a carpet factory. I will take you.’

I had been staring into the tiny shop because it had a full-length mirror at the back for its clothing customers. I hadn’t seen myself in a mirror since God knows when. Not since back home all those months ago. I had fairly long hair and a beard back then but I kept it reasonably neat and brushed. Now the whole lot had grown longer and much bushier, beard and hair too. My plain jeans and neat navy-blue jacket didn’t scream ‘Way-out Westerner backpacking hippy’, but all that bushy hair on my head and face??? Even nothing-fazes-me me had a double-take. I immediately flashed on poor old Krzysztof and the remarkable way he accepted something so alien. I must buy a hairbrush soon, and get a haircut too.

I nodded dumbly at Ahmed. You had to admire his optimism. I mean - someone looking the way I did buying a carpet??? And I admired the way he persistently kept accidentally bumping into such an obviously lost cause. After three laneways and two back-alleys of cheerful selling-talk he stopped dead and took me by the arm.
‘You do not want to buy a carpet, do you Danny?’ he asked seriously.
I shook my head slowly.
‘That is good.’ he exclaimed, all beams again. ‘I knew that when we were at the mosque. Today is my birthday. I am not working today.’
Like I believe any of that.
‘My friends are at a party for me’ he went on. ‘I will take you.’
I told him he was on. I knew the day would end with him asking me for money for something or other, but I wanted to see how far he would go with this charade.


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    Author

    I'm Danny Furlong.

     
    I'm a non-verbal quadriplegic confined to an electric wheelchair.
    A mute quad.
    I've been that way ever since I had a stroke out of the blue thirty years ago.
    I live alone in my own home in Castlemaine, near Bendigo in country Victoria. DHS-funded carers come in morning, noon, night and nighty-night to do the basics for me. 
    I don't know the C2 or C7 stuff. All I know is I can't talk and can't move except for minimal movement in my left arm, which means I'm pretty well stuffed.

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