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.
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.


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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.’

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.
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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.
 

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.