Looking back, looking forward

Sign of life

Exactly a year ago I found myself in hospital with a back injury I’d ignored for three months. I needed a microdiscectomy to pick out the fragment of disc that had broken off and lodged on my sciatic nerve. The word, microdiscectomy, is inked in my journal with a little square drawn around it as if it might somehow make it less foreign, as if by writing it down I might understand what was happening. The operation was a success, but at times I felt so weak I wondered if I would ever be able to perform the simplest of tasks again. Last week, (in a swoop of serendipity) a year to the day that I was operated on, I climbed the very snowy flank of Mt Ossa in Cradle Mountain National Park with three old friends. The snow was too deep to attempt the summit, but we made it high enough to see out over the park to Cradle Mountain in the distance. We sat on a ledge and felt the expanse of sky and space and the headiness of being above life.

When I got home I pulled out the journal I kept under my pillow in hospital last year.

Here are a few days:

Day 1

Emergency Department. Morphine is good.

Day 2

Up until now the movement of time has had the bitter terror of a nightmare. I spent last night in Emergency rocked by waves of nausea and with such a headache that I almost forgot the pain in my leg. I had an MRI. Surgery is mentioned. I am very reluctant. I have cortisone injected into the nerve that is inflamed. The doctor says if it works it might buy me a few months. I have the feeling he does not think it will work.

-

It’s much later. I am in a ward with 5 other ladies, how sick they are, and yet here I am with them.

The kindness of the nurses. The old ladies needing help to the toilet. Their quavering voices, their sorry to be a bother. They seem to fall into two categories, the demanding angry ones and the meek ones. I am meek, but inside I’m furious.

I am going to write myself a schedule.

1. Have a shower

-

The lady across from me was born in 1929 and she has no next of kin. She is suffering from a sore leg and a cancer of the blood. She is clinging to her independence. She tells the nurse she can go home because she has a good neighbour.

-

This morning, before the hiss of cars, the birds sung.

_

Ruth is opposite me. ‘Tubes everywhere’. She must be 93. Pretty handy with a mobile phone.

-

A lady comes around selling papers and mags. My less sick wardmates scrabble for change, one asks, is it the most recent New Idea?

_

Constant beeping in different tones, like frogs calling.

_

Last night, in one of the few quiet moments I lay and listened. In the absence of human voices there was so much humming machinery. I thought of our quiet house where the noises are a scuffle of rats in the ceiling, the rattling growl of a possum on the roof, the occasional hum of the pump. But mostly it’s just crickets and frogs and the quiet of solid stone. All night I drifted in a sea of beeps and flashing lights.

Day 3

Because I have spent years managing to keep my health insurance up, I have been moved from the old ladies ward to a room of my own with a window that opens, a view to mountains, a shower and a loo.

_

Pain launched a sneaky assault after a walk with physio. Does not look like nerve block has worked.

_

M visited with flowers and lollies. J turned up, ate all the lollies and brought me a magazine, some more of my favourite pens and some post-it notes (requested). He picked a posy from the garden (poppies, catmint, roses) which all drooped at the place they found themselves. The G’s sent a flowers (of the robust sort), the most beautiful tea flask and herbal tea.

_

Very strange being out of the busyness of the ward and the organised chaos of emergency. In this quiet room, with my flowers and books, if it wasn’t for the pain I would feel like I’m on a holiday.

_

Sort of miss the old dears. Sleepy. Drugs.

_

Day 4

Slept. My god, it was heaven even with all the beeps, the checking of blood pressure, temperature, the questions as to whether my legs were still working. Shows how bad the past 48 hours have been. The night nurse wrote her name with a smiley face on the whiteboard. Her perfume was so strong it made me gag. She was fierce, the sort of fierce where you feel the facade of it, but the effort to push past it is huge and I do not have the energy. Dreamt of being paralysed and murdered. Hardly surprising.

-

Would kill for a proper coffee.

-

C sends me a poem John O’Donohue poem.

This is the time to slow

Lie low to the wall

Until the bitter weather passes

Try, as best you can, not to let

The wire brush of doubt

Scrape from your heart 

All sense of yourself 

And your hesitant light. 

If you remain generous, 

Time will come good; 

And you will find your feet

Again on fresh pastures of promise. 

Where the air will be kind 

And blushed with beginning. 

Appetite is gone, shut down by morphine. Is this why addicts are skinny?

-

The door is open a crack. The corridor is busy, full of people. Vacuum cleaners are being pushed, nurses rush past with blood pressure machines, another patient on a bed is wheeled by. A huddled conference, the nervous click of a pen in and out.

-

The surgeon says he will operate tomorrow. There’s no choice.

-

A change has moved through. I can barely see the edge of the veranda outside my room. The valley is white. The cold air on my face has the faintest hint of wild.

***********

Transcribing these entries is like revisiting a dream. I remember the scent of snow on the Hobart air as it came to me through the open window and how impossible it seemed I would ever be back up in the mountains. I lay in the quiet, my body this hurt and fragile thing, and read the poem over and over. Lie low to the wall/ Try, as best you can/you will find your feet. The words were a gentle brushing of hope, the kindness of them and the acknowledgement of pain and the surrender to time held me, but I don’t think I really understood their promise until last week - a year after I lay in that bed - when I climbed up the side of a mountain and breathed in the snow crisp air.

mm

Book News

In a slightly surreal update, one of my writing group sent a message saying Graft is up on Booktopia’s site to preorder! Here it is, evidence that it is out there in the wide world. In reality it is sitting in a print out on my desk and I am working through it line by line, page by page. But if you’re eager to read, please do pre order it. I do not understand how this works, but I think it makes a little buzz in internet land that alerts the industry that people want to read it.

Reading

I’ve returned to shearing and general chaos so there has not been much reading time. I finished Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait (great) and read Patricia Lockwood’s review of George Saunders new book of short stories Liberation Day in the LRB. It’s my favourite sort of review where Lockwood goes deep and riffs on Saunders backlist and her responses to it. I’m not sure I agree with her take, but the review is worth reading just for its craft.

Listening

ABC Earshot - this episode featuring my friend Kim Berry on trying to navigate the NDIS. But more than the nightmare of the NDIS, Kim is so articulate on the rollercoaster of parenting a child with a disability. I’ve also listened to two very gentle audiobooks while cleaning and cooking - Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, which is just delightful. I loved Miss Benson’s Beetle and I’m not sure why it’s taken so long to listen to her bestseller. Then I listened to an older Alexander McCall Smith - 44 Scotland Street and it just made me laugh. His Ian Rankin character is hilarious. I’m about to start Niall Williams This is Happiness. Will report back.

Have a good week sitters.

mx