Prognosis Read online

Page 4


  A palliative care nurse visited and gave my mother and me a lesson in morphine injection. I took three months’ unpaid leave from work, packed a suitcase, and moved into the family home with George and Bess.

  I set up the sofa bed in my brother’s room, but the springs poked through the mattress and I wasn’t able to sleep. In the room next door, my father soaked his sheets with sweat and convulsed from the pain. He needed to be moved every couple of hours to control his pain and prevent bedsores, and my mother couldn’t manage alone. She lay next to him and held his hand, helpless, while he writhed in pain.

  It was my father’s idea to move into my old bedroom. My mother needed snatches of sleep to prepare for what lay ahead. We promised him we would not have him hospitalized. He hated hospitals, loathed doctors. I assumed the full-time duties of nursing assistant.

  The palliative care unit delivered our own hospital bed. It was brand-new, the nurse enthused, which I took to mean that no one had died in it yet. My father would be the first. She showed us its features, as if it were a car: a hydraulic pump to control height and bed position, adjustable side rails, lockable wheels, plastic bed sheets. The grim prospect of watching my father die in my childhood bedroom sank in as we set him up in this bed.

  My room hadn’t changed much in the eight years I’d been gone. Only the bed and its position in the room was different. My single bed had sat with one long side against the wall underneath a window. This new, shiny hospital bed stuck out from the wall at right angles, allowing us easy access to my dying father from both sides. My father would die in the same room where he had read to me before bed each night. “Here’s Bod in bed,” began my favorite book, Bod’s Dream, and I never tired of hearing it. Years later it dawned on me that my father liked it because it was short. If it was particularly late, he would sit on the edge of the bed and recite “There Was a Little Girl” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, pointing at the curl on my forehead, hoping that would be enough. It never was. “No!” I would shout, worried he would leave. “Please! Bod’s Dream!” and he would groan, reach across my bedside table, open the book, and begin to read. I was about five at the time. Now, some twenty-four years later, we experienced the devastating reversal of roles that occurs at some point in many parent-child relationships. His deathbed book would be Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes, a book I could never bring myself to finish on my own after his death.

  The curtains I’d chosen as a teenager still covered the windows of my bedroom. Red, orange, and yellow poppies had become bleached over the years. My parents had indulged my request for a bright-green ceiling when I was thirteen. It looked terrible, but once done it was hard to disguise, so we left it there for posterity. Shrouded between white hospital sheets, under the green reflection of the ceiling, my father looked like a plastic Casper the ghost, the kind left to glow all night in a child’s bedroom.

  He chose to take up residence in my room because it looked out onto our backyard. From one window he could see the large liquidambar tree in the corner of the garden. From the other he looked out onto the jacaranda tree in the neighbor’s yard. In front of the liquidambar was an open stone fireplace—the kind of fireplace that could start a serious fire. Backyard fires were banned, and my mother had turned the fireplace into a flower bed, full of nasturtiums and lavender. George liked to sleep in it and catch the afternoon sun.

  We dragged an armchair from the sitting room to my bedroom so one of us could sit next to him when he was awake. I lowered the bed using the hydraulic pump and shifted the chair alongside so I could hold his hand.

  “How’s the PhD coming along?” he asked.

  “Um.”

  “What progress have you made, Pod?”

  “Um, well, none.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “I’ve been a bit distracted.”

  “Oh, I see. I’m sorry about that.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  I sat with him, holding his hand until he settled. I passed him a glass of lemonade, an invalid straw poking out its top. “Drink,” I commanded. He took a small sip and handed me back the glass.

  “Enough.”

  He had stopped eating a week earlier. Now a drip was keeping him alive.

  “How’s the pain?” I asked.

  “The same.”

  “It’s nearly time for your morphine.”

  I went to retrieve his stash of drugs from the kitchen and loaded up a syringe. What would an air bubble do? I wondered, as I flicked away at the plastic cylinder. Kill him quickly? Make things worse? I called my mother. She had a knack for injecting him so he didn’t even feel the prick of the needle.

  Fuzzied by morphine, my father looked blearily out the window. “Pod, would you mind moving that plant a little? I can’t quite see out.”

  I got up and pretended to shift the imaginary plant a few inches to the left and looked back at him for his approval.

  “Much better,” my father said. “Thank you. It’s quite a nice view, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  On another occasion after my mother had increased his dose, he grabbed my hand and whispered, “You’re so much prettier than the other nurse. And nicer too.”

  “True,” I said. “Would you like me to ask her to leave things to me from now on?”

  “Would you mind?” he said, squeezing my hand. “Thank you.”

  The pain worsened. My father, not one to complain about pain, began to shriek. We called the doctor. Double the dose, he said. I jumped in the car, drove to the doctor’s office, picked up the prescription, raced across the road to the pharmacy, pushed to the front of the line, grabbed the paper bag full of ampules, raced back to the car and home, ran up the front steps three at a time, and loaded up a clean syringe for my mother. It was a routine we repeated every couple of days.

  The pain got so bad my father agreed to go to the hospital. He would stay only one night, we promised him, and we would sleep in chairs beside his bed. The next morning when the pain was under control, we would bring him home. We carried him downstairs and stretched him out carefully on the back seat of my parents’ Toyota Corolla. I drove, my mother’s arm twisted around from the front to stop him sliding off the seat. We kept our promises.

  Home, with yet more medication, the pain became crippling.

  “Pod, you have to help me. I can’t go on like this. I want to die. Now. Today. Please help me. I can’t ask your mother.”

  Stupidly, I told my mother. “He wants to die and he wants me to help him.”

  “You want to kill him?” she shrieked, as veins began to throb in her forehead. “To murder him?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And since he’s dying I’m not sure how it counts as murder.”

  “Of course it’s murder, you idiot! We could go to jail for that!”

  “And who do you think is going to find out? He’s dying! We are criminal if we sit by like this and watch him die.”

  Relations between my mother and me sank to a new low. “Sarah wants to kill him!” I overheard her say on the phone to the doctor, and again to my great aunt. She followed me when I went into the room to sit with him. I sensed if anyone was going to turn me in for helping my father die, it would be her. In the end, I gave her my word. I would not help him die.

  I told my father.

  “Why on earth did you tell her?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. But I did know. I was scared because I didn’t know how to do it. How much morphine would it take? What if it wasn’t enough? Or too much, and it made him sick? I hated myself for my gutlessness. My father, the person I loved most in the world, had asked me for help only once in twenty-nine years, and I had failed him.

  It was the one thing for which I would never forgive myself.

  In the last ten days of his life I took to sleeping beside his bed. When my brother arrived from England in time to say goodbye, I gave up my claim to his old room because he was jet-lagged. Taking some cushions from the sofa, I ma
de myself a bed on the floor next to my father. He drifted in and out of consciousness. I didn’t want him to be alone. To die alone. I held his hand, told him I loved him, and asked him to squeeze if he knew I was there. Each time I asked, his hand pressed against mine.

  On the tenth night, I waited until eleven o’clock and went back to the sofa. I hadn’t slept in more than a week. Moments after I fell asleep, I felt my mother’s hand on my leg. “He’s gone.” He had clung to life knowing I was there beside him. He needed me to leave, to allow him to die.

  I sobbed—that mad, uncontrollable sobbing that only grief can cause—until eight the next morning when we rang the doctor. He came and pronounced my father dead. We called a funeral director. Three scruffy blond men showed up, looking like they had been dragged away from their morning surf. They banged their stretcher against the sides of the hallway as they made their way to my old bedroom. Minutes later they returned, my father hidden under their white sheet. They carried him down the front steps and loaded him into the open back of a station wagon. My mother, brother, and I watched in silence as the car disappeared down the driveway, my father finally gone.

  I locked myself inside my father’s study and wept. That same day I moved back home with George and Bess. I wanted my own bed and the familiarity of my own home. There was no point staying with my mother and brother. The glue that had held our family together was gone.

  The longer I spent alone after my injury, the more I realized I vastly preferred the company of dogs to people. Dogs never give up on us, even after we have given up on ourselves. They accept us as we are, love us without conditions, and do not cast judgments. There is no greater gift for the brain-injured person than a dog.

  I didn’t return to work. I received no compensation, although I must have had some form of death and disability insurance coverage—a legal requirement for all government employees. No one told me about it, and it didn’t even occur to me until years later, by which time it was too late to pursue. Months after my accident a solicitor friend suggested I sue Tim and Belinda. They should have insurance that would cover everything, he said. I called Tim and told him that the doctor had said I would never return to work.

  Tim was appalled. Horrified. Apologetic. He had no idea. He took a day to find his insurance papers and discovered his coverage had expired a month before the accident.

  “Go ahead and sue me anyway. We’ll find a way to come up with the money,” he said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I responded. “I would never do that.”

  My solicitor friend pressed me to go ahead and sue. I refused. Who sues their friends? It wasn’t Tim’s fault I had brain damage. I had insisted on riding his horse.

  A couple of weeks after the social worker visited, a letter arrived in the mail from the federal government telling me that my injury meant I satisfied their requirements for a disability pension, a form of social security offered by the Australian government to people with disabilities that prevent them from working. Once a fortnight I drove to the Commonwealth Employment Service office in Leichhardt to collect my check. It barely covered groceries, bills, and dog food.

  Ever since I had started work as a teenager—babysitting and stuffing the bodies of dogs and cats that had been euthanized into huge garbage bins at a nearby vet surgery—I had tried to save as much money as I could. I had just started high school when I overheard my mother talking to a friend on the phone. Her friend had asked my mother to go to a movie, and my mother declined. She didn’t explain why, but I knew it was because she couldn’t afford the ticket. My father, who was in charge of the finances, had grown up poor and was parsimonious with the money he earned. His priority, after supporting his elderly father, was to pay off the mortgage. Any money left over was used to indulge his passion for collecting rare books. The teacher’s salary my mother earned went toward bills and groceries. At the end of each month, we never had much money left.

  Overhearing my mother decline that trip to the movies made me decide that whatever job I ended up taking, I would need to earn enough money to be financially independent. I worked after school and during university, saving whatever money I could. With a small sum given to me by my mother’s father, I stretched myself to buy a small apartment when I was twenty-two, and stretched myself yet further to buy my house. I would never rely on anyone for money, and I would never be poor.

  Over the years, I had saved enough money to keep paying my loan for the next nine months. I had planned for a worst-case scenario, knowing somewhere in the back of my mind it was never far away. There is something to be said for pessimism.

  The pain inside my head intensified. It felt as though someone had dropped a concrete slab upon my head. I made regular visits to the local hospital, to collect a supply of painkillers. Drugs muted the pain, but they didn’t kill it.

  My ability to think had been stolen from me. A walk down a supermarket aisle bewildered me; I may just as well have been pondering whether black holes produce thermal radiation. I didn’t have the ability to remember what to buy, and I didn’t have the clarity of mind to determine what I needed in the way of food, so I often just bought pasta, tomato sauce, and dog food. The routine with the dogs reminded me that I needed to eat also, but for the first time in my life, I had no interest in food. I ate the same thing every day without even noticing the taste. George turned his back on my leftovers, leaving me in no doubt that he thought my cooking was worse than his dog food.

  One day I stood in the middle of a supermarket aisle and stared at the wall of pasta. Yellow-and-red packets, blue-and-yellow boxes, blue packets, red packets, yellow packets. I peered at the price tags lining the bottom of each shelf and couldn’t tell which packet was cheaper, which more expensive. The numbers all looked the same. I took a step closer to the shelf to study the different types of pasta, and my head started to pound. Corkscrew pasta, tube pasta, long stringy pasta in different widths, pasta shaped like shells, pasta shaped like ears. What was the point? Choice confused me. Overwhelmed, I reached for three packets of tube-shaped pasta in red-and-yellow plastic and dumped them in my shopping cart.

  Clueless as to how much things cost and unable to add things up, I handed the cashier nothing smaller than a fifty-dollar note. That way she couldn’t look at me like I was crazy. I panicked at the prospect of being humiliated by the person at the checkout counter. My greatest fear was appearing stupid; a fear I will carry with me for the rest of my life—a tattoo across my forehead only I can see. All I wanted was to be invisible. As I paid the girl, I reminded myself to close my mouth. I had realized that clamping my mouth shut hid the worst of my damaged brain from the world—effectively solving both my unsightly slack gape and the nonsense that came out of it. My words were jumbled. I knew that from talking to the dogs. When I had to interact with humans, I said as little as possible: yes, no, thanks, bye.

  After driving home and unpacking my shopping—two large bags of dog food, three packets of pasta, six jars of tomato sauce, I noticed the list resting on the counter next to the sink. I had forgotten bread, milk, fruit, vegetables, garbage bags, laundry detergent, soap, Vegemite, and a bulb for the bedroom light. It took me a week to make that list. I placed the dog food on the floor of the pantry while George nuzzled my leg approvingly.

  My emotional range had shrunk drastically and now comprised stupor, anger, and depression. Anger was the worst.

  I knew a lot about terrible tempers. My father was prone to sudden bouts of rage that sent him rampaging through the house, smashing things and beating my brother and me. As a child, I had no way of grasping what drove my father’s rage. When I had time to hide, I watched him transform from a distance and saw the ugliness and the damage that rage wrought. He never hit my mother, but he once Frisbeed a plate in her direction, which crashed into the kitchen wall a foot or so away from where she had been standing.

  Before my accident, I had a mild temper. I could turn it on and off and use it to good effect, or so I believed. I never lo
st control, and I was never violent. But the brain-damaged me was consumed by a simmering rage. Nothing quelled my fury. It assaulted me without warning. One moment I could be resting on the sofa and the next held hostage by an uncontrollable rage.

  When Edward moved out, he left behind a set of old kitchen chairs that I stacked up inside the garden shed. Those chairs often took the brunt of my anger. At the first signs of rage, I would go into the back garden and shut the door to the house with the dogs inside. George, Bess, and all the dogs and cats I would ever own in the future were the only things I spared my fury.

  Outside, I would remove a chair, lift it over my shoulders, and belt it into the ground with all my might. It took five hits each time before I would start to tire. Then I would curl up on the ground, rock back and forth, and sob. Rage robbed me of what little self-respect I had left. It signaled defeat, failure, and a complete loss of dignity. Exhausted, I would pick up what was left of the chair and stack it back inside the shed, ready for the next time I’d lose it. George and Bess would be waiting behind the kitchen door and would follow me back to the sofa. Bess would hop up next to me and I would hug her until my heart stopped thrashing. Not one to miss out on a cuddle, George would always intrude on our embrace.

  My rage was born of frustration, at no longer being able to do the things I once did without thinking. After the accident, the smallest things required an effort of gargantuan proportions, and even then often confounded me. Paying an electricity bill, deciphering a bank statement, or trying to find the key to the back gate. Those kinds of tasks caused me to erupt into an apoplectic rage.

  Brain damage had left me with ultrasensitive hearing. Certain sharp or sudden noises made me snap and turn into a madwoman. A poorly tuned radio or TV signal, a screeching tire on the street outside, or a car backfiring threatened my mental stability. The sounds of daily life had become an intolerable cacophony.