The crazy lady in ward four
The day after Zainab’s funeral, I was transferred to the trauma ward. I was wheeled—bed and all—out of ICU, past unmoving patients attached to life support machines or breathing apparatus, past their worried relatives. I was being returned to the land of the living, but frail, bruised and dependent on others for everything. I had my first shower, I took my first steps (with the help of the hospital physio and a Zimmer frame), I ate my first hospital meal. Everything was new to me, everything felt different. I joked that instead of having a baby, I had become a baby. I had anticipated night wakings, changing nappies, first steps—just not my own. But here I was, being the helpless one needing assistance to move, to go to the toilet, to wash, to eat.
My life took on the pace of hospital routines. Big Tony came at 7 a.m., with a clean jug of iced water and a clean glass. He would take away the rubbish, and carefully attach a new bin liner to my hospital table with a bulldog clip. He moved quietly, trying not to wake me if I was sleeping. If I was awake, he was the first day-staff person I would see—a welcome reminder that the long, stretching night was over, that breakfast was coming and, soon after that, Rima, Mum, Dad or Penny. We made light of the hospital meals. When I grumbled over a rubbery croissant, Mum disappeared into the bathroom, and reappeared with a kooky grin and the hospital hair-dryer in hand. She plugged it in, and crisped the pastry up nicely.
In the evening, it was Little Tony bringing a new jug of iced water—sunset, in the hospital universe. He had similar hair and features to Big Tony but was as short and thin as Big Tony was big and wide. I wondered whether they were related.
I had a room to myself, with a bathroom, but there was nonetheless a curtain between my bed and the glass-panelled door. People would dance attendance behind the curtain, tweak it back with a finger, stick their heads around it to comical effect. When I needed to get to the bathroom, I would banish visitors behind it; things worked better without an audience.
During the day, the social worker came to see me with the Transport Accident Commission paperwork. She took me through the claim form, and I was surprised to find injuries listed that I hadn’t known I had. The next time the doctors did their rounds, I asked about these extra injuries and discovered that some were incorrect (no fractured vault of skull, hooray) but some were correct. I had thought the ache in my breast was my heart breaking, but it turned out it was my fractured sternum.
The physio came to teach me how to go up and down stairs on crutches. We put her off for a day. When she came back, I was still weary. ‘There are some steps at the end of the hall. We can practise there,’ she said, enthusiastic and way, way too healthy looking. I shook my head. I was still not prepared to acknowledge the existence of the other end of the hall. The thought of stepping outside my own room made me swallow with fear. Resolute, she came back with a wooden step, so I could practise right outside my room. She helped me past the curtain and out the door, where lino-floored corridor stretched into the distance. I focused on my legs, which were sticking out from the bottom of my nightie, the left clothed in a red and black velcro splint, and both puffy with ripening bruises.
‘Okay; so, when you’re going up a step, you need to start with your good leg, then the bad leg, then the crutches.’ We did a few steps, before I couldn’t help but object.
‘This leg isn’t bad—it’s just injured. And my “good” leg is sore too. Can we call them something else?’
‘Um, okay. I guess so. What are you going to call them?’
I breathed in. ‘This one is Alfred, and this one is Hillary.’
‘Okay,’ she smiled. ‘So, when you go up a step, start with Hillary, then Alfred, then the crutches.’
‘Okay.’
Despite my protests, the physios also took my Zimmer frame away. Where the frame had hovered helpfully, I would now lean two crutches against the bed, or try to balance them in the gap between bed and nightstand. In the night I woke and fumbled for the crutches, knocking first one then the other to the floor. I tried to reach for them but I was stuck, and had to press the assistance buzzer. The night nurse came and, after helping me to the bathroom and back to bed, disappeared with a conspiratorial look, reappearing shortly with my beloved Zimmer frame.
Other family and friends started coming to visit. My uncle and aunt sat on the end of my bed, and squeezed my hand while we had a good chat about nighties. My midwife, Jen, visited, and brought me homemade rhubarb and strawberry cheesecake. I wolfed it down, while we talked about Where the Wild Things Are. Matt, Steve, Sam and Sal all came in at once. Matt hugged me first and surprised me by sobbing into my neck. It was a relief. It meant I could sob too; I could bring out these pictures of our still, little daughter, invite old friends in to the weep-fest that had become my life. I had words I could say when people looked at these pictures. ‘My hair was red and curly from all the blood. I look like another person. At least I know that red’s not my colour.’ Ha ha. I laughed—sometimes it helped. But it came out unnaturally, like an actor pronouncing the words, ‘Ha ha ha’—high and voice-like. After a while, I worked out why and added the explanation to my hilarious repertoire: ‘I can’t laugh properly because my belly hurts from the caesar and my chest hurts from my broken sternum, so I just have to laugh in my mouth—ha ha ha.’
They had never seen me like this. I had never seen me like this. I was a stranger to myself—a wounded, maddened woman in a hospital bed.
Tash, an old school friend, called. The last time we’d spoken, it was so I could get her recommendations for maternity hospitals. She’d just had her third baby, and I had been looking forward to being in Melbourne and on maternity leave at the same time as she was. Tash had lost a little brother before I met her, at the start of high school, and in Year Seven she had been hit by a car while getting off a tram. Now this knowledge meant something very different to me; like text that had suddenly become legible. ‘There is no silver lining,’ she said. ‘Don’t let anyone tell you “everything happens for a reason”—there is no upside to a child dying.’
As long as visitors were around, I could keep it together. Rima filled in the pink meal order form for me each day, and when dinner arrived, we would lift off the heavy plastic covers with great ceremony, announcing steamed fish and salad, or vegetable omelette. As eight o’clock neared, the ward got quieter, and I would kiss Rima goodbye and watch her disappear behind the curtain, listening for the sound of the door closing.
One night, a baby started crying in the corridor. My visitors all gone for the day, I sobbed along silently. Oh, my little love, it’s hard, I know. It was an unfamiliar noise to me, that little cry, little eh-eh-eh sobs from a small, shaking chest. I wondered, ‘What would Zainab have sounded like in full voice? Where was she?’ I wanted to hear my child’s voice, I wanted to hear her cry. But I also thought, ‘Wherever she is, she must be so scared.’ Crying that kitten cry with no one to hear her, to offer a breast, their arms, a heartbeat. I shook when I realised that she lost my heartbeat at exactly the time I lost hers, but while her heartbeat had been a novelty to me, mine had been her constant companion, from her very first stirrings as a few little cells. Oh, my little one, it’s okay, little one, I hushed that little stranger-baby in the hallway, from my bed, as well as my own sobbing self. I’d lost my moving, mysterious bump, as well as the still, little baby she’d become, so that it felt like an amputation as much as a bereavement—a piece of me severed and lost forever, leaving a gap that no amount of tears could fill.
My body still didn’t remember the distinctions between nighttime and daytime, and while it felt tired, I still woke every few hours. There’s no such thing as real darkness in a hospital ward. In the bluish glow, I found the button for the light, on the bed-goes-up-bed-goes-down controller, and opened my black-and-white notebook.
Wednesday, 30 December 2009
Now that I’ve started writing, suddenly it is hard to stop. Words soak out of me like blood. They spot my skin like measles and appear like a coating on my tongue. They leak out of every orifice, soaking into notebooks like the blood that haemorrhaged from my organs. I’m certainly talking too much but I always did that. This is different. Things are so heavy with meaning—there is so much I need to get across.
My trouble now is getting time to eat and sleep because I want to write so much. It used to be so hard to get the words out. Now, it is as though the impact crushed me like a blueberry and all these words came flowing out in dark staining lines of juice.
My handwriting was a fourteen year old’s again, punctuated with love hearts and sad faces with lines of small teardrops. The black-and-white notebook became my journal while the yellow book filled with lists—names of every caregiver I encountered, movies I wanted to watch, books I needed to read, questions for the doctor, things I wanted my mum to buy on her shopping expeditions for me. ‘Hannah’s Rules for Hospital’. Suddenly life felt so short—there were so many things that I needed to do right now. Odd memories came back to me: the old ivory bangle of Mum’s that I used to sniff as a four year old—where was it? My dad obligingly found it and brought it in. Thirty years later it still had the same comforting smell, and I wore it day and night. I collected other talismans to have around me—Zainab’s blankets, knitted by Mum and Penny, and the soft grey bunny my brother and his fiancée had given us.
With Zainab’s funeral over, her death (and birth) notice published and our sad news trickling out to friends, family and the world, I filled the long hospital days, and longer nights, with lists and projects: arranging my return to work, planning the garden at our new house, requesting pen refills, contacting my high school art teacher, negotiating relations between Rima and my family. ‘You realise, don’t you,’ my psychologist remarked months later, ‘that when you first called me from the trauma unit, you were quite manic.’
Thursday, 31 December 2009
It is so easy to get tricked into thinking that time is some substance that comes in measurable, equivalent units. As though we can compare surviving the last two days with surviving the next two days—as if your chances are as good. Instead every moment in time is its own catastrophe—its own miracle. A sibling to the moment which came before it, with its own personality, its own idiosyncracies and significance. Maybe it will be an average Joe Citizen moment, significant only to its loved ones—maybe it will be an Adolf Hitler moment.
If I could take my tiny sewing scissors and cut carefully around that moment—just cut along my line of sight when I saw the four-wheel drive swinging onto my side of the road. Just snip away that moment of impact, cut along to the quiet bit, where suddenly we were still, just before Rima started screaming. We’ll lift that piece carefully out of the picture and put it down somewhere else. And then we’ll pull those little edges together and stitch them, leaving a little more room around my legs and belly. Some blood noses and bruises we can deal with, but let’s just skip that bone-breaking, placenta-abrupting, heart-stopping moment of impact. I’m happy even to bargain over a broken patella.
But when I lift my scissors and try to pluck that offending moment with my finger and thumb, it is all attached. It’s that dilemma when you want to cut a picture from a magazine and on the back is the other picture you want to keep—terrible choices! So I find I can’t cut out that nasty little moment of impact without cutting everything else. There are no neat edges.
Even if I could do the fine snipping and stitching, I still can’t breathe life into my monster-moment. Because even if I wish for it without that ugly impact moment, I’d still be disfiguring time—amputating a moment, which, for someone else, might be the shining star of their lives. Time is not mine to snip.
Enough of the philosophising. My mission for today is to eat protein. Sharon, my nurse here in the trauma ward, is worried about my albumin levels and I can’t just blame it on the hospital food. I’m thinking this might be a good excuse to ask Rima and Erica to revisit the Afghan chicken shop on Sydney Road up near Pentridge and bring me back some bbq chicken goodness.
And there shall be a festival of eggs. I think of the wallchart in Mrs Galt’s home economics kitchen classroom—showing the egg in cross-section, yellow yolk suspended on its twisted umbilical-like cord with a neat arrow, ‘Albumin’. Perhaps that is what I need—an explanatory diagram?
One of my windows is starting to go a light aqua blue—a relief to have morning draw a bit nearer with promised distraction and food.
For New Year’s Eve, and with special permission from the doctors, Rima brought in a bottle of Bollinger, and, with my mum, cracked it open and tried to convince the nurses to have some with us. We cackled hysterically about Alfred and Hillary, bedpans and pain meds. ‘You’re asking the nurses for Endor,’ said Rima. ‘I don’t think that’s actually what it’s called. Endor is the Ewok’s home planet in Star Wars!’ We phoned the girls. My dad was being super protective and wanted them to go to bed at ten, but it was New Year’s Eve, after all, and we insisted that he let them stay up for the countdown. In the early hours of 2010, the champagne clearing from my head, I wrote an earnest letter to the new year.
Friday, 1 January 2010
Dear 2010,
Oh I had thought you would be so different already, and I haven’t even seen two hours of you yet. But I promised my Haloumi that I would be open to surprises. Please let that include some happy surprises as well as the rough and unfunny one 2009 dealt us.
My hopes are too delicate and frankly I’m too scared to hope or wish for anything at the moment. But I can start with what I’ve got and from where I am now. Right now I have my beautiful Rima and our beautiful girls. Please don’t go hurting them just yet, 2010?
During the day, I could hold onto the raft of family and friends and the distractions of food, doctors’ rounds and the physio or social worker. Nighttime was harder—it was just me and the big salty sorrow, with the beam of light from the night nurse swinging around slowly every so often. Pauline, the night nurse who had returned my Zimmer frame, often heard me weeping and came in to see if I was okay. She would pull up a chair and we would talk. One night, to try to calm me, she offered to rub my back. I rolled onto my tummy and with the fancy-smelling oil I had bought to rub into my stretch marks, she laid her hands on me and smoothed out some of my sadness, so that I could sleep for a little while.
Tuesday, 5 January 2010 1.10 a.m.
I don’t understand with all the buckets I am crying how I can also be peeing so much. There must be some great inland sea inside me. Perhaps when I move around you can hear me sloshing?
Oh I am in so much pain right now—a choir of pain, from the deep baritone ache of my knee to the sharp peaks of breathing with this broken chest bone. And over the top comes a weird melody of moans which I have never heard myself make before—a keening series of wavering ‘ahhs’ and alto ‘ohs’. I remember reading Shakespeare plays in high school and laughing with Penny at all the ‘Ah me!’ and ‘Alas!’ exclamations. But that was the luxuriously naïve laughter of someone who had not felt sorrow so visceral that it makes you cry out in pain.
And please don’t think that my analgesic needs are being neglected! Pauline and Pervin have just brought me my strong pain meds—signing them off in tandem as though I were a library book. No, I am being looked after well in that department—yet not too much, so I’m not living in a morphine fug.
No, while some of the other singers in this choir sing on the frequency of physical pain, most of them specialise in the other end of the spectrum—in sadness and madness. These are my two torture masters. They would quite like to drive me to a bad place of hurt and hate. They are taking me somewhere whether I like it or not, but I am pushing for a gentler destination—a silly puerile comic-grotesque direction in which people name their own legs. I know Alfred (left) and Hillary (right) are a bit old fashioned, but I really didn’t get a lot of time to think about it. One must make snap decisions sometimes and live with those decisions.
I need to find a type of crazy in which you can laugh at the most humiliating and revolting things, because this is the reality of my life right now—stinking out the room with farts that make even the flowers weep.