There are not many things in this world that I find heartbreaking. Death, disease, and disfiguration are part and parcel of my day at work. I see it so often I have become numb to it. Humans grow accustomed to the shock and pain of distress. This happens to all of us when faced with traumatizing anguish. We are habituated to it. How else could Jim Bakker survive waking up every morning beside Tammy Faye for so many years? Acclimatization. Combined with black out curtains on the windows and a wraparound sleep mask. It is our best defense from continual despair. Occasionally, something slips through our guard. Warning get some tissues.
I once had a 46-year-old autistic man to evaluate at the hospital. He had been hit by a car crossing the street and broken both his ankles. The genius doctor in charge of his case writes an order for gait training twice a day but no weight bearing on either leg for 6-8 weeks. You can only laugh sometimes when you realize these guys are cutting into bodies every week. I read the chart completely but enter the room without complete awareness of all the factors at play. The patient has a tense but unmindful look on his face. He is not fully aware of what is going on. When I ask him if he is in pain, he shakes his head, no. He does it more to not be in trouble than due to the fact he is not uncomfortable. He has the disposition of a well behaved 11-year-old. This man couldn't hurt a fly. I can tell he is gentle to his core. He wouldn't know how to hurt a fly.
'Where do you live?' I ask. A standard background question that has the nurse frantically wave for me to leave the room with her. What did I do wrong? Is he going to become upset telling me his address? Never had this happen before. Anyone who knows me knows I am not the most sensitive guy in the world, but I have plenty of empathy for anyone who is the unfortunate victim of an accident. This man is an innocent, in both the hand dealt him in life and with being involved in a hit and run. I follow the nurse outside expecting to be given her inflated fear of me making the patient feel uncomfortable. The practice of Medicine has become a safe space. No one can be allowed to hear the truth if it means hurting their feelings. It is quite honestly a disaster. The nurse tells me that the patient lives with his mother. They had both gotten off a bus and were crossing the street when a car ran a red light and hit them. The mother had been killed, but the son doesn't know yet. He remembers nothing of the accident. The nurse has already been asked several times about the mother. She cries as she tells me she doesn't know how to respond. Gulp.
I go back in to continue my therapy session with him. The man is very keen to do well and follows every instruction I give him humbly, while constantly apologizing. He sits up at the edge of the bed and a broad smile flashes over his face at his accomplishment. I tell him that he can't stand up for a few weeks and that he will need to go to a nursing home for some rehab, if he is accepted. He thanks me. I am not sure he fully understands, but he is not upset at the news. Then come the words that tear at my heart, 'I want to make Mom proud of me for when I get home.'
My throat chokes. 'You will mate. You will,' I barely get out.
I get him back to lying down and give him some sincere encouragement while I struggle to keep myself together. The five paces to exit the door seem like a marathon. Apart from not yelling at the punks in Santa Monica this is the only time in my life I have kept my mouth shut. In whatever way people may judge a person for the things they have done during their life, or their sarcastic attitude toward everything, they may never see how a heart reacts during the moments like this. Now you can call me a flipping softie, tree hugger.
This is not the most tear-jerking moment in my life. Not by a long shot.
Every guy has that one girl that slips through their fingertips in their life. The one that got away. I am not talking about the drunk hag at the bar on Saturday night who said she would let you take her home, then went to the bathroom, passed out, and you never saw her again. I am talking about one special girl. The metaphorical Helen of Troy. The one girl no one else could measure up to in your eyes. (Talking to the guys and lesos here) The '24 years of living next door to Alice,' in your world. The lady with whom you might have had the briefest of moments to impress her and you either failed to capitalize on it or, went completely tits up and buggered it to hell. And this is the type of woman that men only get one chance in life with. We have all had our shot at a Sophia Loren type. A superstar. A woman that transcends beauty and desire. Most of us crash and burn, never to speak a word of our failure to anyone. Some of us barely survive to tell the tale.
Barbie was my Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch combo hands down. I first saw her across the tables at the Burleigh Heads tavern beer garden in 1985 at Schoolies Week. This is the Australian Spring Break equivalent, except that it is held at the end of the education year not at some random point in March when everyone in the country is sick to death of winter. In the USA there are several destinations to find Spring Break shenanigans; South Padre Island, TX; Miami, FL; Colorado ski resorts; Cancun and the Mexican Riviera; or the Dominican Republic. In Australia there is only one spot for Schoolies week, the Gold Coast. A strip of high rise concrete jungle looming over stretches of white sands in South-East Queensland. Extending from the spit at Southport to Snapper Rocks at the end of Coolangatta Beach.
Schoolies is a coming of age event. Seventeen-year-old high school students become adults. While 18 to 22-year-old university students revert back to being kids. Friendships forged in the fires of morning assembly are solidified over a celebratory beer at the Broadbeach tavern. For many, it is their first tentative steps into a brave new world. Emotions run high. The memories last a lifetime. I can't remember any grades from my senior year, but I recall every broken item we couldn't fix in the apartment that me and 18 mates stayed in during Schoolies that lead to our security deposit being forfeited.
Barbie and I danced around my sheltered feelings for her for the better part of a decade. In the same way a stray tabby stalks a pigeon that doesn't fly away but continues to prance around the backyard. Despite being surrounded by an army of suitors she remained single for the most part. During this time, she became one of my closest friends and a true confidant. Eventually, it was the overwhelming pull of my wanderlust that kept us physically separated by thousands of miles. In any times of loneliness and despair it would be her that I called for reassurance that I meant something to somebody back home. She was always there. Responsive, unhurried, compassionate. Is it any wonder that embers of attraction stoked firmly over the years into a blast furnace?
It was a near tragedy that finally brought us together.
One fateful day on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, California my life is almost terminated. A head on collision with a landscaping truck, followed by a rear ending by a sedan, leaves me clinging for life in a Los Angeles intensive care. Along with other structural injuries the restriction of the seat belt ruptures my intestine. My stomach wound is left open for 23 days and I am fed by drip. I am not allowed to eat solid food for 29 days. A month of hospitalization returns me sufficient strength to have my little sister haul me onto a QANTAS flight across the Pacific to get home. Pre-arrival in Sydney I am beset with stomach pains. The medico at Sydney airport clears me to continue onto Brisbane. The trip north starts with me using an air sickness bag for the first time in my life while the plane is still parked at the gate. The flight is thankfully short. I last an hour on the ground in Brisbane before I am bundled out of my sister's house and driven to the closest Emergency Room. I require another emergency operation to untangle scar tissue obstructing my bowels.
The worst thing about stomach surgery has nothing to do with being cut open. It is to do with the tube that must go into your stomach to drain the acid. I was in a coma when they inserted the one in L.A., so I never felt a thing. At the Brisbane Mater I am wide awake. The preferred orifice for access is not the mouth it is the nostril. Years from now some bright Medical student may be brave enough to question, why is the tube inserted into the nose rather than the mouth? The professor may respond, 'you know, that is brilliant we didn't think of that.' Or he may say, 'we do it through the nostril because it is shit loads more uncomfortable for the patient.' All that I know is I have never felt anything as deeply unpleasant as the doctor inserting a garden hose down my nose then asking me to swallow at the same time as it scrapes the back of my throat. It is that distressing that I would have preferred access the long way via my anus.
To make the tube slide down the esophagus the doctor liberally covers it with more lubricating jelly than Ron Jeremy used in his entire adult film career. Most of that lubrication gets trapped in my nasal cavity with the initial insertion, to be sneezed out at an inopportune time in the future. After surgery the tube acts as a drain to remove unsightly dark stomach juice that can leak from a stitched-up intestine and cause an infection. The liquid is collected into a clear plastic jar that sits near the patient's head. This allows visitors to see how foul the contents of my stomach are. Once my alimentary canal is sufficiently healed the action of peristalsis will recommence. This is the muscular contraction along the length of the small intestine. The telltale sign to know it is happening is the release of gas through the rectum. A patient can then have the tube removed and resume eating. After 29 days I am famished. I have lost 50 pounds, a quarter of my body weight. All without doing a scrap of exercise. The diet of the future - intravenous drip nourishment.
Three days after the operation in Brisbane my parents are sitting beside my bed when the curtain is drawn back by Barbie! Oh my god, did I die and go to heaven? I don't know what to do but I am feeling stoked. How I am supposed to react if Sophia Loren suddenly stopped shooting a commercial to wander over to me standing in the peanut gallery and say, g'day. I quickly shoo my parents out of the room and tell them to instruct the nurses, 'no one is to disturb me for any reason. If the monitor shows my pulse stops, then ignore it.'
Barbie sits down. 'How are you feeling?'
How am I feeling? Like the limousine starts backing out of the drive then Alice jumps out screaming, 'I can't leave, I love him.' That is how I feel. We talk for half an hour catching up on our lives over the last five years. She laughs, recounting the time that I call her drunk from the States three consecutive nights over one weekend. She was away so her Dad kept answering the phone. He told her that I always had no recollection of calling the day before. I had no recollection of ever calling. A spectacular accomplishment in the annals of drunk dialing stupidity.
'You were always so nice,' she states and reaches out to hold my hand. Oh my god, it is really happening. Life has finally stopped being a shit show and come good. This is a moment I have waited years for. A fairy tale ending to the hardships I have endured. It was if in the end of the movie Casablanca, Ingrid Bergman abruptly decides to leave her wealthy Czech git of a husband to shack up with the impoverished Humphrey Bogart and work as a waitress in his dive bar.
However, her unanticipated move catches me by surprise. There is a reflexive tightening of all the muscles as my heart rate shoots into the low 170s. Before I can stop myself, I pass a significant amount of gas out my arse. The unapproving surprise registers clearly on Barbie's face. That is bad. There might have been a chance to recover from this if I graciously apologize. Perhaps excuse the horrendous event away as the result of an unfortunate side effect from the medication that is keeping my life hanging on by a thread. But, I am thrilled. I have a smile from ear to ear. 'You little ripper. Been waiting for that for days!' I exclaim.
Barbie's eyes spring wider at my comment. She lets go of my hand and stands up. 'You get to feeling better okay, Simon,' she says, then quickly walks out. Silence pervades the room, much like the smell. Why did the Universe choose that exact instance to screw with me? The happiest and saddest day of my life. To this day I regret that fart and I don't regret many of them. I reach for the intercom, 'nurse, I passed gas. Can I get something to eat please?' They don't have pills to heal a broken heart. If they did, the likely prominent side effect would be erectile dysfunction.
This is not the only time in my life that I end up in a hospital after a plane flight. I did it so well the first bloody time I just had to take another shot at it.