I was nineteen years old, on the brink of adulthood and independence. Suddenly I didn’t know how to feed myself, go to the loo or brush my teeth. I couldn’t sit up in bed by myself or dress myself and certainly didn’t know how to get into a wheelchair.
Picking up a pin with my fingers was beyond my wildest imaginings. It was the most impossible task in the world. It was like asking someone who was afraid of heights to fly to the moon.
As for walking, that word was now permanently erased from my own private dictionary along with running, rugby, horseriding, surfing and quite a few others.
The only comforting thought was that I knew I wasn’t alone. I’d joined an exclusive club of 10,000 to 12,000 spinal cord injury sufferers in Australia. Between 300 and 400 new recruits join the club each year — that’s about fifteen for every million of our population. At the Princess Alexandra Hospital I was surrounded by about forty new members. I had a better chance of joining the club than most. This club has a preference for males in the eighteen to twenty-five age group involved in motor vehicle accidents. Each year the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare National Injury Surveillance Unit at Flinders University in South Australia prepares a report on Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) in Australia. It reveals that a fifth of SCI sufferers are typically between eighteen and twenty-five years of age, nearly 80 per cent are male and one in five has been a passenger or driver in motor vehicles involved in accidents.
I injured my spine in the cervical segment of my vertebrae, in my neck, as opposed to the thoracic (the rib area) or lumbar region (lower back). Around 150 Australians suffer a similar level of spinal cord injury each year — more than half of all injuries. I can’t pick up a pin because I’m a quadriplegic or tetraplegic at level C7 on my right side, C6 on my left. My brain sends messages, like a telephone call, but there’s no reply from my chest down. If the message is for the muscles in the top of my arms something picks up the receiver, but below that it just rings out. So when I tell my hands to use the fine motor skills required to pick up something as small as a pin, the muscles don’t pick up the handpiece.
I didn’t bruise my spinal cord. I didn’t even crush it. If I had, I might have been what is called an incomplete quadriplegic — someone who can maybe walk a little, but who has no feeling below the injury and some loss of function. What I had is called a complete lesion. I cut my spinal cord virtually all the way through. I did a bloody good job and there’s no sewing it back. Maybe one day they’ll find a cure but for now, the phone has been well and truly disconnected. I’m what is called a complete quadriplegic.
In the beginning I thought I’d only have to take ‘walking’ and ‘mobility’ out of that personal dictionary I was telling you about. But I was wrong. I also had to cross out words like ‘sweating’ and ‘shivering’. I had no temperature control. Not only did my body not feel touch, it also didn’t feel hot or cold.
I’ll never forget my first shower. The nurse wheeled me into the bathroom in a special shower bed and lined it up near the shower rose. I heard her turn on the tap and could hear the water running and pouring down the drain. I lay there waiting for her to start washing me. The time passed and nothing was happening.
‘Are you going to give me a shower?’ I asked.
‘I’m halfway through,’ she replied.
I couldn’t believe it. She’d started at my feet and I hadn’t felt a thing.
The first time I bathed myself I watched the water hitting my body, cascading down my skin. I was all shiny and glowing with the droplets and the dark hair on my bare chest and legs lay flat under the flowing water. I’d discovered another word to cross out of my dictionary. ‘Wet.’ I didn’t feel wet.
Then there was the matter of my bladder and bowels. When I was in the acute unit before my stroke, the thought came into my head that I hadn’t done a pee for three or four days. I thought I’d be all wet. I put my hand down to feel my crutch and touched a tube coming out of my old fella. The nurses had been emptying my bladder with an indwelling catheter the whole time, and I hadn’t even known. I also hadn’t emptied my bowels for days, and eventually I asked a nurse about it. It felt so embarrassing to be a young man entering adulthood and having to ask a female a question like that. She was unfazed, telling me, ‘Oh, that’s all taken care of at night time and you wouldn’t even know.’ They had been using suppositories to empty my bowels. Boy, did I have a lot to learn.
So there I was — schoolboy rugby representative and keen athlete, fencer, jackaroo, steer rider, aspiring farmer and all-round country bloke — literally without a leg to stand on, and dealing with a few other challenges as well.
I’d hit rock bottom. A month after my accident, I was facing the toughest time I’d been through so far.
With hindsight, I suppose I was going through the grieving period. I guess I experienced all the normal stages — sadness, anger and denial. I don’t really remember the anger so much, but there was denial. I kept hoping I’d wake up and find out it was all a bad dream, a rotten nightmare. But each time, when I opened my eyes, nothing had changed.
We’ve all experienced waking up in the night in a lather of sweat after a bad dream. When you open your eyes, you think, ‘Thank God that wasn’t true.’ But for me, the dreams were true. Some nights it happened over and over. The awakenings were such a let-down because the result was a shock, again and again. I would quickly close my eyes, trying to shut out the awful reality, willing myself back to sleep — back into oblivion. It was like floating at the bottom of a swimming pool, in the dead leaves and murky, lifeless water. I could have stayed down there, lonely and sad, surrounded by plankton, drowned bugs and grit.
It’s a pretty simple choice really. There are only two options — sink or swim. I couldn’t see much life down there at the bottom so I decided to swim.
I had plenty of reasons to swim. I only had to look around me at other patients in the spinal unit who were worse off than I was. In the bed next to me was a guy called Gary. He was completely paralysed from the neck down and needed a respirator to breathe. When I was having a bad day, struggling to sit up in bed or to transfer into my chair without landing in a crumpled heap on the floor, I’d see him waiting for the nurses to help him sit up, to dress him and get him into a chair. I guess that was always in my face and so, as hard and bloody tough as it was, there was always someone else doing it a lot bloody tougher. That stopped me throwing the towel in. I used to think to myself, ‘You could be like that.’
Another fellow patient was a guy whose injury was a fraction higher than mine, who had been there for a couple of months before I arrived. He used to come up every now and then and we’d chat about the steps towards going home. He’d been through the worst of it and let me know things would get better.
In fact, there was a great bunch of patients in the unit when I was there. There are probably good and bad batches. I had a cracker bunch. Mainly young males, in their late teens or early twenties. They had suffered diving injuries, motor vehicle accidents and in one or two cases, freak accidents such as falling through the ceiling of a house. In that environment I felt safe and secure and there was a camaraderie between us because we all had the same problems. There was a lot of joking and carrying on about our different disabilities. And because we weren’t there for only a day or two — some people end up in spinal units for twelve months or more — it was almost like a family.
Then there were my own family and friends. I was swamped with cards, flowers, phone calls, letters and fruit. My room looked like a florist’s shop. At one stage we had to distribute some of the flowers throughout the other rooms in the spinal unit. Ten to a dozen letters turned up every day. The nurses had never seen anything like it.
One family friend wasn’t surprised by the response. She wrote, ‘I know you didn’t set out to test the efficiency of the grapevine and bush telegraph, but you must realise by now that news of your accident reached every nook and cranny of at least three Australian states in under twenty-four hours — surely an all-time record!’ Another wrote, with typical dry Aussie humour, ‘I hear via the grapevine Sam that last week wasn’t crash hot for you!’
The humour continued: ‘I hope they’re looking after you all right up there — good food and nurses with the TV in the right position … I suppose you won’t have even seen a TV for a while, just fences, a few Brahmans, bit of Mitchell grass and of course, the odd Bundy!’
Then there were the words of encouragement, ‘… you’ve got some bloody good friends here [at Avon Downs] who are going to stick by you through thick and thin.’
And: ‘There aren’t many people I know that have what it takes to make a go of any situation they may find themselves in. But you mate are one of the lucky few …’
Another writer said, ‘Remember — you’re “Territory Tough” now, so keep striving.’
And: ‘Look mate, I’m not very good at this but I think you know what I’m trying to say and how I’m feeling for you, it’s not “Poor Sam”, it’s “Come on, Sam”!’
Some of my friends found it hard to know what to say, but said it anyway. Like the mate who wrote, ‘It’s taken me a while to sit down and write to you, mainly cause I didn’t know what to say — then, I suddenly thought Sam wouldn’t mind what I wrote as long as it isn’t “wimpy” — right?’ Another said, ‘For a couple of weeks now I’ve been wondering how to start this letter and I still don’t know. I’m really sorry, mate!’
Then there were words of wisdom. ‘I guess the only thing you’ll never be able to do is play rugby … you gave it the best years of your youth and made all the friends and that’s what it is all about anyhow, Sam — friendship.’ And: ‘There is little doubt that you are going to get as much out of life as you would have before the accident, it will of course come in different ways, but it is almost inevitable that you will give even more to life, simply through your determination to conquer every obstacle.’
I hope I haven’t failed them, all those people who wrote to me or phoned me or sent me flowers or bowls of fruit. They certainly inspired me to keep going.
The person who was there for me the most, apart from my immediate family, was my girlfriend at the time, Kim McConville. During the five months I was in the unit, she visited every weekend except two. That was a huge commitment when she was studying at university more than five hours’ drive away. Sadly Kim’s and my relationship ended a few months later, unable to withstand the pressures and guilt I felt after my accident. But during my time in the spinal unit she came, weekend after weekend, with conversation and support, love and cheerfulness.
Her visits helped take the pressure off Mum and Dad because they couldn’t be there all the time, much as they would have like to be. They visited every ten days or so in that initial period, but they had the farm and two other kids to support, so they came less often as I began to improve.
There were lots of other visitors as well, including my aunt, Lee, and my godmother, Annie Ross, who also lived in Brisbane. During those first eight weeks when I was on my back and struggling to feed myself, they made up a roster between them to help. The nurses were there but Lee and Annie felt this was something they could do to make a difference.
One of the most overwhelming displays of support came about a month after my accident when six of the jackaroos and the stock camp cook, Sandy, came all the way from Avon Downs to visit me. It took them twenty-six hours to get to Brisbane by bus from Mount Isa — after a three-hour drive by car from the station — a trip which was funded by the Australian Agricultural Company. They arrived three days after I got out of the ICU, when life was looking pretty ordinary. They couldn’t have timed it better.
I think my appearance was quite a shock to them. The Sam they knew was six foot tall, tanned and generally pulling pranks on them in the stock camp. While they’d obviously been kept up to date with my progress, like me they were pretty naïve about what being a quadriplegic actually meant. They walked into the spinal unit and saw me lying there, with the skull tongs in my head, unable to move, by now reduced to skin and bone and my tan faded away.
One of those jackaroos, John Ryan, recalls, ‘We didn’t know what to expect and when we first walked in and saw all these things hanging off his head we were so shocked … it didn’t look like Sam. He looked like someone we didn’t know … it blew us all out of the water when we saw him in the flesh. That’s when it really hurt everyone.’ As hard as it was for them, they all came to visit me four days in a row, as well as spending time with the other back-seat passenger in the accident, Johnno, who had been released from hospital by then. He went on to make a full recovery. They also brought good news about Alex, whose broken pelvis had mended in a month, and she was back at Avon.
They visited me in pairs, so they wouldn’t wear me out. We laughed about the fun we’d had in the stock camps, telling jokes, reminiscing and talking about the latest news from the Northern Territory. At times I couldn’t help drifting off, I was still so weak, but I wouldn’t have missed them for anything.
Despite my dramatically changed appearance, John said, ‘Sam’s voice still reverberated around the room like it always had. And he made us all feel comfortable. Just like he did at the stock camp, he involved everybody and had a special little comment, a joke for each person. He made it so much easier for all of us.
‘We were telling him what we were doing on the station, but it was hard when I realised he was never going to do it again. So then, we tried to reminiscence rather than talk about the future …’
John kept a diary and on Wednesday 13 August, the day they returned home to Avon, he wrote, ‘Hope it doesn’t send him backwards’. They all felt their visit had cheered me up, John told me, and I was back to my usual jovial self by the time they left. It was true, their visit really lifted my spirits, and I felt sad when they left. I would have done anything to be going with them.
But I gather the trip home was a very long, quiet, sombre one. While they’d been warned it wouldn’t be easy visiting me in hospital, it had been much harder than they imagined. ‘We were still talking about that for a long time in the stock camp. It was a trip we were glad we did, but it had a profound impact on us all,’ John said. Apparently it was to be quite a few weeks before the normal fun and laugher returned to the stock camp.
Another visitor I’ve already mentioned was Richard Browning. He began to come regularly, often with a carload of friends from university. They would arrive en masse — loud, noisy, boisterous, full of one-liners. Their visits were like one long stand-up comedy routine without the audience. Jokes bounced all over the place and we laughed ourselves sore. The visits grew into major events, almost parties, and everyone was included. They enveloped staff and other patients in the spinal unit. In fact, everyone at some time was touched by their visits.
Richard, who is now an ordained Anglican minister and works in an Anglican school in Canberra, says the visits helped him at a time when he was wrestling with issues about his own life, faith and purpose. He told me, ‘In you, Sam, I had the avenue to face the reality of a life under a very real threat … meeting with you clearly gave me something. It would have something to do with your enthusiasm for the life we have, regardless of where we find ourselves. It would have something to do with my own faith. Can I join another at the edge of an abyss and have something to offer, even if it be simply my presence?’
While I felt buoyed by Richard and his friends’ visits, it was mutual. And don’t worry, I gave as much as I got. Richard and most of his friends who visited were physiotherapy students. They had been learning that one of the side effects of spinal cord injury, when the injury was above a certain level, was a full erection, sometimes for days and days. And it is true that during some of those earlier visits, there were days when the marquee stood impressively erected. My visitors would wait until there were nurses around, the younger and prettier the better, and the comments would start flying. ‘Nurse, I think Sam is a bit faint. Are you sure he doesn’t need an infusion to keep flying that flag?’ ‘Nurse, what are you doing to the man? Be professional, please. He can’t help it. It’s not Sam’s fault. What are you doing?’ ‘Hey, Sam, you don’t know this, but it looks like you are so keen to walk out of here you are growing another leg … and the nurse isn’t quite sure whether to fit a shoe or get out the nail polish.’
One particularly pretty nurse actually left. She walked out of the room! We thought for a moment we’d offended her, but she came back, having recomposed herself enough to complete her work fixing up my teds (the long white stockings) and straighten me in bed.
My visitors’ antics were never crude or mocking. They took on the role of speaking about the bleeding obvious, helping everyone laugh. Looking back, it probably helped me through the grieving process, allowing me to release the trauma bit by bit as I faced my future.
Day in, day out, my greatest personal help came from the nurses, my doctor, occupational therapist and physiotherapist. Again I was lucky. I happened to get the head occupational therapist and the physiotherapist-in-charge. They were the best the spinal unit had to offer and I believe I owe them a lot.
For the first couple of months I spent most of my life horizontal, being rotated from my side to back to other side like a barbecuing chook, viewing the world through the curved mirror. I could always tell when my occupational therapist was coming — she had a really funny laugh and very distinct walk. Things as simple as the way someone walked set them apart. It was a far cry from the vast open outback to the confines of a small mirror in a spinal unit in a big city.
My time in the spinal unit was like climbing a ladder. Each rung was another step towards getting home, and brought a huge sense of achievement. My first major step was getting out of traction — which meant getting the skull tongs out of the sides of my head.
If I had the same injury today, I’d be operated on and be up and about in a wheelchair within a week or two. Back in the 1980s, it took much longer. For eight long weeks I’d been living with the skull tongs and associated weights on my head. Every time they moved me it was painful — and the regular turning in bed was the most painful of all. Eating and any other motion also hurt as the wounds where the tongs were attached to my skull remained tender and sore, unable to heal because of the constant movement. I couldn’t wait to get the skull tongs removed. I’d been looking forward to it for days. It didn’t take staff long to free the tongs and, thankfully, it hardly hurt at all. It was a great relief.
But I’d jumped out of the pot into the fire. The traction was replaced by a SOMI brace. SOMI is an abbreviation for sterno-occipital-mandibular immobiliser, sterno meaning upper and midchest, occipital for base of skull, mandibular for chin and jaw and immobiliser meaning giving support and preventing movement of body parts. It was a frame that provided a rigid support for my spine and head, supported by padding strapped around my chest. It had three arms, one supporting my chin and the others supporting the back of my head.
How my chin itched! If I hadn’t shaved for even a couple of days, it was excruciating. All I wanted to do was scratch. The only time the SOMI brace’s chin piece was removed was to let me shave first thing in the morning before I got out of bed. What a relief, as temporary as it was. I still couldn’t move my head and I had to wear the new brace all the time, even when I slept. Sometimes I thought I’d rather have stayed in traction. The only bonus was knowing it was a step in the right direction and I could finally get up, although that posed a whole new challenge.
I’d been lying on my back so long that I couldn’t sit up without becoming so dizzy I passed out. The blood in my body had been pooling to the lowest point due to gravity for the past eight weeks and consequently I’d lost the muscle and blood vessel tone that normally pumps it back up when you stand. While that tone would return over time, when I first started getting up there would be a sudden rush of blood and my head would start spinning. It was an awful feeling, knowing I was fainting. I’d pass out and the staff would tip me back and gradually I’d come round. Then I’d try again. They’d lift the bed again, and I’d fight the dizziness. Eventually, I could sit up in bed without passing out. It was another tiny step up the ladder.
Once I could sit up it was fantastic. Finally, I could see the faces of the people I’d grown to know in the oval mirror over my bed, the staff who had helped me get to that point and the other patients I’d met. Seeing the world from an upright position, I discovered my horizontal perception of people was totally at odds with reality. The spinal unit, my room — everything was incongruous. I’d heard people telling me about the acute ward, wards two, three and four and the gym and occupational therapy room. I’d painted in my mind what I thought they looked like, but they were totally different when I got up.
I had the room sizes right in my mind, but nothing was where I thought it was. Each ward had four beds, two against opposite walls. A doorway entered from the spinal unit hallway, and straight ahead the outside wall contained a glass sliding door which opened onto a balcony. People talked about the nurses’ station — and I’d imagined where it was. But it was nowhere near where I’d thought. So in a sense, I entered a whole new world.
And I was incredibly weak. I’d push myself around in my chair for five minutes and I’d be stuffed. Being paralysed from the chest down, just holding myself up in the wheelchair was exhausting. I couldn’t believe how much strength it took to sit up in the chair, even with a strap around my chest and a chair with high sides.
But I was determined to climb that ladder as fast as I possibly could. Next I had to get into a sitting position by myself. First I learnt different ways to sit up, rolling over to each side while lying on a gym mat on the floor. Gradually, with practice and weight training to build up the strength in my arms, I learnt to sit up in bed by myself. It took me a whole week. Whenever I was thinking of giving up, I’d look across at Gary in the bed beside me, waiting for someone to help him. I would see him watching me. I’d try again.
Next I had to be able to get myself dressed. Before I started to get up, I’d been naked with only my teds and a sheet for modesty. There was probably a period of three weeks when I had lots of help to get dressed, in a simple tracksuit and sloppy joe, but then they threw me into the deep end. I can’t even start to tell you how difficult it was to pull pants onto legs that I couldn’t feel and that refused to co-operate, or to pull on a top when I had only two arms to balance a torso that couldn’t hold itself up. I was like a table with three wobbly legs swaying in the wind. Crashes were par for the course.
Then I learnt to transfer from my bed to my wheelchair and back, and from my bed to my bathchair and back. To begin with, I lost my balance all the time, but in the spinal unit there was always someone there to grab me and stop me falling.
Combing my hair was a nightmare. I didn’t actually have enough strength in my hand to hold the comb, so staff made a mould to fit into my hand and attach to the comb. It was such a tiny, insignificant everyday task, yet such a huge mountain to climb.
Even something as simple as brushing my teeth was suddenly a marathon in determination, requiring considerable ingenuity. I had trouble squeezing the toothpaste out of the tube and I certainly couldn’t hold the toothpaste in one hand and the toothbrush in the other. I would put the tube on the side of the bench and push down with my good right hand until a little bit of toothpaste hung suspended from the tube. The idea was to then pick up the toothbrush and wipe the suspended toothpaste from the end of the tube before it dripped onto the floor. If it did, I’d have to start again. If the paste dropped onto the bench, I’d scrape it up from there with my toothbrush. I wasn’t using my left hand at all, doing it all with my weak, inflexible right hand. On a bad day I’d drop my toothbrush. I’d never picked up anything off the ground so I had to find someone to pick it up for me. Then I’d start all over again. It could take half an hour to clean my teeth. Much later, after going home, I taught myself to use that left hand but in the days in the spinal unit I didn’t have the skill.
Getting myself around in my wheelchair required a feat of athletic proportions, balancing my unstable torso while I pushed, and the first time I reached out to shake someone’s hand I almost fell flat on my face. Little things like that had become a whole different ball game. My brain still tried to do things the old way, but it didn’t work any more. My computer program was well and truly out of date.
At first I was totally disorganised and I’d leave half my clothes where I couldn’t reach them in the morning. I’d sit up in bed, prepare to dress myself and my tracksuit pants would be over on the shelf out of reach. So I soon learnt to get everything ready for morning the night before. Often, just when I thought I was starting to get on top of things, something would go wrong. While I was putting on my shoes, I’d drop one off the side of the bed and have to call out for someone to pick it up. I’d try again. It was enormously frustrating.
The final rung on the spinal unit ladder was learning to negotiate the outside world. It was part of my rehabilitation process virtually from the time I could sit up in a wheelchair, but was the most difficult task to master. It was a big shock, taking my wheelchair outside for the very first time. Until then, I had no idea of the challenges involved. The unit was plain sailing. It was all set up with even, smooth floors, low-rising ramps, large open spaces and wide doorways. It had no stairs or lips or twigs or stones to trip you up. Nothing prepared me for all this. When I headed outside, I found myself in my own personal horror obstacle course. It was terrifying.
On my first outdoor session, all I did was go across the street to the café, chemist and shops. It was the little things that threw me. When I went to push the pedestrian button at the traffic lights, I nearly fell out of my chair. There was a ledge onto the roadway, a tiny drop of merely four or five centimetres. It may as well have been Niagra Falls. ‘How do I get down there?’ I wondered.
There was really no choice. I either let things like that stop me or I threw caution to the wind and had a go. So I pushed like hell and hoped it would be all right. I made it across the road without plastering my forehead in asphalt. What a sense of relief. That first time was terribly scary but it became easier after that.
I wheeled down the footpath and hit a small stick. It was tiny, just a twig, but my wheelchair lurched and I nearly went flying. I clung to my chair for dear life.
I was thinking, ‘This is a nightmare.’
Everywhere I looked there was something in the way, something that could send me sprawling. My brain thought, ‘Go down the street, go to the café and chemist … piece of cake.’ My brain didn’t consider accessibility and shelf heights and sticks and stones.
One day they gave me a series of chores. I had to go to the bank and collect a deposit slip, go to the café and order a pie, and finally, go the newsagency and buy a magazine. I left the safe confines of the hospital feeling petrified.
Gingerly, I wheeled down the footpath, watching for branches or twigs on the cement. I braced myself with my right arm, as I reached for the pedestrian button. No way was I making that mistake again! I managed to get across the street and wheeled up to the bank. Thank goodness there was a ramp. I pushed my chair to the base, but it was too steep. I couldn’t possibly push myself up. The café and newsagency were the same, they all had ledges or obstacles of some sort.
I asked someone to give me a push up into the newsagency and then I spent the whole time worried about how I was going to get out. Like a cat that had climbed a tree but then couldn’t get back down again. Where was the rescue team?
I bought a magazine and headed for the ledge at the doorway. I pushed, trying to balance as the wheels left the floor. I fell. The one good thing about falling out of a wheelchair is the fact that it’s usually pretty graceful. Slow motion. I just plopped out. I didn’t hit the ground like a ton of bricks. As I fell forward I broke the fall with my arms and hands. So much for trying to be independent. A couple of people raced to help me. They dusted me off and helped me back into my chair. I was so embarrassed.
Dejected, I went back to the unit. Mission impossible. I hadn’t completed any of the tasks without mishap. But one thing saved me from total dejection that day. I knew that everyone else in the unit had similar stories to tell. We were all in this together and fighting the same battles. We turned our mishaps into funny stories and we shared the road to recovery and independence.
As time went on, I still thought occasionally I was back in the Territory, but not so often and gradually even my dreams and waking moments were firmly cemented in the hospital walls. I was starting to settle into the pattern of my new life.
Each morning between 7.30 and 8am a nurse would walk into the ward and turn on the light. ‘Wakey, wakey,’ she called and my day would begin.
One or two nurses were assigned to each ward for every shift. The first thing my nurse would do was drain my overnight catheter bag. She’d give me a glass of water and have a chat before the lady with the pill trolley came around with my medicine. I was taking three different types of tablet, one to thin my blood, another to control muscle spasm and another to keep my bladder clean.
Another nurse pushing a trolley would collect a blood sample from the artery on the soft inside of my elbow. The daily testing was essential to make sure my blood wasn’t clotting but all the needles became very painful. After a couple of months in the unit, I felt like a well-used pincushion. One morning when the nurse came in to collect my blood I couldn’t bear it any longer. ‘Please take the blood from somewhere else today,’ I pleaded. ‘Can you take it from somewhere I can’t feel?’ For two days she tried her best to take a sample from my feet, but then she couldn’t pick up a blood vessel and had to go back to my arms.
After the blood tests, breakfast arrived. Generally, it was cereal and a bit of fruit. Often by then someone in the ward — which had four beds — had turned on their radio or stereo. It was the late 1980s, and these days, whenever I hear music from bands like Crowded House or Dire Straits it takes me back to that time in my life.
Then the process of getting up began. I usually had a shower at night, so after breakfast was cleared away, it was time to get up. My nurse helped me dress and get into my chair, until later on when I had mastered the skills myself. Even then, someone was always nearby in case of the inevitable crashes. There was always somebody around to help pick you up. In the early days, getting dressed seemed to take forever. In fact, I began to wonder if the rest of my entire life was going to consist of dressing and toileting.
The physio or OT often came to get me by mid-morning and my training continued. Physiotherapy involved sessions in the gym or pool, developing my strength and agility, wheelchair skills and techniques for sitting up and rolling over. Occasionally it included a trip down Ipswich Road. Occupational therapy normally took place in a room with a kitchen and other household items. I learnt to cook, use a computer and a knife and fork again. I worked on developing my hand strength and flexibility. It was all aimed at making me as independent as possible when I returned home.
Every Monday morning my doctor visited. With my physiotherapist, OT and a senior nurse, they huddled around my bed discussing my progress.
At lunchtime, when I was up in my chair, I’d have my meal in the dining room. In the afternoon there’d be a couple more sessions with the physio or OT, or sometimes there might be a talk to the whole unit about driving, or managing bladder and bowel. Mum and Dad often came to those talks, after which we would discuss modifications at home and the equipment I was going to need.
Each day was slightly different, and there was never a dull moment. Obviously it was that way to stop me sitting, looking into space, dwelling on my situation too much. After dinner in the dining room, I’d watch television or catch up with friends or family. By 8pm I’d climb back into bed, undress, get into a shower chair, have a shower, clean my teeth and be back in bed an hour-and-a-half later. To think I used to be able to do all that in less than fifteen minutes.
In the earlier weeks and months I remember being exhausted by the end of the day. Almost before my head hit the pillow I’d be asleep. It didn’t stop the dreams, but as time passed there were fewer and fewer.
The pattern of the days was also broken by the occasional social outing or driving lesson. I’d go to the pub for lunch, or to the movies — either with the hospital staff and other patients, or friends and family. Kim McConville, Richard Browning and a few other mates were with me on one of my first trips out of the hospital. We went to the Red Brick Hotel not far from the PA, and down the road from Boggo Road gaol, which was still open at the time.
It was a pretty dodgy pub. It was all very loud and full of laughter. We drank, not excessively, and then suddenly I realised my catheter bag was full. Everyone had had enough beers to turn the whole thing into a joke. Someone yelled, ‘Take cover, it’s going to blow.’ They dropped, pushing chairs over to protect themselves from the shrapnel of the pretend blast, almost wetting themselves from laughing so hard. We all were.
Finally, after everyone had recovered, Richard and Scott wheeled me into the men’s toilets. I was trying to tell them what to do, fighting to stay upright in my wheelchair at the same time. It was still early days, and I was still wearing a torso belt.
Things unravelled from there. Richard picks up the story: ‘We had a totally distended bladder bag, a wobbling jack-in-a-box sitting on immovable hips in a chair that kept rolling around with a voice that just kept getting louder and more confident with “the answer” just as the solution slipped out of our fingers. Scott and I each took turns at rolling around on the toilet floor holding our sides as a staff member entered to check what all the fuss was about — of course making it just all the funnier. Finally we got a plan: push Sam as close as we could to the aluminum water wall, unplug the bottom end of his catheter bag and send it down the wall. Well, that was what we’d hoped.
‘Handling a bomb that seemed set to burst at any moment made the task extremely difficult to handle. That and the eerie warmth of the thing made it all creepy and funny at the same time. Cracking the lid was tough and with such pressure the yellow river shot out like a fire hydrant spurting all over the place, soaking my hands and feet. It was a desperate state of hilarity where one paralytic man in a chair was accompanied by two others paralytic with laughter and struggling to stay on their feet whilst trapped by a floor that was too sodden now to roll around on and recover. You, Sam, were very much to blame and seemed to be the one laughing loudest.
‘When we finally returned to the spinal unit, we were all like chastened choir boys who had been muted by a collective shame. We couldn’t tell anyone at first because, well, we felt stupid that we hadn’t really considered the consequences.’
It didn’t worry me. Times like these helped lift my spirits and are fond memories I still have today.
Richard Browning said something interesting one day. He said, ‘I remember playing first fifteen rugby in 1985. I had had troubles with my shoulder dislocating and had just returned to play. I was set up by someone inside, who made me look good by going over in the corner. But I got an extremely heavy tackle and you, Sam, picked me up and said something like: “Woo hoo, your shoulder must be all good now after that.” I nodded and ran back with you and others to set up for the next play, all the while my shoulder was killing me and my ribs were screaming.
‘I wonder how much screaming went on, on the inside for you, Sam. We had such fun together, but the quietness, the other side of our leaving was something you had to live with all by yourself. Whether we were family, friend, relative, we all walked out sometime or other, leaving you alone. I wonder how much screaming went on in the inside.’
It’s true. Everyone else did get to walk out of the hospital door at the end of each day and go home. We’d had our fun and laughter, but in the end it did come down to just me. In the end, I had to find the strength to go on deep within myself. Nobody else could do it for me.
Until I faced quadriplegia, I never knew if I had that strength. Thankfully, I dug down deep and found I could cope. When I was alone, I didn’t dwell on my situation. To be perfectly honest, most of the time I was too tired. And I always knew that tomorrow, there’d be more visitors. Kim or Richard or Mum and Dad, or other friends and family would walk through the door again. Next time Richard came he’d bring another carload of raucous mates to brighten my day. Who would have thought, that day I picked him up on the rugby field and gave him support way back in 1985, that one day he’d be doing the same for me. Life has a funny way of turning out.
For many years Mum kept to herself one incident that happened in those early weeks. Neither Kate, Bill nor I were aware of it but at about this time Mum discovered a lump in her breast. Her first reaction was to do nothing. ‘God, we’ve got enough on our plate,’ she said. But Lee, her ever-supportive sister-in-law, would have none of it. She made an appointment for Mum with her GP in St Lucia, a nearby suburb. As they sat in the waiting room, Mum’s armour plating finally started to crack.
‘And what’s your problem?’ asked the doctor.
Tears welled. ‘I think I’ve got a lump in my breast,’ she managed to blurt out before the floodgates opened.
He found her a box of tissues and she grabbed a handful. ‘I’m sorry about this,’ she said.
‘Don’t worry. Are you in Brisbane for this reason?’
‘No. My son’s had an accident.’
‘Oh dear. I hope it’s nothing serious.’
‘He’s a quadriplegic.’ Once more she dissolved into floods of tears.
‘Have you cried about it before?’
‘No.’
‘Well, then — it’s about time you did,’ he told her. ‘Go for your life.’
Fortunately the lump was benign.