Forged with Flames (11 page)

Never in my most fertile imagination did I envisage that
this place which had brought me so much joy, friendship, and contentment would one day be the scene of my worst nightmare and a death trap for twelve firefighters.

Upper Beaconsfield was a real little village then but nothing like English villages. The latter were soaked in history which seemed to emanate from the cobblestoned streets and the buildings. In Upper Beac, it felt as if history was just beginning. I didn't know or appreciate then that people from the world's oldest continuous culture still inhabited this ancient continent. Even old things here were new. There wasn't much in the way of shops; just the Post Office, a milk bar, butcher's shop and general store, as well as the inevitable village garage. Everyone, however, was welcoming and friendly as they had been in Berwick and, to my surprise and delight the neighbour on one side came in to introduce herself, riding a horse. For me, this felt so quintessentially Australian.

The next ten years seemed to pass very quickly. Astonishingly, my parents decided to visit us in 1973, a magnificent effort for people who had never flown and had such limited resources. I could hardly believe it. I felt so grateful to them for making such a sacrifice to take this long and expensive journey for me. Sarah was born in 1976, followed two years later by Rachel. We joined the local Anglican church which was conveniently located at the end of our street—a charming white weatherboard building with a pitched, tiled roof and stained-glass windows. This welcoming and supportive community immediately catapulted us into a ready-made social life. Terry and I went to Bible studies, taught Sunday School, helped out at working bees and participated in progressive dinners, which were all the craze then—that's about as wild as we got!

Upper Beaconsfield truly was my ideal of a country village, with a strong community life which we embraced, and close and enduring friendships. I became involved in whatever the girls were doing, even to the point of standing in for the preschool assistant, teaching religious instruction and listening to reading when Sarah started at Upper Beaconsfield Primary. Naturally, my anxieties would pop up again when I stood in front of a class, but the girls loved having me there so I would push my panic to one side, just get in there and do whatever was needed.

Procie, one of our elderly neighbours who lived just across the road, took to coming in for cups of tea at least twice a week, which I really appreciated. His wife died just before Rachel was born and he became a grandfather figure to us all, babysitting once a week while Terry and I went down to Beaconsfield for some time together over games of badminton or occasionally to the drive-in in the Dormobile.

For the first time in my life, I had the time and financial freedom to explore interests that would have been impossible to pursue in my previous life. I began learning the flute, and took to this new passion so much that my teacher in Berwick even persuaded me to sit an exam—still a frightening prospect. Once the girls arrived, we couldn't sleep comfortably in the Dormobile but made up for it with other holidays, cruising down the Murray River in a steamboat, and staying at a friend's holiday house in Dromana. Mostly, our life centred around the home, our sanctuary. Terry and I were both still essentially quiet people despite our many friends, and just loved spending time together, reading companionably, walking Tammy and Dusky, or playing board games or cards. Our life together flowed easily. It was full and busy in these years, but contentedly so. There
were things I missed about England, though—the gentle, green beauty of the English countryside and my mother, especially when the girls came along. But my Australian haven in the bush was where I wanted to be; I'd created with Terry the family life I'd always craved.

Because my time was taken up with family, community and church commitments, the difficult side of my life was kept in some sort of perspective. I was struck with nervousness at times in what would seem ordinary everyday situations—helping out at school or kinder, playing the flute in front of people, even making a meal for visitors. I was always aware that I hadn't really dealt with my anxiety issues but with so many people around to take my mind off them, they didn't seem the overwhelming problems they'd once been. I had finally started to feel that I belonged. Life was amazingly good in so many ways.

Christmas 1982, unlike the blur of Christmases before, is lodged in my mind, a bitter-sweet memory. I was thirty-two at the time. We spent it at home with the girls, Flo and John, and Procie. The pine tree Terry had chopped down from the bottom of our block stretched, festooned, up to the ceiling. Christmas cards hung in an arc of string on the wall, and the dining-room table was set festively with a red-and-white tablecloth and a centrepiece of red candles. Dressed in their best summer frocks, the girls hovered, hopefully, around the pile of presents. The adults wandered into the kitchen from time to time to offer some help or to perch on one of the chairs at the kitchen bench and talk for a while as I prepared the roast. Having Flo there ensured that nothing would go terribly wrong with it. My cooking had improved since the early days of our marriage,
even if my repertoire of dishes hadn't expanded greatly. It was a lovely kitchen to be busy in; I could look up and watch the girls when they went outside to dress our two dogs, Tammy and Dusky, in decorations, or as the adults stood talking on the lawn. Even the roast was a triumph that day.

Everyone seemed so happy, so it was a surprise to go into the kitchen during the afternoon and find Flo crying.

‘Everything's so perfect,' she said. ‘I'm sure it can't last.'

We laughed together at the inexplicable comment and went back to join the others, never realising how prophetic her words were to be.

In less than two months, things were to change for all of us, forever.

10

HANGING BY A THREAD

T
he ambulance siren stopped mid-wail as we turned into the Alfred Hospital. The paramedic of a thousand questions lingered for a few moments after I was lifted out, wishing me well and then disappearing before I was rushed into Emergency. The trolley jolted and jarred as we passed walls and bodies. Bright lights flashed by quickly overhead. Flames flickered. Oh no, that can't be right, I thought. Not flames. Occasionally, a face peered down at me. We stopped somewhere inside a room that disappeared as a circle of white coats closed in. Doctors talked above my body as I lay there. I could barely hear what they were saying but the sense of urgency was unmistakable. Kidneys. They needed to do something about my kidneys.

Although I wasn't aware of it, Terry was hovering on the edge of the group of doctors trying to decipher the medical terms they were using. Because I was in shock and sedated, he was answering the questions they were asking about the fires from what I'd told him at Akoonah Park. One of the doctors turned around and looked at Terry more closely.

‘Who's he?' he asked.

‘He's her husband,' another doctor replied.

They'd been discussing me thinking Terry was another doctor.

‘Take him out of here,' the doctor ordered. ‘Take him out!'

A young doctor escorted Terry into a room to one side. That doctor had been given the task of telling him the bad news about me. As he stumbled around for the right words, Terry said, ‘What you're trying to tell me is that my wife is not going to survive'.

The pain I was experiencing at this point was beyond anything I could possibly have imagined. Childbirth didn't come close, not even remotely. Every part of my body hurt in the most excruciating way. My mind was frenzied, bursting with an intense horror. I tried desperately to think of something, some scrap of hope that could help me through the agony.
Anything.
I have to escape this… I can't let go… Someone, please, get me out of this…

Amidst the pain and confusion, I knew with a stark clarity that if I loosened my grip on life for even a minute I'd be gone. I was wheeled into surgery, and oblivion, for the time being.

I woke up in the Intensive Care Unit—my new home, my lifeline and my prison. The ICU had been evacuated of other patients to accommodate the burns victims who were coming in from the bushfires, some of whom died very soon after admission. Much later, Judy, one of the intensive care nurses, recounted the medical condition I was in when she first saw me. I was black, my hair had been burned and there was significant swelling of my face, neck and body. I had seventy per cent thirddegree burns to my body—full thickness burns, the whole layer of skin gone. Much of the rest of my body had second-degree
burns. All up, eighty-five per cent of my body suffered burns. My heart, kidneys, lungs and other organs were struggling as a result and I needed to be resuscitated many times. To put it bluntly, I looked grotesque, Judy recalled, and no one held any hope of me surviving.

The Intensive Care Unit was a maze of beeping machines, with alarms and monitors going off all the time. The medicos moved quickly to put me on life-support. Gloved hands pushed tubes into my body, carrying infusions connected to pumps. I was hooked up to various devices by masked people reading my vital signs. Behind me the jagged thread of my life scrolled by on the screen of a cardiac monitor. All the time, the ventilator beat a steady psssh-psh.

All I could see of anyone was their eyes. Every facet in the isolation room had to be sterile so anyone in there was wearing a white cap, mask, gown and gloves. I became aware of Judy, in particular. She had kind eyes and a compassionate voice. I knew I was in good hands with her; here was a born nurse. I needed to know that because I felt so vulnerable. She settled me into bed, helped by another nurse. They turned me over, which was agony.

‘Well done, you managed that beautifully,' she said encouragingly. Such sparing, but reassuring, words kept me hanging on.

In the first few days in Intensive Care, I was monitored closely, twenty-four hours a day. There were often two nurses in the room checking devices that were measuring my temperature, heart rate and rhythm, blood pressure, the pressure in my veins and arteries, respiratory function, renal function and anything else that could indicate what was going on in my body. The nurses dressed my burns and took numerous blood tests. Burns
patients are extremely challenging to look after, particularly as they are prone to infection. To add to it all, the Intensive Care Unit was hot—about thirty-eight to forty degrees Celsius—because extensive skin loss means the body can't maintain and regulate its temperature.

To my left, were windows to the next cubicle, but there was no one in it. I looked up once, though, to see a doctor standing in that cubicle, just standing looking at me. ‘Why?' I wondered. ‘Why are you just staring like that?' On the other side was a door with a glass window, so I could just see out into the corridor and notice anyone coming in. There was no daylight, just a glaring overhead light that seemed to be on all the time. I couldn't tell if it were night or day, as I lapsed in and out of consciousness. My entire being felt dislocated. I'd simply been caring for a family, tidying the house, making beds and meals, when suddenly I was catapulted into a world where nothing was remotely like anything I'd ever experienced. One day, a mother and wife; the next a medical case. I'd barely even been in a hospital before, except for the maternity ward.

Terry came into the ICU the night I was admitted and returned the next morning, though my recollection of seeing him is hazy. After he and the girls arrived at his parents' place on the day of the fires, Flo had stayed up late into the night to wash his clothes so they'd dry before morning. Until he had time to go shopping, they were the only clothes he had and he was worried about wearing them into the hospital still sweaty and smoky from the previous day. That struck me as poignant when he told me some time later. A simple, caring act in the midst of all the havoc. His only clothes. At the time I barely knew that he was there, let alone what he was wearing.

In those early days, and at times over the weeks following, the doctors warned Terry that my chances of survival were negligible. ‘She could die at any time so don't get your hopes up,' they said. They called him into the hospital to bid me goodbye at least twice, telling him I wouldn't make it through the night, counselling him to say anything he needed to. The helplessness in not knowing was the worst part of it all for him.

In the first two days or so I could feel my body swelling. One of the critical risks of burns, I now know, is fluid lost to the circulatory system through evaporation and swelling. This is what was happening and as it did my face puffed up. My eyes were being pushed close as my eyelids swelled, narrowing into two slits of blurry vision. I strained to open them but couldn't. I panicked that I was losing my sight, that on top of everything else, I would be blind. This creeping blindness seemed to last forever, but with time and to my great relief, my eyelids opened again.

At one stage, I was taken off the ventilator for a few days, for reasons I couldn't understand. I'd been burned internally—my throat and lungs were badly damaged, and I'd lost one of my vocal cords. But the effort to keep breathing on my own was enormous, and agonising. I had to consciously force myself to take each and every rasping, wheezing breath. Keep going. Just another breath. Don't stop. Think of the girls. Don't stop now. Don't stop.

The early morning hours were the worst. My body slowed naturally and I sensed it would be easy for it to give in. It felt as if I never slept for more than a few minutes at a time. I'd drop off in exhaustion, then wake myself immediately after with a start, alarmed at what sleep could bring: death, a deep, dark hole
with nothing to hold on to, with no one to reach out and help me. In spite of my previous battles with fear—the constant social phobias that plagued my everyday life—I was filled with a terror I'd never known before, one that stalked every waking moment. The desperate thought that I hadn't fully lived dogged me too, that for most of my life I'd never lived free of the shadow of self-doubt and fear. And now I might never wake up. Ironically, fear was keeping me alive.