Forged with Flames (16 page)

I discovered that if I pretended to be deeply asleep, the nurses would decide that rest was even more important than clean
dressings, and I'd get a reprieve—and so would they! But most of the time it was just a case of gritting my teeth and letting them get on with it.

One day, when everything seemed to be going along normally, the nurse doing my dressings let out a scream. I looked up at her in surprise. Surely if there was any screaming to be done, I should be the one doing it. She looked back at me wide-eyed.

‘Your ear has just fallen off!'

I was completely taken aback and for a long time we were silent as we contemplated this awful occurrence. Then suddenly, I began to laugh. The unexpectedness of the ear falling off and my reaction to it was infectious and we both laughed until our stomachs hurt. We couldn't help ourselves, we just laughed and laughed. Here I was, burned inside and out, worrying about how I could make it through the next hour, never mind the next day, laughing fit to burst. Perhaps, as a final insult, all my body parts would now begin to fall off, one after the other! Had I not laughed then, I might have gone insane. My days and nights had been so full of raw emotions it was wonderful to have a bit of light relief. After all, compared to the seriousness of everything else, what was the loss of an ear?

As it turned out, when we'd both calmed down, we found that—thankfully—my whole ear wasn't gone, only the top half of it. Pretty annoying when wearing glasses, but really not that bad at all. In fact, this whole episode became a funny place I could go to when times became too heavy and pressures seemed almost unbearable. Just the thought of it was enough to lighten me up. I soon lost count of the many instances where I would smile and say to whoever I was with, ‘Remember the day my ear fell off?'

19

THE FLYING NUN

I
realised the worst was over in early May shortly after the ear incident, when I asked Cathy, the ICU Charge Sister, if I might still die. She looked at me intently from above her mask and said, ‘No'. I had reached a turning point, I thought; I was on the road to normal life again! I settled back into bed after Cathy left and rolled the idea around. I was so delighted with my survival that I barely thought of what else might lie ahead. Blessed ignorance—there were still so many challenges to overcome.

For now though, I thought only of the milestones and the positives. I could breathe unaided. I was off intravenous nutrition and able to eat consommés and ice-cream, albeit with help. The catheter had been removed from my side and I could use a bedpan, such an absurdly enjoyable experience that the nurses allowed me extra water to drink until I got over the novelty of using it. The movement in my arms was improving. I could sit up, with assistance. I still had one-and-a-half ears.

I was even able to go to a party again, in a fashion. The previous week, at the end of April, friends, family and the
Intensive Care staff threw a party for my thirty-third birthday—a first for the ICU. I was still fragile and my heart wasn't really in it but it was also a celebration for Sarah's seventh birthday so I tried to look lively. The room next door—the one in which the lone doctor had stood watching me when I first came in, an eternity ago—was festooned with balloons and garlands of paper flowers. There were bowls of sweets, Cheesels, Twisties and doughnuts and a cake for Sarah. Mum, Terry, Liz and Jane were there but not Rachel—she had a cold and had to stay behind because of the risk of infecting me.

At one stage Sarah spontaneously walked into my room and presented me with a Twistie—she knew I loved them—but I was sure I'd be sick if I ate it so thanked her and said I'd save it for later. I cheered a little when the staff presented me with a gift, a pretty pink and cream nightdress, which one of the nurses hung up where I could see it. I looked at it often and felt encouraged—it was a promise of things to come, and a reminder of the thoughtfulness and kindness that surrounded me in the Alfred. No one was expected to bring presents at this stage but I do remember a single red rose arriving from friends, Geoff and Tilly. Bunches of flowers weren't allowed in the isolation rooms due to the risk of infection but this rose arrived securely packaged in a plastic tube. The nurse placed it on a little corner shelf where I could see it.

Two weeks later, in mid-May, I finally left the ICU and its staff to return to the Burns Unit. The nursing manager of the unit came to say goodbye and told me a few things that surprised me and that really made me think. He said that in the time I had spent with them—almost three months altogether—they'd learned something valuable that would help in their assessments
of future cases. It had seemed, at the beginning, that the best thing they could do was make me as comfortable as possible before I died. But my survival—the outcome of their care—had proved them wrong.

‘When we realised how hard you were fighting to stay alive we decided to go that extra step,' he said.

I appreciated his honesty. I was so impressed that this man in charge would come and say, ‘Look, we almost got it wrong'. It was brave of him to say that. I never knew then what the ‘extra step' was although years later I was to find out that they resuscitated me dozens of times.

Although I was out of ICU and my situation was no longer life-threatening, the doctors told me on several occasions that long months, even years, of surgery and rehabilitation lay ahead. The road to recovery is never straight with burns patients. I was getting stronger physically, yet each day relentlessly brought more pain. Returning to the Burns Unit, I was able to have a bath for the first time since my admission to hospital. To be lowered into the beautifully clean, warm water was heaven; to feel that warmth surround me was a gentle caress, a balm to my assaulted skin. But bath time was also my daily debriding time. I was so sick of enduring such procedures and pretending to be brave. I longed with a passion for it to all be over and to get on with my life; to be able to turn over or sit up in bed without help or to be able to cut up my own food. I dreamed of being able to move freely and independently, of the days I'd be able to look after my family again, care for the girls, even iron clothes.

When I became well enough to leave my bed towards the end of my stay at the Alfred, I was assigned my own wheelchair.
Sitting in a wheelchair was an interesting experience—for some reason many people treated me like a child when I was in it. It seemed as if being the height of a child somehow transferred me back to the status of one, which was sometimes funny, but often not. Some people would shout at me instead of talking normally—did they think I was deaf, slightly incapable of comprehending things or just a long way down? I found it hard not to laugh sometimes when they talked both loudly and slowly, putting extra emphasis into trying to make sure I understood what they were saying. ‘I'm not thick, you know,' I thought, ‘I
can
understand you.'

By the end of May, Carol the physio decided I was well enough to try to stand up. Terry was visiting that day during his lunchtime and helped lift me out of bed and onto my feet. If you've been bedridden for a long period of time the muscles in your calves shorten so you can only stand on your toes, like a ballerina. If I'd once dreamed of being a ballerina what was to follow certainly cured me of it. Because my toes had been badly burned, the doctors had put steel pins in them to set the bones back into place, so being on tippy toes was agony.

It was under Carol's guidance that I later took my first tentative steps. I was still frail and very underweight. My legs were so pathetically thin—as thin as birds' legs—that a friend said she couldn't imagine how they'd ever hold me up. The surgeons had removed tissue from them because it was damaged, and it doesn't grow back. I'd been one vein away from having my left leg amputated—had Professor Masterton not discovered that the vein was there providing circulation to the leg, it would have been taken off. So at least I had two legs to stand on, even if they would need a lot of help to be useful!

Before I attempted to walk in earnest I had to be reacquainted with standing upright for more than a few seconds. Carol, helped by another physiotherapist, laid me on a special board, strapped me in and slowly tilted me upright. Mum often came to watch me in physio and was there that day. She looked on anxiously as I was tilted, the colour draining from my face as I battled nausea. She didn't say much at the time but this first step towards getting back on my feet must have been exciting for her because she often talked about it afterwards.

Taking a step on the parallel bars two weeks later was even more momentous. After willing my leg to budge a few inches, I knew then that however hard that single step was, I'd walk independently again. Later, I tried to take three or four steps. Even lifting one leg in front of the other was unbelievably hard. I'd stand gripping the bar feeling that I couldn't possibly take another step. Carol would stand next to me, encouraging me every inch of the way.

‘You can do it darling, just one more. I've got you. I'm here.'

And when I'd finished she'd say, ‘That's fantastic, that's enough for today'.

Gradually, painfully, a little more each day, I made it to the end of the parallel bars. There were some days, particularly when I'd just had surgery and wasn't strong enough, when Carol would just move my legs and arms up and down while I was lying in bed. Eventually I was given a walking frame and learned to take a few steps on the tips of my toes. The walking waxed and waned. I could do it one day but not the next.

By late June I would be walking a few steps on the frame, building up to moving right around the physio room on it, then eventually walking down the corridor, giddy with achievement
like a toddler on their first legs. I did quite a bit of bike riding too, increasing my times and speed. A friend, Steve, came in once to see me pedalling away, a blue scarf, made by a friend to cover my bald head, streaming in the air behind me.

‘Just like the Flying Nun,' he exclaimed delightedly.

Carol, while enthusiastic, always approached our physio sessions in a calm, measured way and I was relieved that she could do it without causing unbearable levels of pain. Her approach might have taken longer, but for me it was perfect. We'd made considerable progress by the time I was ready to leave the Alfred Hospital and move onto the more serious work at Hampton Rehabilitation Hospital, where I would stay for several more months.

20

THE UNEXPECTED VISITOR

B
ack in my ‘normal' life—before February 1983—I had, like so many other people, found joy and solace in music. Certain pieces of music touched my soul and made my mood soar. In 1980, Terry gave me a flute for my thirtieth birthday and I'd been playing it with much enjoyment, if not complete polish, ever since. My hero was the Irish flautist, James Galway. I had many of his recordings and before the fires, had been looking forward to going to one of his concerts in Melbourne when he came out in May of that year. When he did arrive from Ireland at the end of that month, I naturally assumed there was no way I was going to be able to see him play.

I didn't know then how it all came about, but what occurred at that time was just extraordinary. One of the nurses brought a telephone into my room, telling me that I was about to receive a call from James Galway.

‘James Galway?'

‘Yes,' she replied, nodding.

‘James Galway?' I repeated mechanically, trying to marshal a few runaway thoughts.

A call from James Galway? Really? How? Why? I was trying to think of a few intelligent things to say about his music—without sounding like a groupie—as I waited for the phone to ring, before my thoughts were interrupted by an unusual amount of noise outside my room. Before I could work out what it was, the door burst open and clad in gown, hat and gloves was the world-famous flautist! Apparently, his rehearsal for the evening's performance down the road at the Melbourne Concert Hall had gone smoothly and he had found he had the time to visit rather than make a phone call, as had been planned.

James was refreshingly down-to-earth, completely without airs or graces. My heart raced. I had trouble stringing two sensible words together, such was my elation, but it didn't matter. Terry, Prof, the doctors and nurses, Cathy from ICU, Trish, the Charge Sister in the Burns Unit, and an Australian flautist friend of James', Andrew Richardson, had come in for the occasion. For more than an hour, Jimmy—‘Just call me Jimmy'—entertained us with some highly amusing stories and a few mischievous asides. He told us his own hospital tale about the time he'd been hospitalised somewhere in Europe recovering from a serious road accident. He and the other patients used to break out of the ward, he said, in their wheelchairs and go down to the pub. They'd be so drunk that on the way back they'd fall out of their wheelchairs and couldn't get back into them again.

Jimmy showed himself to be sensitive and full of compassion as he asked me all about the fires. He played tunes on his two tin whistles and swooningly beautiful melodies on his golden flute. It was enchanting. The door was left open for the nurses to listen as he played. There I was, with my head resting on two pillows, in a white hospital gown, having the experience of a
lifetime, a close-up and personal chat and concert from the most famous flute player in the world. For those ephemeral moments I was able to forget where I was and what had happened to me. I could feel wonderfully normal, too, as James laughed and joked with everyone in the room.

When it was time for him to go, he asked if there was anything special I'd like him to play. Without hesitating, I told him it had to be
Annie's Song
—an obvious one, really! It was wonderful to have it played for me but even better when later that evening, as I was listening to the ABC's broadcast of his concert on the radio, I heard
Annie's Song
again. James talked of his visit to see me in hospital that afternoon and dedicated the song to me, and to others recovering from illness.