Forged with Flames (27 page)

I coughed and strained until I managed to dislodge the fishbone and swallow it, but was so rattled afterwards that I sat in my kitchen trembling. Over the next three or four days as my throat became more sensitive, I felt as if I couldn't swallow, that at any minute my windpipe would close up completely and block my airways. I took myself off to the doctor. Tests revealed that the fishbone had dislodged, but my throat was going into spasms which were causing the impression of choking. Wes patiently showed me his anatomy books and explained that while it felt as if my throat were closing, the air I needed to breathe was passing into my lungs normally. Rationally, it made sense, but when I got home my throat was still contracting and the alarm returned.

In the days and weeks that followed, well after my throat returned to normal, I fell deeper and deeper into anxiety. I would dream of fires and wake with a start. Nowhere seemed safe any more. I still didn't comprehend the persistent, debilitating effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or how pervasive it was. By now I was almost unable to leave the house. Just walking across
the road to buy groceries seemed like climbing Mt Everest.

On one particularly bad day, I opened and closed the front door twenty times before I could step outside. Tentatively venturing to the end of the drive, I slowly made my way the short distance to the end of the street and stood at the traffic lights for long minutes trying to make up my mind about whether I could get myself across the busy highway to the supermarket. It was the stuff of comic mime, only it wasn't funny. After much dithering and deliberating, I crossed the road and as I entered the supermarket I prayed that I wouldn't meet anyone I knew—I was completely beyond rational conversation. After grabbing the groceries I needed as quickly as possible, I made my way to the checkout, looking in my bag for my purse. Oh no, I'd left it at home! Fortunately, about half-way home my sense of humour kicked in and I started to laugh. This eased the tension and I was able to make the second trip more easily than the first. I decided, philosophically, that the universe had forced me into this second trip because I needed the practice!

One Saturday morning, I needed to go further afield to the big local shopping centre, about fifteen minutes' walk away. This one was like Kilimanjaro. I planned my assault. There were two items on the itinerary: one really necessary (a lay-by), the other not so urgent (some banking). If I were in reasonable shape after attending to the first item, I'd attempt the second. The walk to the Centre became harder the further away I was from home. I looked down at the footpath and concentrated hard, trying to ignore my thumping heart. Just one step at a time, just cross one crack at a time, I willed myself. My body began trembling so much that my legs wouldn't hold me up. I crumpled and folded down slowly where I was on the pavement, one hand
supporting my body on the gritty, cold concrete. The traffic passed, oblivious to the sorry figure on the footpath. Half of me wanted someone to rescue me, the other half was mortified. I sat on the footpath shaking, until I could get myself together enough to go on.

I made it into the shopping centre and paid the lay-by instalment. Unfortunately, the bank was on another floor. The thought of having to repeat the journey in the near future spurred me on. As I made my way to the escalators I passed a little boy of perhaps three or four, crying loudly. I looked around for his mother and hoped that someone else would help him, but no one stopped. ‘Oh please don't let me have to be the one to take care of this,' I pleaded to myself. I waited, hovering a few feet away but no one approached him. I bent down and tried hard to smile, speaking to him as gently and evenly as I could. He stopped crying immediately, and took my hand reassured, as we walked off and at last located his concerned mother. The incident, and that little hand, comforted me momentarily, too. I finished my errands and returned home with greater ease.

The days ground on. Just getting myself out of bed in the morning was almost beyond me. On many days I'd just make it to the couch where I'd have to lie down for a while before deciding to attempt a shower or breakfast. I felt as if I'd come to the end of my resources; I just didn't have the energy to work my way out of this desperate place.

The only way I could operate sometimes was to put myself on automatic pilot. I'd always been a neat freak, enjoying everything being ordered and in its place, but now, this became magnified. I sensed that something indescribably bad would happen if everything weren't as perfect as possible; so I spent
my limited energy obsessively straightening the house. Crazy stuff, but whenever I stopped myself from doing it, my anxiety would soar through the roof, and so I kept doing it. I'd get up in the morning, start in the kitchen and work around the rooms in an anti-clockwise direction: laundry next, bedrooms, lounge, dining-room and back to the kitchen. I didn't like to jump rooms. When I finished, I'd think, ‘Oh, I'll be right now for the rest of the day'. At night I'd start in the lounge-room and do it the other way around with the kitchen last.

Everything had to be symmetrical, lined up with the edge of tables or straightened up. My bed was always made very neatly, no stuffing the sheets in under the mattress in lumps; they were always tucked in with perfect hospital corners. I fussed about the cushions until they were perfect. I'd have all my herbs in alphabetical order, and my music and DVDs too. I arranged my books by author, which created a bit of a conflict sometimes because they're different sizes. I liked to have my shoes in the cupboard with the laces neatly pushed into them, all my T-shirts together, then all my cardigans in piles, not a folded sleeve out of place. I ironed my tea towels so that they sat flat in the drawers. For some strange reason I'd have the toilet seat down until four in the afternoon then put it up.

Later, when I understood what I was doing and that this behaviour had a name—Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder—I found it, and the plethora of oddball phobias that went with it, tremendously funny. In the meantime though, in 2005, it was plaguing me.

I knew I was headed for a major meltdown and I prayed for the help, when my old friends Barry and Joan visited one afternoon in late June 2006. Barry had lost his wife, Alison,
and daughter, Kerry, in the fires; we'd long been bound by a shared suffering. He had married Joan ten years later. They saw immediately that I was struggling and invited me to spend a few days with them at their home in Upper Beaconsfield.

During the first couple of days I was there I slept a lot, thankful that I didn't have to force myself to cook, clean or make dreaded trips to the shops. On the third day, Barry and Joan were busy with some workmen who had arrived to work outside. Barry lit the fire in the lounge-room, put on some soothing music and left me to a relaxing morning. I was okay with open fires as long as the smell of the smoke wasn't too strong.

I settled into the couch. From where I was sitting I could see a photo of Kerry, taken in her school uniform. She was smiling. I gazed through huge windows at one end of the room to the bush outside. Without warning, I started sobbing. And couldn't stop.

I wept for the people who were gone, and the person I had been. I wept for the teenage girl in Barrowford who had run like the wind and was now hobbled, and for the small frightened girl at the top of the stairs. I wept for the woman who had lost her marriage, her face and her home. I cried for two hours, as Barry kept coming in to check on me. Never before had I cried like that. Never before had I let anyone see the depth of sorrow that underpinned my life. But he understood what was happening—he'd been there, too.

42

CHASED BY FEARS

A
s the summer of 2006 approached, I decided to find a psychologist. My anxiety was rampant. I was sitting at the computer one day, when I came across an invitation by Monash University for anyone diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to apply for a place in an online counselling course. The course would span ten weeks with professional guidance provided via the internet. Bingo!

The treatment—exercises of increasing difficulty in which you'd think about anxious things and ‘reframe' your fears—was useful and at the end of it, the online therapist recommended that I consider seeking more help. I arranged to see a nearby psychologist and was keen to get started, but it took me until the spring of 2007 to go—dealing with the anxiety was just something else to get anxious about. I needn't have worried, though. Maureen, an open, friendly woman in her late fifties, relaxed me with her warm smile, her eyes crinkling from behind her glasses. Sitting on a comfortable velvety, blue chair in her consulting room, I began to talk about the trepidation
that was with me almost every moment of any day and which ruled my life. Maureen listened empathically. She picked up on the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder within the first twenty minutes, and explained what it was. What a relief to find that the unaccountable behaviour had a name and that I wasn't the only one who had it.

She taught me practical ways to manage the panic and anxiety while it was happening; and helped me to look at important matters that troubled me in new ways that helped to lessen their impact. She encouraged me, for instance, to stop judging myself so harshly about what had happened on the night of the fires. Although I'd saved my daughters, for years afterwards I'd grappled with the guilty belief that at the time I really wanted to save myself. That I could even have entertained that thought, convinced me I was a bad mother. Maureen introduced the idea that I didn't have to be perfect all the time and that there are natural reactions in times of extreme danger. It's what I did that counted, not what I thought.

Of course, there were still bumps in the road.

During the time I was seeing Maureen, Terry's father became very ill and was taken to the Alfred hospital. In many ways, John had been more of a father figure to me in adulthood than my own father; we had been closer geographically and emotionally. I hadn't been back to the Alfred, with all its painful associations, for decades, but knew I had to see him. It was November 2008—twenty-five years since the bushfires.

I had an appointment with Maureen on the morning of the day I was to visit the hospital. This was helpful in preparing myself. I left her office in Beaconsfield to catch the train for the city feeling confident. I can do this, I repeated to myself. I can
go back to the Alfred and it will be okay. I caught the tram up Commercial Road, feeling composed. But the moment I stepped down from the tram and stood opposite the main entrance of the hospital, I was back in 1983. For a while I couldn't move. I stood transfixed as people brushed past me. I tried to remember where I was, and why I was there, and couldn't. What was this place?

Shaken and confused, I remembered. I tried to breathe deeply as Maureen had taught me and take control of the way I was thinking. Eventually, I calmed down enough to cross the road, forced myself through the Alfred's main doors and headed into the cafeteria where I ordered a cup of tea. That would help. But I felt so sick I could hardly drink it. The cafeteria was awash with noise—clamour and clatter—people going to and fro. I had to get out of there, and quickly.

I knew that if I didn't get up to John's ward then that I might never see him. So I quickly found the lifts and somehow got myself up to his room on one of the higher floors. John was delighted to see me and, in spite of my disturbed state, I was glad to be there. It was hard to sit and concentrate on him and what he was saying; all I wanted to do was run as fast as I could out of there. After a while, I excused myself and bolted to the bathroom to take a few deep breaths and compose myself. I looked in the mirror. ‘you have to hold it together', I told myself. ‘Breathe deeply.'

After kissing John goodbye with a heavy heart, I ran out of there, as much as I could run, dodging a few people as I fled. I had to get outside into the fresh air. In my haste, I took a wrong turn and found myself in an unfamiliar corridor looking up at a sign that read ‘Psychiatric Ward'. That made me smile. ‘If you
don't calm down,' I told myself, ‘That's where you're going to end up.' I retraced my steps and found my way out of the maze of corridors.

John died soon after.

Maureen explained later that I'd had what's called an “abreaction”—an unconscious reaction to stimuli that reminds you of a previous traumatic experience. It was one of a bundle of behaviours that we worked on and, after two years of valuable help from her, it was decided that I was ready to manage on my own. My anxiety, or the ‘legacy of the fires' as Maureen called it, was reduced—not gone. I didn't like it, but I had stopped being afraid of it.

Fear no longer controlled my life. And, for me, that was huge.

43

BLACK SATURDAY

I
t was the 7th of February, 2009, the day that would soon become known as Black Saturday. Outside, the air was filling with smoke, nauseating; and a red ‘bushfire' sun hovered. The devastation I had dreaded every summer since Ash Wednesday had struck—only more savagely than even I could have imagined.

I wept as I watched the stunned and grief-stricken families on television that night. This time an observer of the tragedy, I vowed that if I could help ease their pain in any way I would, as so many people over the years had helped and comforted me.

The day after the Black Saturday fires, perhaps predictably, I had a massive reaction. My body shook uncontrollably and I felt physically ill; I started to cry and couldn't stop. This time I knew what was happening and I wasn't alone with it. I had Maureen to talk to and in the next few days the phone ran hot with sympathetic calls from so many friends and family members. People I hadn't spoken to in months rang to say they were thinking of me. Professor Masterton called, concerned.
In an uncanny twist of fate, he told me his own daughter and her family lost their house and possessions in the fires. She and her children sought refuge in a pool as the fires raged around them. They were all safe, he said.