by Leigh Sales
About the Book
As a journalist, Leigh Sales often encounters people experiencing the worst moments of their lives in the full glare of the media. But one particular string of bad news stories – and a terrifying brush with her own mortality – sent her looking for answers about how vulnerable each of us is to a life-changing event. What are our chances of actually being struck by one? What do we fear most and why? And when the worst does happen, what comes next?
In this profound and layered book, Sales talks intimately with people who’ve faced the unimaginable, from terrorism to natural disasters to simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Expecting broken lives, she instead finds strength, hope, even humour. Sales brilliantly condenses the latest research on the way the human brain processes fear and grief, and poses the questions we too often ignore out of awkwardness. Along the way, she offers an unguarded account of her own challenges and what she’s learned about coping with life’s unexpected blows.
Introduction Staring at the Sun
One That Could Have Been Me
Two We’re All in This Together
Three The Eye of the Storm
Four The Things That Get You Through
Five A New Normal
Six Out of the Ashes
Seven Ordinary Days
Notes
Acknowledgements
In Memory of Joseph Raymond Dale Sales
1948–2018
The very best of dads
The day that turns a life upside down usually starts like any other. You open your eyes, swing your body out of bed, eat breakfast, get dressed and leave the house, your mind busy. As you close the front door behind you, rarely is there a tingle of unease that something is off. Later, when the story of what happened next comes to be told, it will start with the day’s deceptive ordinariness, something that will now seem incredible. How could a blindside so momentous have struck on a day that began so unremarkably?
In late 2014, the news media was dominated by two such days, so unimaginable in their endings that they rattled even those of us far removed from the events. On the afternoon of November 25, a sparkling spring day, a young cricketer, Phillip Hughes, was fatally struck by a ball during a game. And on December 15, at morning tea time in a Sydney café, a gunman took eighteen people hostage, two of them – Katrina Dawson and Tori Johnson – killed by the siege’s end.
Phillip Hughes had padded up as he’d done since childhood. Katrina Dawson had left her law office and popped downstairs for a hot chocolate. Tori Johnson had gone about his business on a regular day at work. Where was the last sign to exit the freeway, the chance to change course? It feels as if the universe cheated them by not warning that this was a day to stay home. If the universe – or fate, luck, God, happenstance, whatever you want to call it – didn’t give them that courtesy, then it probably won’t offer it to you or me either.
There are choices we all make in the full knowledge that they will alter the course of our lives: whether to marry or have children or change jobs. We expect such decisions to have consequences. The confronting thing about the cricket accident and the Lindt siege is that the choices leading to disaster were so minor they would have been barely worth contemplation. What family could imagine that sending their boy to cricket instead of soccer is a decision about how long he will live? Who could possibly function wondering each day if a decision about sharing a hot drink with a friend was a matter of life or death? We all make similar choices without pause every moment of every day, blessedly oblivious to where they might lead.
There’s no way to stop the clandestine forces, marshalled by insignificant decisions, that will clash in a future instant. Some will have been on their trajectories for years, others for minutes. They level the rich and the poor, the weak and the powerful, without discrimination. It’s straightforward to grasp this intellectually, but deeply emotionally uncomfortable to be prodded with the sharpness of the reality. The events in the news in late 2014 magnified the deepest truth of being alive, a fact that is both wonderful and terrible all at once – we never know what is coming next.
I have been a journalist for twenty-five years, and watching these kinds of indiscriminate tragedies play out is part of my professional life every day. From the very first newswriting lecture I attended, in February 1991 at the Queensland University of Technology, I knew I had found the right career for me. I loved everything about journalism: talking to people, writing stories, crafting headlines, editing text, and studying all sorts of different subjects under the pressure of a deadline. I would sit in the cafeteria at lunchtime with friends who were enrolled in law and accounting and think to myself with smug glee how dull their courses sounded by comparison. I still feel that way about journalism and I try not to take for granted how fortunate I am to have a job I enjoy so much.
As a young reporter, I was sent on every sort of story imaginable: floods, droughts, court cases, protest marches, police raids, murder trials, environmental messes, lunches for the homeless, colour features about the Royal Brisbane Show, surf accidents, sporting scandals, political downfalls. One thing I quickly learned was that I was not one of those journalists who thrive chasing ambulances or disasters. I did not like coming face to face with tragedy or pain. I remember doing an overnight shift on the chief-of-staff desk at Channel Nine in 1994, and listening to the police scanner when two firefighters died battling a blaze in a Gold Coast home. The cameraman on the scene transmitted his footage back to me in the newsroom. He had captured their bodies being recovered from the house. My job was to make a list of all the key shots for the reporter who’d be assigned the story first thing in the morning: I was pretty certain that this was as close to death as I wanted to get. Over time, I gravitated to politics as much as possible, feeling more at ease dealing with a political tragedy than a genuine one.
I spent the first ten or so years of my career covering various news rounds and, amazingly, mostly managed to avoid firsthand exposure to true horror. I’ve never had to attend a car crash before the victims were cut from the vehicle, almost a rite of passage for many young journalists and police officers. I’ve never been sent to a war zone. I admire enormously my colleagues who do that sort of reporting because I know I do not have the courage or temperament for it.
From late 2001, just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I was the North America correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I didn’t avoid disaster entirely (I was despatched to New Orleans to cover the calamitous Hurricane Katrina), but my stint there was heavily dominated by the politics of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the imprisonment of an Australian, David Hicks, at the US military detention centre at Guantanamo Bay. I interviewed people who had lost family members in those wars and I visited Guantanamo a few times. For me it was not traumatic, because unlike the people I met and observed, I was able to return to my normal life after a few days.
For the past decade I’ve been largely studio-bound as an anchor, mostly on 7.30, the ABC’s flagship nightly current affairs program. It is journalism of which I’m very proud and I could not have more respect for my colleagues. In my role, I sometimes interview people on the best days of their lives and often on the worst. I do so from the comfort and safety of an air-conditioned studio but it can still be painful, night after night, to immerse myself in the misery of the news. At least a couple of nights a week we run an item that comes close to reducing me to tears.
In one fairly typical news month on 7.30 – March 2016 – we covered child sex abuse by Catholic priests; coal workers dying horrible deaths from black lung; Fijian people devastated by a cyclone; nursing home residents abused by their carers; insurance companies refusing to pay people in dire need, even though they’d faithfully paid t
heir premiums; a dance teacher who sexually abused children; a famous swimmer diagnosed with melanoma; five hundred people suddenly losing their jobs at an oil refinery; a suicide bombing in Turkey; students abducted by a Thai junta; a woman whose face was smashed with a hammer by her partner; a terrorist attack at Brussels airport; and a television star’s degeneration from multiple sclerosis. Of course, there were other, happier stories too but the sad ones seem to make a stronger impact.
Notably, on the day of a terrorist attack, a mass-fatality accident or some other major news story, the number of viewers watching 7.30 will almost certainly be bigger than usual. A public disaster appears to make television ratings spike. People seem perversely but irresistibly attracted to catastrophe when it happens to others, while in our daily lives we do everything possible to shield ourselves from these poison darts of fate. We eat leafy green vegetables, apply sunscreen, wear seatbelts, obey speed limits, quit smoking, walk for half an hour a day, install spongy ground under monkey bars and swings, ban peanut butter sandwiches in schools, limit coffee intake, cut down on saturated fats, don bicycle helmets, submit to wanding, patting, screening and X-raying every time we fly, put non-slip mats in the shower, restrict ourselves to only one glass of red wine each day, and permit doctors to regularly scrape, probe and squeeze our private parts. It’s as if we hope that watching others’ misfortune might somehow teach us what new precautions we can add to our list to avoid the same fate.
I know rationally that the news is not a mirror held up to life. It is highly selective. (As one of my journalism lecturers told my class, ninety-nine helicopters might fly safely on any given day: what makes news is the one that did not.) Even so, reporting awful events for hours every day has made me fearful. In December 2014, I often lay awake at the thought of all the people who had recently found themselves in the news when their lives had been upended. I could scarcely bear to contemplate the questions those tragedies raised. Why them? Why not me? Why not somebody I love? When will it be my turn?
I felt an unshakable sense of dread that the wheel of fate had to be spinning for me too, the ball skipping towards my number.
Something had happened in my own life at the start of 2014 that changed me profoundly and undoubtedly contributed to my fear that my luck was running out. In February of that year, eight months pregnant, I woke one night with a sharp pain in my side and the sense that something was wrong. I already had one child, so I knew this wasn’t labour pain.
I headed to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney and doctors ran various tests. The baby’s heartbeat was fine and so were my vital signs but I was admitted for monitoring. There was some speculation about appendicitis. After a while, two ultrasound technicians arrived, and I could tell by their ashen faces as they looked at their screen that something was indeed wrong.
‘What can you see?’ I asked. At that stage, my pain was about three on a scale of ten.
‘We can’t see your organs,’ one of the technicians replied. ‘A dark substance is blocking the view.’
Even with my scant medical knowledge, I assumed that had to be blood.
My obstetrician arrived soon after and said something like: We don’t know what’s going on but I think we need to take you to the theatre for surgery, get the baby out, and once we can see what’s happening, we’ll call in whatever specialists are needed. He apologised, saying that instead of the usual small caesarean incision near the pubic bone, he would need to cut vertically up my abdomen so that he could have unimpeded access to all my abdominal organs. This would leave a large scar.
He left to scrub up and within a couple of minutes I was floored by utterly blinding pain. It went from a three to ten instantly and felt as if my ribs were cracking, one after the other. I tried not to breathe, as the slightest movement was excruciating. I still had the fetal heart rate monitor around my stomach and I heard the midwife say, ‘I’ve lost the baby’s heartbeat,’ and she smacked a button on the wall.
I desperately wished to lose consciousness, partly to escape the physical pain but also because I was absolutely terrified. I had no idea what was going on. After the midwife triggered the alert, it seemed like pandemonium to me, although I assume that to a medical person it was not. I remember only snatches from then on: the agony as orderlies lifted me onto a gurney; the kindness of somebody reaching under the sheet and squeezing my hand as they ran down the corridor; the lights in the ceiling flashing rhythmically over my closed eyes as we raced under them; how I begged the anaesthetist to knock me out, not caring in all honesty if I died. She said something to the effect that it was less than ten seconds now, to just hold on.
The last thing I recall is seeing my obstetrician walk through the door in his scrubs as another person drew a line up my stomach with a marker where they were about to cut. Everything was moving so quickly, I feared they might start slicing before I was unconscious.
When I woke, there was no baby to be seen. I was on my back in a dimly lit room in what I learned was a high dependency unit. I could sense that there was a tube going up one nostril. It was very uncomfortable and I was later told that it was running down the back of my throat into my stomach, pumping fluid out of it. Another tube snaked out of the bandages on my stomach, leeching brown fluid into a bag, and yet another tube fed into a catheter bag. I had oxygen prongs in my nostrils. Both hands had cannulas in them with even more tubes attached to drips on either side of the bed. My legs were in extremely tight white stockings. My left hand was wrapped around a plastic device with a button on it, and I quickly discovered that I would be knocked out if I pushed it enough times in a row.
I fell asleep again and the next time I woke, my obstetrician was there.
‘Where’s my baby?’ I asked.
‘He’s in the neonatal intensive care unit,’ the doctor replied, ‘because he was deprived of oxygen for a period.’ He told me that I’d had a uterine rupture.
I was reluctant to google those words for a long time after the event, but when I did, I read: ‘Uterine rupture in pregnancy is a rare and often catastrophic complication with a high incidence of fetal and maternal morbidity . . . [T]he short time for instituting therapeutic action makes uterine rupture in pregnancy a much-feared event for medical practitioners.’
My obstetrician told me that when he opened my abdomen, it was a sea of blood. There was a tear the size of a cricket ball in the upper left side of my uterus. Due to the baby’s traumatic birth, he didn’t know if there had been brain damage or not, and wouldn’t be able to tell for a while.
Whenever a baby is born, the nurses give it an Apgar score out of ten, measuring its vital signs. The test is done immediately after birth and then again five minutes later. My first child, born two years earlier in a natural delivery, was a 9 at birth and a 10 on the second check. This baby was a 2 at birth and then a 3 at five minutes.
I had lost a massive amount of blood, requiring three transfusions during surgery, and I was also numb with shock that the baby was in the neonatal intensive care unit with possible brain damage. When I broke down crying hysterically two days after surgery, the nurses took pity and wheeled me in my bed, trailing drips, bags and tubes, down to the NICU, where my baby was hooked up to all his paraphernalia. The first photograph of us together is the most pitiful sight imaginable. My son can barely be seen under the medical gear and I am unrecognisable. There was so much equipment attached to us both that instead of holding him, I just lay on the bed beside him.
That night, I had a terrible dream. I was in labour, frantically walking through a mansion, looking for a room in which to give birth. They were all locked or occupied and nobody would help. Another woman – a ‘yummy mummy’ with platinum-blond hair and a tidy bump out front – was also in labour, but handling it with ease. I kept trying to ask people, including her, for assistance but I couldn’t speak properly and nobody could understand what I was saying.
The sound of my own voice in the hospital room woke me up. I was crying out, ‘Mumm
y, Mummy, Mummy!’ and tears were streaming down my cheeks.
That was possibly the single most devastating moment out of everything that had happened, worse than the pain and fear I’d experienced. I had been reduced to this pathetic, childlike state, begging for my own mother to come and save me. I have never even called my mother ‘Mummy’! She had rung me that very day to ask if she should come down from Queensland and I was adamant that she should not, because I didn’t want to be a bother.
Somehow, although my intellect didn’t understand it, my subconscious knew that I had entirely lost my sense of security in the world, and, to a degree, my sense of self. Here was I, this supposedly competent, independent person, not only unable to look after myself, but unable to care for my own children. My dream shattered me because it made me feel that the person I considered myself to be – self-sufficient, in control – was not, in fact, who I had turned out to be. Although I knew it was irrational, I felt ashamed and weak. It was terrifying.
Even as I grew well again over the months that followed, and it became clear that my baby was fine, the whole experience felt like I had tumbled into a raging river. I feared I would not make it to the other side. I tried to swim back to where I’d started but the current was too strong. Sometimes I lost my grip and the torrent swept me along. Finally, I clambered onto the opposite bank and collapsed. I could see the place I had started from but I could not get back there. The view of my life where I had come ashore was not the same as the view from where I had set off. The world did not seem as safe as it once had, and the possibility of death or catastrophe seemed real, not distant things I didn’t need to worry about for the time being.
The experience amplified for me the questions with which the news confronts me every night: How do we come to terms with the fact that life can blindside us in an instant? When the unthinkable does happen, what comes next? How does a person go on? Do we, as a community, have a responsibility to people who unwittingly find themselves in the middle of a story that we all want to know more about? And once we truly understand that we are not exceptional, but are instead as vulnerable as the next person, what does that tell us about how we should live?