For my part, though, I was filled with anxiety. I knew that what he wanted to attempt with hypnosis was possible; moreover, that the reason he wanted to do it this way was deeply important to how he would regard himself in the future. I felt like a hypocrite because, at the same time, I secretly agreed with the surgeon; his warning of the potential for massive post-operative trauma had hit home with me. The idea that Damon might expose himself foolishly to unnecessary pain and further suffering I found almost unbearable. In desperation I hit on a ploy.
“Damon, listen! Whether you have a general anaesthetic or a local one doesn’t prevent you from controlling the bleeding by hypnosis.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, all you have to do is go into the operation in a state of hypnosis, go into the anaesthetic that way.”
Damon looked doubtful. “I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, Dad. The idea is that you’re always in a wakeful state, conscious of what’s happening around you, able to control things.”
“Hypnosis can hardly be called a waking state, can it?” I lied. “I mean, it’s a different radio frequency, your brain is on a different frequency from plain ordinary wakefulness.”
“Dad, that’s bullshit, you know that! You’re quite conscious of noise and what’s going on around you in hypnosis. The same is not true of whatever brain frequency you’re on when you’re under anaesthetic. How can you control what you’re unaware of?”
It was a good point, but I pressed on regardless. “Damon, you trust your mind, don’t you? If your last conscious decision in hypnosis is to control your bleeding and the mind,” I paused, searching for a word, “blanks out under anaesthetic, why wouldn’t it retain this last conscious thought? Why wouldn’t that work?” I looked at him, appealing to him to accept my doubtful logic. “Surely it’s worth trying?”
Damon looked at me. I could see he was totally unconvinced but, like me, he was grasping at straws. “Okay, I’ll give it a go. It’s a crazy idea, but I have no choice, do I?” He looked up and gave me a grin. “Thanks, Dad, for trying at least. About the brain retaining the last thought before you go under, that’s a dead-set dad fact.” Damon went into the operating theatre and just prior to receiving the anaesthetic he put himself into a deep trance, concentrating on preventing his bleeding excessively from the extractions to come.
He had, of course, received a fairly massive pre-operative transfusion of Factor VIII, designed as a first line of defence should he begin to bleed profusely during and immediately after the operation. This transfusion would allow sufficient time for an even more massive transfusion of whole blood to be mounted should it be required.
Whether it was luck or hypnosis, Damon bled hardly at all; in fact, no more than might be expected in any normal dental operation when four large back teeth are removed. The surgeon professed himself amazed, but when I told him later that Damon was under hypnosis when he received the general anaesthetic, he was unimpressed.
“Just one of those circumstances, I dare say; for some reason he didn’t bleed. We were lucky.”
“Wouldn’t you say it’s rather strange that this ‘luck’ is the only such circumstance, the singular circumstance, in Damon’s entire medical history, doctor?”
The surgeon looked at me and shrugged. “Have it your way, Mr Courtenay, I’m a doctor, not a witchdoctor. Your son didn’t bleed. I’m grateful for that.”
The important thing was that Damon believed that he’d controlled the bleeding, that his mind power had been effective and that he was still in control of his HIV destiny. We were to learn how these small signs were of the utmost importance to his, and our own, psychological welfare. We became experts at clutching at the thinnest of straws. A little further down the track, any sign, omen, nonsensical superstition, chance remark, was sufficient to lift our hearts and give us hope.
I recall an occasion when Ann Williams, the artist friend who had given Damon the pen and ink sketch of the two zebra, had visited and Damon had come over. Ann was gentle and lovely and also deeply into Buddhism and psychic healing. She had watched him walking towards her and remarked that Damon had a wonderful aura about him, that it flared hugely about his person and was the colour of a great healing. Both Damon and I were pretty cynical about that sort of thing and I could see he was barely able to conceal his mirth. He loved Ann too much to offer a rebuttal and instead thanked her politely. The following day he asked me rather shyly, “Dad, do you think there is anything in the stuff Ann believes in?”
“You mean about you having an aura around you the colour of healing?”
“Well, yes, all that Buddhist stuff.”
I thought for a moment. “I’m from Africa – I believe in everything nobody else believes in and disbelieve just about everything most people claim to be God’s truth.” It was a nonsense reply, but it was the best I could offer. For I, too, had later thought about what Ann had said and had secretly hoped that what she claimed to have seen might be mystically possible. After all, grasping at straws was better than learning the art of how to drown very well.
But all of this came later. When Damon went into his tooth operation, he was well by his own peculiar standards. He could still think of himself as unaffected by the HIV virus and boast that he hadn’t budged from stage one of the viral infection. Anything that appeared to go wrong with him could conveniently be laid at the feet of his haemophilia and its ever-attendant arthritis.
Damon had hoped to be out of hospital to see Celeste off to Europe, but his face was still badly swollen and he was in considerable pain. The decision was correctly made to keep him in hospital under observation for three or four days at least. The operation appeared to have been a success and Celeste was certain in her own mind that Damon had arranged it in order that she could go without feeling guilty or worried about leaving him.
She never doubted that he would control his bleeding, whether under anaesthetic or not. But she’d naturally been concerned; four wisdom teeth in one sitting is a huge operation even on a healthy person and she would have been reluctant about leaving him if his prognosis had not been good.
On 27 January 1988, the day after Australia Day, when most of Australia was recovering from a celebratory hangover, Celeste, with her backpack filled with all the essentials – jeans, T-shirts, sleeping bag and lots of sketching pads and pencils – left for Italy and her big adventure. Damon was perhaps more excited than she was.
But unbeknownst to Celeste or any of us, Damon was about to face his first real AIDS-related crisis. The premature operation to remove his impacted wisdom teeth was to prove a terrible mistake. The two years his doctor said he couldn’t afford to wait was to be about all the time he had left. This situation was brought about largely because of this unnecessary dental operation.
Twenty
Food Poisoning of the Kneecap and the Moment of Truth.
Damon needed no emergency blood during the operation for the removal of his four impacted wisdom teeth and he required only the mandatory blood transfusion when he returned to his hospital bed. This came as an enormous surprise to Denise who, knowing Damon was a classic haemophiliac, expected the worst and transfused him with Factor VIII for several days before the operation. Nonetheless, the almost complete lack of bleeding was without precedent. Damon always bled, classic haemophiliacs always do, it was only a question of degree. Denise had been concerned that she might not have enough blood product saved up for the occasion.
I find it curious that with their quasi-scientific mindset, most doctors will give you a specific reason for almost any medical outcome. They will tell you that the body is essentially a piece of plumbing and that it contains no surprises, everything has a physico-mechanical explanation. Science explains all. So when something comes along to confound this glib prognosis, such as the fact that Damon, a classic haemophiliac and therefore a chronic bleeder, bled less during the operation than a normal patient might be expected to do, the surgeon simply regarded this as a coincidence. N
ot even a curious circumstance, simply something that happened on a wet Thursday morning.
The real irony of course was that they’d gone ahead with an operation on Damon which could easily have waited a further two years or more. Though there seems no doubt that eventually his wisdom teeth would have needed to be removed, he’d suffered no real inconvenience from them and the decision to proceed very nearly cost him his life and certainly moved his relatively benign HIV status on to full-blown AIDS. It was a case of a system which once in motion couldn’t be stopped. The blood for such an operation had been collected, the surgeon was booked, the theatre came up and so the procedure took place.
Despite the comparative lack of bleeding the operation was very traumatic and Damon remained in hospital for two weeks before he was allowed to come home. During this period he lost considerable weight.
“It’s to be expected,” we told ourselves. “He can’t eat much with his mutilated gums and badly swollen jaw.”
He returned home and, while we were anxious that he come to live with us in the flat at Rose Bay, he insisted on going back to our still-not-completed house in Vaucluse so that he might be with Celeste for the last few days before she left for Europe. His recovery from the operation was remarkable and by the time Celeste left, though his mouth was still painful, he seemed almost his old self again. Celeste had confided in me that she wouldn’t go if Damon wasn’t better and now she left quite cheerfully. Damon, she knew, was well on his way to complete recovery.
After Celeste had left, Damon insisted he wanted to stay at the house in Hopetoun Avenue alone. Though this didn’t please us overly much, Damon was neat in his ways and quite capable of looking after himself. After considerable nagging from Benita he agreed to take three meals a week with us in the Rose Bay flat.
The idea of his being on his own wasn’t quite as stupid as it must seem. Benita would go up to the house in Vaucluse every day to supervise the workmen and would spend a good portion of the day on the job. As I’ve mentioned before, this was a traumatic time for us all and in particular for Benita. I was busy with my book and work and could only go to the site before work on weekdays and weekends. Benita needed to be on hand, often several times a day, for deliveries and for the detailed supervision that becomes essential, particularly when completing the hundreds of tiny details on a new house.
The good side of this was that she could monitor Damon’s progress without appearing to do so and so we didn’t feel too bad about him staying alone so soon after his operation. He needed rest and this way he remained largely undisturbed.
One of Damon’s major reasons for wanting to stay at Vaucluse after Celeste had left was Mr Schmoo the cat. Mr Schmoo had turned up one day at the house in Talfourd Street and proclaimed it home and Celeste his mum.
Anyone with a heart less open than Celeste’s would have recognised a professional cat bum in an instant. Mr Schmoo was no gentleman and he knew a good thing when he saw one. But Celeste adopted him with no questions asked and Mr Schmoo became family. When they’d moved from Talfourd Street to our near-complete house in Vaucluse Mr Schmoo, of course, had gone with them. Now with Celeste overseas Damon didn’t like the idea of Celeste’s cat being left alone. Mr Schmoo, he knew, couldn’t come down to the Rose Bay flat because of Lana, our Weimaraner, who didn’t take kindly to cats.
We need not have worried. Mr Schmoo was a cat for all seasons and would simply have moved on to his next meal ticket. In fact, Mr Schmoo is still in the neighbourhood with owner number six since Celeste’s original adoption papers went through. How many surrogate families he’d attached himself to before he wandered into Celeste and Damon’s life is, of course, unknown. He is definitely a cat for all seasons. I was signing books at a local bookstore recently when a young couple came up and said, “We’ve got Schmoo the cat.”
“Ha!” I said. “For how long? You’re his sixth owner that I know of.”
“Oh no!” they chorused, looking quite indignant, “Mr Schmoo loves us and will never, never leave.”
“He will!” I assured them.
Mr Schmoo was the proverbial fat cat and pretty beat up looking at that. He had a purr inside him like a tractor engine and you could hear him coming from a hundred feet. He must have had some sort of indefinable feline charisma because everyone who ever owned Mr Schmoo (Owned? That’s really funny!) always spoke well of him, despite having been dropped without a backward miaow when something more suitable came along.
Now here was Damon alone in an incomplete house and doing it for the sake of Mr Schmoo, the cat bum! Taken together with Mothra and Sam, Celeste’s taste in cats had to be severely questioned.
Damon seemed fine for a couple of days after Celeste’s departure, but on the Thursday he wasn’t well and seemed to be running a temperature. Benita tried to make him come home but he refused. His good knee was really bad again and we discovered that he hadn’t really been fine at all. His knee had blown up on the morning of Celeste’s departure and he’d given himself a massive transfusion and bluffed his way through the day despite being in considerable pain.
He’d kept transfusing himself every morning and again at night, but the knee had grown steadily worse. By Thursday, he was in a great deal of pain and Benita persuaded him to go to the Haemophilia Centre at Prince Alfred. He agreed on one condition: that he not be made to remain in hospital. Benita phoned me at work and I agreed she should give him the assurance, provided he wasn’t putting himself in any serious danger.
When Denise was told how many transfusions he’d given himself she was concerned. Damon had given himself sufficient Factor VIII to stop almost any kind of internal bleed short of a major accident. Not only had the bleeding not stopped but it was located in his good knee and, on the third day, started up in his good elbow.
Every classic haemophiliac lives in dread of one thing; that he will become immune to Factor VIII. Damon had received huge doses of Factor VIII prior to the teeth operation and now he had added to this a further eight transfusions in four days. None of these seemed to have helped and this was cause for great concern, the real concern being that there was no medical routine to put into effect. Waiting and hoping was all that could be done.
Damon was in a lot of pain, but Denise agreed that being in hospital wasn’t going to make things any better; they couldn’t do any more for him than we could. Thankfully Damon readily agreed to stay at home with us. He was beginning to feel really unwell and was, I suspect, grateful to come home to be looked after. I’d previously moved the boxes out of the spare room when he’d had his teeth removed, fully expecting him to come home to us after the operation. This room was now ready for him. The boxes had been moved into the room next door, known by now as my cardboard kingdom. This additional load so filled the tiny room that the cardboard containers stood as high as the stately old-fashioned ceilings would allow, with only a narrow corridor leading from the door to a small bunker where my computer stood on a card table. My working view was of a solid wall of khaki cardboard no more than eighteen inches at any point from where I sat and stretching to the roof.
Outside my window was the full sweep of one of the most beautiful bays on earth, a seascape busy with water traffic – scurrying ferries, yachts with baggy spinnakers, schooners in full sail and the occasional oil tanker or cargo ship looking sedate and businesslike as it came or left via the main shipping channels in the harbour. But within my cardboard kingdom there was nothing to distract me. It was a marvellous way to write.
With a solemn promise that I’d personally feed Mr Schmoo a can of Snappy Tom sardines every morning when I went up to the house, Damon agreed that he’d stay with us. He was sick as hell and sweating profusely by the time we got him home and into bed. That night I awoke to hear him moving around in his room. I looked at my watch. It was two a.m. and I got up and walked quietly down the passage and knocked at the door. “May I come in?” I opened the door without waiting for his reply.
Damon’s light was on and he was
seated beside his bed with all his transfusion gear spread out on the table next to it. His hands were trembling as he was attempting to suck the clotting factor into a syringe. Then I saw that he was weeping quietly.
“Damon, are you all right?”
He looked up at me, his eyes glistening. “Dad, my knee hurts terribly.”
“Can I help?” I pointed to the stuff on the table.
He handed me the syringe and I pulled the liquid slowly into it from the bottle. “It’s useless, I know, but I’ve got to try,” he said, then he looked at me and his eyes brimmed with tears. “Shit, Dad, it hurts worse than any time I can remember.” I could see the beads of sweat forming on his forehead.
I put my hand to his head and it came away wet, then I inserted a thermometer under his tongue. “Damon, you’ve got a temperature.” I looked at him and put my arm around him. “Perhaps we should take you into hospital, what do you say, eh?”
Damon pulled back and winced with the sudden pain of even this simple body movement. “No, Dad. Please no! I couldn’t stand going back to hospital.” He was wiping his eyes, using the back of his hand. “These days when I go into hospital, I think of death.” I was deeply shocked. Damon, who’d been in hospital so often he simply regarded it as a part of his life, was suddenly frightened. Damon, who had faced every battle with wonderful courage, was panicking.
“We’ll leave it until the morning,” I said. “I think tomorrow we ought to make a decision. I don’t believe you’re getting well fast enough.”
April Fool's Day Page 27