The phone calls came every week and Damon was still in hospital. After the fourth week, Celeste started to worry and wanted to come home. She was talking to Benita on the phone when she suddenly burst into tears. “Please, Benita, what’s wrong? I know something’s terribly wrong and I must come home!” Then she added, “I can’t, because I can only return with the ticket I’ve got in another three weeks. Please, will Bryce send me a ticket and I’ll pay him back!”
Benita was close to tears herself, but Damon had made her swear that she wouldn’t tell Celeste anything. He knew that if she knew the full story she’d want to return immediately and he was determined that she should have a wonderful holiday.
“Talk to Bryce, see what he says,” she said, then added, “Hold on, he’s working on his book, I’ll get him.”
Benita stood at the door, at the entrance to my cardboard kingdom. “Darling, can you come here for a moment?” She seldom came into the room as the boxes towering above her gave her claustrophobia.
“I can’t, I’m busy,” I said, irritated at being disturbed again. I’d been out half an hour or so earlier to say hello to Celeste before Benita settled down to have a proper yak.
“Please, it’s important!”
I sighed and made my way down the cardboard passage to the door. “Jesus! What?”
“Celeste is worried about Damon, she wants to come home.”
“That’s dumb!” I said.
“Will you talk to her?”
“What? Now?”
“Of course now. Celeste is waiting on the phone!”
“It’s a really dumb idea,” I said, irritated but walking down the passage to the phone. I picked up the receiver. “Celeste?” I said in a peremptory voice.
She didn’t allow me to continue. “Bryce, I want to come home. I feel there’s something very wrong with Damon.” Her voice was urgent, she was speaking fast and I could hear she was close to tears. “My ticket won’t let me leave Europe until the end of March. Please can you send me another one? I’ll pay you back as soon as I can.”
To cut a long story short I convinced her to stay in Europe. I used all the usual arguments – the trip of a lifetime; Australia’s distance from Europe; things to learn; Damon’s knee and elbow getting better by the day. I added that Damon would be furious if he thought she’d come back on his behalf. “There’s nothing you can do for him,” I said rather harshly, trying to make my point more forcibly.
Finally she seemed mollified. “Celeste, if things got bad with Damon you know we’d send you a ticket right away, but there’s no indication that anything is likely to happen, he’s just making a rather slow recovery, that’s all.”
Celeste told me later that she’d been reasonably satisfied after speaking to me but, the following night in her pensione in a small village outside Siena, she’d wakened with a terrible fright in the middle of the night with my words, “There’s nothing you can do for him", pounding in her ears. She became suddenly, unshakably convinced that Damon was dead and that we were keeping the news of his death from her.
She caught the train next day to Rome where she persuaded the Alitalia people to let her fly out a week early, though her ticket wasn’t valid. After they agreed she went into the Via Condotti and bought a beautiful outfit with the money she’d saved from the final week of her trip, then she phoned from Rome airport to say she was coming home. She paid a few lire to have a shower at the airport and got dolled up to the nines in her new outfit and boarded the plane for Sydney.
Later she told me, “I kept telling myself that if I arrived in Sydney and Damon wasn’t there to meet me then he was definitely dead. But if he was there waiting for me, then I wanted to look perfectly stunning for him, the totally sophisticated Italian, the sort of woman he spoke of as being seated beside him in his red Ferrari when he made his first million.”
She went on to explain how she felt on her arrival in Sydney: “I arrived home, having spent the last hour in the plane getting my make-up perfect and hoping the red in my eyes didn’t show how exhausted I was. I came out of customs after what seemed like a hundred years and there was Adam. I looked to see if Damon was with him and, when I saw he wasn’t, I felt the panic rise in me. It was an empty, burning feeling like acid vomit rising. I wanted suddenly to run away, to run back into the customs hall and up the ramp and back on the plane, which would somehow take off and fly me away, like a video tape rolling backwards, rewinding, cancelling out the action that had just taken place. All I could think was that Damon was dead and you’d sent Adam to break the news to me!
“I have always loved Adam. He is just a wonderful person and you can love him just for that. But he loved Damon terribly and was enormously protective of him and I loved him for this as well. I knew if something had happened to Damon, Adam would want to be the one to tell me. Adam took me in his arms and I started to cry. ‘It’s okay, really it’s okay,’ he kept saying.
“I didn’t seem able to register whether this meant Damon was alive or that he was comforting me because Damon was dead. Adam seemed suddenly to understand my confusion because he said, ‘It’s okay, Celeste. Damon’s in hospital, but he’s waiting impatiently to see us.’
“I was exhausted from the journey; after all I’d been travelling non-stop for two and a half days and I hadn’t slept much on the plane and I still wasn’t entirely convinced. Perhaps I was hallucinating or something? ‘You have to take me to him now, Adam! I have to see him right away!’ I must have been shouting, though I was unaware of doing so.
“’Shhh, Celeste, I promise you he’s okay, I promise!’ Adam said, then added, ‘We had trouble restraining him from coming to the airport.’ Which I later found was untrue; although Damon would have wanted to come, he was still too weak to leave his bed.
“On the way Adam tried to prepare me for the shock. ‘Damon has lost a lot of weight,’ he cautioned, then he explained about the Salmonella in his good knee and elbow. ‘It hasn’t been good, he’s been through a bit of a tough time.’
“’Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t Bryce or Benita tell me? It’s not fair,’ I wailed.
“Adam was silent for a moment and when he continued his voice was suddenly shaky. ‘We couldn’t, Damon wouldn’t let us…’ I looked up and tears were streaming down his face. ‘He’s got AIDS,’ he whispered. ‘Shit, Celeste, my little brother’s got AIDS!’ He pulled the car suddenly to the side of the road and slammed on the brakes so that I shot forward in my seat belt. Then we held each other and wept and wept and wept.
“I rushed into Damon’s hospital room, still not entirely convinced. The signs meant nothing to me. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure I even saw them. I just wanted to see Damon with my own eyes.”
Damon spent another two weeks in hospital after Celeste’s return and she seemed to spend almost all her time with him. Adam was living in a tiny flat above Dinki Di Pies where Celeste had worked and where she’d earned most of the money to go to Europe. The bakery’s real name was Classic Catering, but everyone called it Dinky Di Pies, because that was what was written on the canvas awning overhanging the shop. Xavier, the owner, had agreed that Celeste could move in with Adam, though there was hardly room for two, but he agreed to them sharing until she could find a place to live.
She was due to start back at university for the third year of her degree in architecture but, with all the time she spent with Damon, it became almost impossible for her to look for a place of her own. Our house in Vau-cluse was finally completed, though we were never to live in it. Benita and I had lived through two horrific years of building and felt that the house held nothing but trauma and heartache. The prospect of owning the home we’d dreamed of had been completely shattered. Coupled with the emotional impact of Damon’s near death, our memories of that old and most happy of homes were still poignant and of the new one unbearable. We decided to sell. This meant it was no longer available to Celeste.
After nearly seven weeks in hospital Damon wante
d out. Years of being in hospitals meant Damon knew his way around and, with the assurance gained over time, he was no longer a compliant patient. Instead he demanded to know the details of every bit of medication and how it would affect him and whether there would be any side effects. He’d long since lost his respect for the average medico and realised that he was largely responsible for his own body and its medication. So he’d often argue with a doctor before he agreed to take a treatment. And, sometimes, he’d even refuse to take medication if he felt it was wrongly prescribed.
In a busy public hospital with doctors changing all the time and where interns are mostly on duty, cross-examinations and interrogations such as Damon would conduct were disruptive and often embarrassing to the senior nursing staff who, simply acting on instructions left by the physician, were often unable to answer his questions. Damon was usually better briefed than they were and they didn’t take kindly to his arrogant and his often know-all manner. Damon knew better than to expect doctors to know everything and this was particularly true of interns. He would tell of one evening coming to Prince Alfred late because he had a bleed and had run out of blood product at home. He explained to the intern in Emergency that he would need to take him to the Haemophilia Centre for the AHF blood product required for a transfusion. The Haemophilia Centre was closed at night, but Damon was familiar with the procedure, while the intern obviously was not.
The intern looked at him suspiciously. “You claim you’re a haemophiliac and you require a blood transfusion?”
“Well yes. AHF. You know the Factor VIII compound? I’ll need to transfuse myself. It’s stored at the Haemophilia Centre. You keep the keys here in Emergency.”
“You seem to know a lot,” the intern replied, then added, “but not enough!” With one eyebrow slightly arched he said, “Haemophiliacs receive medication for bleeding orally! Now just who are you and what do you want?”
Though Prince Alfred contained its own AIDS ward, Damon had not been placed in it, he’d come into hospital via Emergency and, with his infected knee, he’d simply been put in a private room in the general-medicine section. The staff in this area were not accustomed to treating AIDS patients and over-reacted somewhat to accepting him. Some of the nurses and cleaning staff simply refused to enter his room. In an incident, which I hasten to point out wasn’t typical, two male nurses barged into his room gloved and gowned on the pretence of attending to him; then they simply stood by his bed and called him a “fucking poofta” and a “turd burglar” whereupon they left.
Fortunately Damon was too sick to react, nor did he feel that their attitude was typical. He seemed to understand from the beginning the fear that AIDS gave to people including hospital staff, who, unless they worked in an AIDS ward, really knew very little more about the virus than did the general public.
Those of the staff who were prepared to nurse him wore so much protective clothing that they looked as though they were entering the radioactive chamber of a nuclear reactor. It was a tiring and difficult time for everyone, though, of course, as is always the case, some of the hospital staff were quite wonderful. But they were not in the majority; the fear of AIDS, coupled with the ignorance of how it’s spread, made everyone who came near Damon apprehensive and he couldn’t help but feel their anxiety, which inevitably added to his overall resentment of the hospital environment.
In fairness, it must also be said that, toward the end of his stay, Damon was giving back as much as he was getting and he too wasn’t being very co-operative. After seven weeks he’d had enough. He felt sure he was sufficiently well enough to leave and he wanted to get the hell out of the place. But the biro-tapper from the Haemophilia Centre, who was nominally still the doctor in charge of Damon, was adamant that he remain in hospital for a further three weeks. The doctors at the Centre changed all the time and this one, whom we referred to as the biro-tapper, had no continuity with Damon. Furthermore, as Damon’s Salmonella problem was outside his specialty, he was unable to give Damon a rational reason as a physician for a continued stay. Admittedly, Damon was being difficult and finally one morning the biro-stabber exclaimed in exasperation, “If you go now and get sick again you’ll be wasting the taxpayers’ money! I simply won’t be responsible for such public waste!”
Damon was furious and called me at my office, informing me that he was signing himself out and could I come and fetch him. Worried that it might be the wrong move I phoned Denise. To my surprise she was on Damon’s side. “Damon will get better sooner if he goes home,” she said, then lowering her voice on the phone she mentioned the biro-tapper by name. “You see, Damon’s T-cell count is down. The doctor’s just trying to cover his backside in case Damon catches another infection.”
“What does that mean: his T-cell count is down?” I asked.
“Not a lot. We’ll need to wait and see. It’s no reason to keep him here anyway.”
We all trusted Denise; she knew more about her haemophiliac patients than any of the doctors and we accepted her advice more readily than that of any of the physicians. The thing about Denise was that she seldom pulled her punches while, at the same time, she cared enormously for the haemophiliacs in her care. Damon loved her and she could make him undergo tedious exercise routines where even his mother wouldn’t succeed.
“Denise, you’d tell me if there was something very wrong, wouldn’t you?” Damon was one of the first of the haemophiliacs with an HIV positive status and I knew that Denise herself was on a learning curve.
“Bryce, I don’t know. We don’t know! The fact that his T-cell count is slightly further down may simply be due to the tooth operation and of course the subsequent Salmonella infection. In somebody like Damon, the tooth operation alone is a very traumatic experience. In fact, it’s a pretty rotten thing for anyone to have to undergo. Add the Salmonella and we’re very lucky we didn’t lose him.”
“What do his T-cells do?”
Again Denise was hesitant. “Precisely – they fight infection. They protect us from being infected.”
“Infected from what?”
“Well, you see we all have an immune system and the T-cells are sort of the front-line fighters belonging to this system; without them we’d all catch just about everything going around. Diseases are always around in the air. Though some appear at certain times, most are always present, but our immune systems keep them from infecting us.” She paused and then went on to explain, “Our T-cells fight them off – they’re the soldiers that keep our blood protected.”
“So, without them, we become easily infected?”
“Well yes, that’s the general idea. That’s how the Salmonella got into his system.”
“And Damon’s T-cells are down even further than before?”
“Yes, but we’ve got a lot of T-cells, losing a few more isn’t a disaster.” Denise’s voice was deliberately casual.
“How many have we got? I mean the average person?”
“Well it varies; a healthy T-cell count can vary from five hundred to as many as two thousand.”
“How many did Damon have?”
“Originally? Sixteen hundred.”
“How many does he have to lose to be in danger, to be vulnerable?”
“Well, we don’t like the count to go much below two hundred and fifty.”
“And what is Damon’s T-cell count at the moment?”
There was a pause on the other end. “Damon’s count is precisely one hundred and ninety-eight.” It was the old, precise, no-punches-pulled Denise. Then she added, “They could build up again. Really we don’t know.” She sighed, “There is so much we don’t know, Bryce.”
My heart sank. After sixteen hundred, one hundred and ninety-eight T-cells seemed like nothing. “But you think it’s safe for him to come out of hospital?”
Denise sighed, “Bryce, where do you think the most opportunistic infections are likely to be found?”
“In a hospital?”
“Precisely! The sooner he’s out of this pla
ce the better.”
Damon returned home with us. He was still too unwell to live with Celeste who was about to start university again. Besides, even if Adam moved out of the tiny flat above the bakery, as he’d already offered to do, Damon would have found the narrow stairs up to the no-bathroom flat impossible to negotiate.
Our Rose Bay apartment wasn’t big, but it was light and sunny and fronting a small, inner-harbour beach which, at low tide, became glorious flats with shallow puddles to splash through and soft sand reaches to walk along. It was an ideal place for him to recover his strength. I found him, once, sitting in his wheelchair on the front verandah, for in the first week home Damon lacked the strength to walk. He was looking at the shimmering bay where a small seaplane was coming in to land, tears were running down his cheeks. I sat quietly beside him, saying nothing. “It’s so wonderful to be alive, Dad,” he said at last.
Fattening Damon up was our chief priority. He’d entered hospital weighing sixty-two kilos and returned home weighing just forty-two. We tried almost everything to tempt him, but he seemed to lack appetite and, despite a conscious desire to regain his strength, he ate like a bird. It was about this time that we noticed that oral thrush (Candida), a yellow fungus, was growing in his mouth. It wasn’t bad and didn’t seem to worry him overmuch, but nothing the chemist gave us to control it seemed to help very much. We’d manage to rinse it out, but by morning a fresh crop would grow.
Thrush is the eternal companion of AIDS and it would eventually build up in his mouth and throat and the lining of his stomach so that it had to be scraped off with a spatula and he could tolerate only soft custards and jelly.
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