Trudi and her husband, Scott, started to come and visit me along with Lisa and Otis. I’d developed a craving for watermelon and orange juice, so they brought plenty in for me and the nurses kept it nice and cold in a fridge. Even though I was still pretty fucked, I was at least starting to feel more alive. But there still wasn’t much spark in my system.
One morning, they wheeled this miserable old prick into the ward and put him in the bed opposite me. He looked like a washed-up version of Ronald Reagan with his wrinkly face and slicked-back hair, and could he whinge. I used to lie there and listen to him complaining about the food, the nurses, his bed, anything and everything in general. The first night he was there I was watching TV. Anyone who’s been in hospital knows the TV sets at the top of the beds have a screen about as big as a book cover and a tiny little remote speaker you keep next to your ear so you don’t disturb the other patients. It was half past nine at night and I was into this movie called Misery, about an author who gets kidnapped by a crazy fan, starring James Caan. I was quite enjoying it when I heard, ‘Hey! You’re not in your own room. This is a public ward. Turn your bloody TV off.’
I waited a moment, then replied, ‘WHAT?’
‘You heard,’ Ronald Reagan said, ‘turn your TV off. People want to sleep.’
‘Turn my TV off? Why don’t you go and get fucked, you miserable old cunt,’ I yelled back. ‘If I want to watch TV. I’ll watch TV. Go and fuck yourself.’
‘WHAT did you say?’
‘You heard, you miserable old prick,’ I yelled at him. ‘Get fucked.’
This went on for a while, with me calling Ronald Reagan all the arseholes and bastards under the sun, till finally I said, ‘Listen, you whingeing old cunt. You’ve got cancer like the rest of us. You’ll be dead before you know it and you’ll get all the sleep you want. So fuck off and leave me alone. You fuckin old dill.’ Then I ignored him and went back to watching the movie. When it finished, I put my radio on just to nark him some more.
The next morning they pulled the screens back to give us breakfast and Ronnie was sitting up in bed glaring at me. So to nark him some more I smiled and asked him if he had a good night’s sleep and I was really pleasant to him. It’s an old Zen philosophy: if you want to upset people who hate you, be over-nice to them.
But having the slanging match with Misery Guts was just the catalyst I needed. It got my adrenalin pumping and I started to pick up. But I did have something on my mind. It seemed strange that the doctor who gave me the colonoscopy that nearly killed me, never came in to see how I was. It also seemed strange that he never found the cancer had come back and it was strange how he didn’t seem to know my bowel was pierced. It was fuckin strange all right. But the doctor who operated on me called in and told me that my catheter and stoma would now be permanent fixtures. Great.
There’s an old saying by an ancient ruler: ‘This too shall pass.’ It means whether you’re having a good time or a bad time, it finally has to end. It pertains to everything — life, the seasons, even the world. Eventually it all has to end. And, after almost a month, my ordeal in Gosford hospital was over and they kicked me out. I gave Ronnie another cheerio before I left, then Trudi brought me home. My memory was shot, I’d lost another fifteen kilograms and where I’d once had stomach muscles was now a hernia as big as a rockmelon. Plus I was wearing an emergency call button on my right wrist, I needed a walking stick and my face looked like Hamlet’s father’s. But boy was I happy to be back at the old hacienda. The first thing I did was slip the old cat half a Valium, I had the other half, along with a painkiller, then I kicked back in my recliner and put my giant screen TV on.
Despite itself, the Central Coast has a pretty good home nursing system. Besides Lisa, I had nurses and carers calling round to help me have a shower, take me for a walk and do my shopping. I was pretty fucked and I still needed a walker to get around so I knew my rehabilitation was going to be a long, slow process. But you have to do it. Otherwise you seize up. One thing I did notice was that most of the nurses who came round to walk me were around half my age, overweight and badly in need of a gallop. I also figured having a catheter jammed up your wozza is more uncomfortable then having a superpubic catheter stabbed into your side. Every time you sit down you feel like you’re straddling a paling fence and getting in and out of car isn’t much fun either. So I got a referral to the urologist who did the original bladder operation and he swapped the catheter around. This only took a day at a local hospital and even though it still left me still feeling like I was busting for a piss all the time, it was considerably better.
Lisa drove me in to see the doctor who operated on me in the hospital and he told me he couldn’t get all the cancer out. So he arranged for me to start radio- and chemotherapy in a couple of weeks’ time. He also held his thumb and forefinger about half and inch apart and told me that’s how close I’d come to dying. I said I knew and told him about my NDE. He found that quite interesting. Good for him. But I’m not interested in having another.
People dropped in to see how I was, including, of all people, an ex-cop who I had had a falling out with. I thought that was pretty decent of him and he was genuinely concerned about my health. Before he left, he recommended I try reiki. It had worked for him when he had bad headaches and for some people he knew that had cancer. 1’d heard about reiki, so I thanked him for coming around and said I’d give it a shot. The next day, I let my fingers do the walking and found a woman nearby who did reiki in your home. She said she could come over the following afternoon.
The reiki lady was an attractive skinny brunette in her fifties who wore glasses and didn’t look anywhere near her age. She brought a fold-up table with her, I got on it face-up and she placed an iPod on my chest playing celestial music while some bloke told me to relax and go with the flow. The woman never touched me. She just moved her hands over my body. I relaxed all right and was feeling sort of okay. The next thing I started crying. Great racking sobs of grief with tears pouring down the sides of my face. It was absolutely astonishing. Finally she stopped and I wanted to keep on crying and let it all hang out when there was a knock on the door and a nurse arrived to give me a shower. It broke the spell. I made another appointment to see the reiki lady and let the nurse give me a scrub.
The next time the reiki lady did her thing on me wasn’t quite like the first. There were no tears and I didn’t feel any different. Nevertheless, I made an appointment to see her again. The third time, she showed up in a neat blue dress with her hair done nicely. Before she started she said she wanted to talk to me about something after, and I’d probably want to throw her out of the house. I thought she’s either going to ask me if I was ever interested in getting married, or, she’d found cancer all through my body and I had two weeks to live. She did her thing, which was much like the session before, then she packed up her table and sat on the lounge and we each had a glass of mineral water. I asked her okay, what’s this thing she wanted to talk to me about. She fumbled around a bit then said did I know I was an extraterrestrial? I looked at her for a moment and said no, I’d never really thought about it. There wouldn’t be two hundred people in the world like you, she said. And that’s why I was crying so much that time. That was my friends in outer space calling to me to come home. We finished our mineral waters and I said goodbye to the reiki lady and said I’d be in touch. However, I never saw the reiki lady again. I might have cancer and feel like shit, but I still quite enjoy life as an Earthling and I’m no hurry for Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Fleet Command to run me out to the Epsilon Pulsar Cluster or wherever it is the reiki lady was convinced I came from.
The following week, Lisa ran me out to the intensive care ward at Gosford hospital and I gave all the nurses some chocolates and fruit boxes. They remembered me and were absolutely chuffed. In fact it was quite emotional seeing them all again and knowing I had them to thank for my life. A lot of people take things like that for granted. They shouldn’t. Nurses are angels and under
a lot of pressure. They deserve all the help and support they can get.
A day or two later, Lisa and her monster boyfriend went and got Mum from the nursing home and brought her round to see her old cat. This cheered the old girl up, even if the cat didn’t want to know her. And it cheered me up too. It was funny with the old girl now. Ever since I got cancer and couldn’t get out to see her as much, she realised I was all she had. And she stopped being so nasty towards me. She actually told me she loved me. I told her that despite everything I loved her too. I always did. After that we became mother and son again. It was beautiful.
One day Lisa was around doing some cleaning and I happened to remark that the builder wouldn’t give me a receipt for the work he and his merry men had done in the bathroom. I’d been ringing him for over six weeks.
‘Why won’t he give you a receipt’? asked Lisa
‘Because he wants to slip it under the Taxation Department’s radar,’ I explained. ‘I need the receipt to make a claim.’
‘What’s the builder’s name?’ asked Lisa.
A few days later, Lisa called in with some bread and milk and handed me a sheet of paper. ‘Here’s your receipt,’ she told me. What? Apparently Lisa told Otis about the builder. Otis owed me a couple of favours, plus I was looking after his girl. So Otis got a friend from the club, I’ll call him Gronk, and they called round to have friendly word with the builder. I’d seen photos of Gronk in books about bikie gangs and fair dinkum, a gorilla could sit in Gronk’s hand and he’d have to turn side on to walk into a double garage. The builder kept himself buffed up and did all this martial arts training so he got a bit smart with Otis and Gronk. They picked him up, shoved his head into his computer and told him to write out Mr Barrett’s receipt or they’d wrap the fuckin thing around his head. Gronk wanted to give him a flogging just for the fun of it. In two seconds the big tough builder pissed his pants and swiftly printed up my receipt. Hey, it ain’t what you know, it’s who you know.
Now it was time for my radiotherapy at Gosford. I drove myself in and met this delightful little doctor who barked at me for about four minutes, charged me $110, then hunted me out of his office with his clipboard. He gave me the impression he’d rather a see a swarm of wasps in his office than yours truly. I went into another room, stripped down then lay on my back facing towards a round metal ring that looked like something out of Stargate Universe. They tattooed some markings round my groin then zapped me in and out of the metal ring several times. I had six bouts of radiotherapy. By the last one, all around my groin looked and felt like I’d been lying out in the sun in the Simpson Desert for a week and my crutch was burnt to a crisp. Poor Mr Wobbly glowed in the dark.
Next it was time to start chemotherapy. This time I cracked it for an intelligent, caring oncologist who knew what she was doing. Thank heaven for little girls. She put me on Xeloda tablets two weeks on and one week off. Then before you start the next course, you go out to North Gosford Private to get pumped full of Avistan for two hours. If you’ve ever spoken to anyone who’s been through chemo, they’ll all tell you the same thing: it’s a cunt. These are some of the side effects from Xeloda according to the brochure inside the packet: diarrhoea, vomiting, nausea (feeling like you want to vomit), fatigue (tiredness), weakness or weariness, skin rashes, dry or itchy skin, abdominal (gut) pain, fever, constipation, headache, dizziness, loss of appetite, weight loss, increased eye watering or irritation, taste disturbance, indigestion, dry mouth, nail disorders, sore throat, cough, nose bleeds, shortness of breath, muscle and joint pain. They left out morbidity, lachrymosity and irritability. Compared to the cure, cancer is a day at the beach. But the one that totally fucks you is the fatigue. You’ve got no idea how tired it makes you. You have absolutely no desire to get out of bed in the morning and you haven’t got strength enough to lift a nightie. Like I said, ask anyone who’s been through chemotherapy, they’ll tell you what it’s like. And I had at least a year of this to look forward to.
Not long after I started chemo, I knew I was going to have to do something about this Kransky hanging out of my stomach. It almost filled my bag and with my stoma pumping away all night it would burst in bed. I’d have to get up at three o’clock in the morning in the middle of winter, covered in shit, and clean myself up, change my clothes, along with the sheets, then crawl back into bed and try to get some sleep. I got a referral to some specialist, showed him my problem and asked if he could fix it. Sure, he said. I can fix that. So he booked me into North Gosford Private Hospital for an operation in about a week’s time. I went into hospital, had the procedure and got booted out four days later. The bill for the operation? $3000.
The stoma was definitely a lot smaller and I was a much happier camper. Except three days later it fell out again, bigger and better than ever and this time it hurt like buggery. I rang the specialist and made another appointment. But you don’t get to see a specialist on the Central Coast just like that. Up here it’s like getting granted an audience with the Pope. He could see me in a month.
While I was waiting that out I realised I was going to have to do something I absolutely dreaded. I was going to have get the old cat put down. It was winter and I couldn’t have it in the house because she wouldn’t use a litter tray and would shit and piss everywhere. I made her up a bed under the house, I even put a heater next to it and took its food down there. But like me, the poor old cat was flat out getting up and down the stairs. I made a shelter by the front door and fed it there. But the bush turkeys would eat all her food and she couldn’t fight them off. Plus it had arthritis that bad it was dragging its left leg and it would be only a matter of time before a dog wandered in and killed her because she was too slow to get away. So I took her up to the local veterinary clinic and after a good look they agreed it was the best thing to do. I left the old cat there along with its cage. I didn’t have the heart to bring its body home and I didn’t have the strength to dig a hole in the backyard. Worst of all, I had to ring Mum and tell her. I told her the cat died in its sleep and Lisa and I buried her in the backyard. It tore my heart out when Mum burst into tears over the phone. Plus I felt like a nice cunt lying to her like that. But little Liza Minnelli, as Mum used to call her, had a great three years up here with me. I made sure she was warm, I used to feed her topside mince and tuna in spring water because her teeth were old, and she got a steady supply of dope. And none of that generic shit either. Only the top shelf for little Liza Minnelli.
Soon it was time to go and see the medical luminary that performed the brilliant operation on my stoma. He looked at it and went, ‘Mmhh. Yes. Yes. Mmhh. I see. Yes.’ He said he could go in this way. Or he could go in that way. But the best thing for me to do, when it fell out again would be to lie on my back and roll it up, like folding a sock. I thought yeah, what a great idea. When I’m in the middle of Erina Fair or down the beach and it falls out, I’ll just lie on my back and roll it up. That would be a great look for the people around me.
I said to him, ‘Would you mind if I got a second opinion?’
He was somewhat taken aback. ‘Where?’ he asked.
‘St Vincent’s Hospital,’ I replied.
‘Why St Vincent’s?’
‘Because,’ I said. ‘St Vincent’s Hospital is St Vincent’s Hospital.’
What I really wanted to say was, ‘Because I’m sick of being hacked to bits up here by quacks like you. And any chance of getting my three fuckin grand back? You arse.’ But I needed his input for the surgeon down there and I had to keep in sweet, so I kept my mouth shut.
This time I went and saw my old friend and old doctor in Bondi who lined me up with a surgeon at St Vincent’s Private Hospital. I made an appointment to see him, and he said, ‘Yep. I can fix that. It’ll be a bit of a bastard of an operation, you’ll be in hospital a week and you’ll have a drip when you get out. But it’s definitely do-able and you’ll heal up okay. Cost will be about $2200, counting the anaesthetist.’ That didn’t worry me because I’m a capital
ist bastard and I’ve got private health insurance coming out my arse. Well, not quite. Oozing out my stoma would be more like it. He booked me in for surgery in two weeks’ time. I’d already arranged with Lisa to drive me to the hospital and she and Otis could flog the guts out of my new Holden ute while I was away if they wanted. So I thanked the good doctor, said I’d see him on the day and went back to my wonderful life of chemotherapy and its delightful side effects.
Still Riding on the Storm Page 29