Mum was only there a few minutes before the nurse tapped her shoulder. When she stood up to go, her eyes didn’t leave mine as she backed out of the room. I realised something serious must have happened to me but I was too tired to ask. Instead, I lapsed back into a cosy nap.
I spent the next few days sleeping and waking, not knowing when it was day or night because the curtains were always drawn and the room was kept in darkness. Over this time I pieced together part of the picture of what had happened to me, from brief conversations with nurses, augmented with details Mum told me on her daily visits. She was the only person allowed to come and see me, but she brought little notes and drawings which she’d coaxed my sisters into making for me.
I’d been in a coma for ten days. Local doctors had been unable to diagnose what was wrong with me. Two other children, admitted in the same condition, had both died.
Mum told me her version of events. ‘They wouldn’t let me stay at the hospital, the doctors sent me home and said they’d send an ambulance for me immediately if you took a turn for the worse, but I came back every afternoon at visiting hours,’ she said. ‘I came one afternoon to find a man leaning over you, wearing baggy old trousers and a dark coloured shirt, and he looked like the gardener. I thought he was molesting you, and I yelled at him to get away. A nurse came running and took me away. She told me he was a specialist, just in town for the day. He’d agreed to have a look at you and he’d found what was wrong with you. Meningitis. He was having you moved out of the ward and into the private area. He saved your life. A man who looked like a gardener saved your life!’
I never learned his name. He’d left instructions for my care, and the hospital had put a senior doctor in charge of looking after me. This doctor came in gingerly, accompanied by Mum, soon after I’d roused out of the coma. When he had checked my intravenous drip and the injection site, Mum pointed out scratches on his hands and arms and said that I’d attacked him one day when he came to give me one of the six lumbar punctures they’d taken. She said I must apologise to him, but he laughed the whole thing away and told me to just get well.
The day nurse assigned to me spent a lot of time looking at her face in a mirror which was hanging on the wall. She told me that she’d been given ‘Privates’ because she’d just had measles and, although she still had spots, which she kept inspecting, she wasn’t contagious anymore.
One afternoon she brought in a sheet of paper and waved it at me.
‘D’you know what this is?’ she asked, laughing.
Well, of course I didn’t, and I certainly wasn’t strong enough yet to laugh with her. She brought it over and showed it to me.
‘It’s a death certificate. It’s blank except for this bit on the bottom. The doctors thought you were going to die, and your mum would be too upset to sign it—so they got her to sign it when you were very sick so she wouldn’t be made even more upset later.’ She showed me Mum’s signature. The nurse thought it was terribly funny, and said she’d been told to tear it up. She seemed to think of this as a mark of my improvement under her care. I didn’t think of it that way, and burst into tears when she’d gone. How could my mother have signed it? How could she? I thought, rejecting her distress as a reason. Because of this, I harboured even deeper distrust of Mum’s motives for many years.
For several days I continued to have trouble moving my limbs, and I was on total bed care, fed by intravenous drips and my right leg was elevated on a pillow. My leg had been hurt when the first intravenous drip, which had been inserted in my ankle, had become blocked in the vein above my knee and a nurse had failed to look in until my leg had become badly swollen. My skin was dark and wrinkled, like prune skin, in a path from the inside of my lower thigh, down my calf to the insertion site, and my leg was in pain all the time and felt very sore to touch.
At some stage during the coma, I’d ripped a drip out from my arm, which was also bandaged. When the doctor checked on me, I begged to have the remaining drip taken out. Because the fluid being pumped into me looked like water, I cried that I’d drink the water instead of having it go into my arm.
Without warning one afternoon, a trolley was trundled in and a wardsman lifted me onto it. The nurse zipped around, putting my few belongings, drawings and notes sent by my sisters, into a paper bag. She told me the private room was needed for another patient and I was being moved to the convalescent hospital. I was afraid Mum wouldn’t be able to find me when she came but the nurse assured me that they would tell her where I had gone.
The convalescent hospital was in the same complex, but up a steep hill in a much older building. The wards-men tried wheeling me there but the wheels were made for flat surfaces and kept spinning out of control on the broken path. Eventually, I was lifted into an ambulance and driven the short distance. My nurse said that I’d have a lovely time because there would be other children for me to play with. But when I arrived, I was put into a very long and poorly lit dormitory ward, all by myself. Through the wall I could occasionally hear children playing, but throughout my stay I didn’t see any of them.
I was frightened in the ward. A sister came by shortly after my arrival and, to cheer me up, she said, ‘We’ll have your sea legs back for you in no time, and then we’ll send you back to the island.’ When she left, I cried until Mum came. I thought they were going to send me to Palm Island, where most of the expectant mothers I’d run messages for at the maternity ward lived. I recalled Mum telling me that the government had made several attempts to take us kids off her, and that they’d probably put us in a dormitory on Palm Island if that happened. It seemed that now, when I was so weak I couldn’t even stand up much less fight them off, they were going to have their way. When Mum arrived I pleaded with her to take me home, but she said she was fearful I’d have a relapse and die. I thought I would surely die or be carried off by the welfare if she left me there. I would have cried that night, but instead I went for a journey inside myself in order to work out how best to handle this situation.
By the next day I had made a plan. I slid my legs down off the bed to run away, but they wouldn’t hold me up. Then I couldn’t get them back on the bed, and I ended up sinking slowly to the floor, still clutching the stiff sheets. Only a few nurses were working in this section of the hospital, so I lay on the ground for a long time before anyone found me.
Two people came in during the afternoon to try to talk to me, but I refused to cooperate. I wouldn’t even answer them when they asked me my name. I was so distressed and had no other way to show it. That night, Mum visited me and she brought Dellie and Leonie. They weren’t allowed in but she had them look through a window and wave. It made me even more upset to see their freedom and to know that I had to stay there. A nurse had told Mum about the people who’d come to see me earlier and how I’d played up. Mum explained that it was their job to test me for brain damage, and the sooner I answered their questions, the sooner I’d be allowed to go home.
The next day the two people came again. I asked them if they were doctors but they said they weren’t. They asked a lot of questions about things I’d learned at school and gave me a mental arithmetic test. However, when the woman gave me a book she wanted me to read from, I couldn’t see the type clearly enough to read it. The man sat making notes. From the way Mum had spoken, I thought this examination was all I was being kept there for, so as they were walking away, I asked them if I could go now. The woman turned back and said, ‘Oh, no. You’ll be here at least three months.’ A spear of pain went through my heart and I felt absolutely betrayed by everyone.
Late in the afternoon, an Asian man was brought into the ward. He arrived walking, accompanied by a nurse, and was made to put on pyjamas and get into a bed at the far end of the dormitory. On her way out, the nurse paused at my bed and told me that the man was Chinese, didn’t speak English and was being kept there for quarantine.
In the evening when Mum came, she got very upset and went off to talk with the nurse. I was already frightened
by being alone in that long gloomy ward, and the nurses had told me they couldn’t hear me from their station. In fact, they left a pan on a chair beside my bed because my screams had previously gone unanswered and I’d wet the bed. Now I was to be left in the dormitory with a strange man who had some disease which needed quarantine, and I couldn’t even speak to him, nor could he speak to me.
That night, the nurse came by to administer my evening medication and to turn off the lights. I implored her to leave them on, and eventually she agreed to leave a few on around me. No sooner had she gone, however, than I realised that I was spot-lit but I couldn’t see what I needed to—that the man was staying in his bed and no other strangers were coming in through the doors. I hoped the nurse would come back so I could ask her to leave all the lights on as the present arrangement frightened me even more than being in the dark. After a few hours, when she hadn’t come anywhere near the ward, I began to scream. I needed some relief from the tension of fear, and I needed to rest.
There was no response to my screams. In the silences, when I was gathering my breath, I could hear the Chinese man at his end of the room. He opened and closed his locker and dragged a chair on the floor, but I was much more frightened when the sounds stopped and I didn’t know what he was doing.
Realising that I would have to slide across the ground like a grub in order to make my way out to wherever the nurses spent their time, I slipped over the edge of the bed and dropped to the floor. When I got as far as the verandah I sat still for a few minutes to recover my energy, and while I was there I heard firm footsteps. I yelled out, ‘Help, Nurse.’ A man coming up the path leading to the verandah saw me and went off to find the nurses’ station.
Nurse was very cross at being interrupted. She carried me back to bed and she said she was going to settle me down ‘Once and for all’. She disappeared, then returned a few minutes later with a syringe in a kidney dish. I’d already had so many needles I looked like a pin cushion, and I felt that what was about to happen to me was grossly unfair. I tried to fight her off but she easily overpowered me, pinning me down by putting a pillow across my shoulders and leaning her bodyweight on it, while whipping up the hospital-issue nightgown I was wearing and sticking the needle into my scrawny buttocks.
When I woke the next morning, I knew there’d be no end to this torment unless I ended it myself. By then I was so stressed that nobody could speak to me and no one, apart from Mum, tried. I embarked on a terror campaign, turning myself around in the bed so my feet touched the wall and began drumming them loudly on the wall separating my ward from the children’s polio rehabilitation ward. I swept my arm across the top of my locker, knocking everything off it, including a thermometer standing in a glass of sterilising fluid, onto the floor. After the nurse cleaned up the shards of broken glass and spilt mercury, and replaced the equipment, I broke them again. I worked the corners of the sheets from under the mattress and tore them from the bed, throwing them to the floor. This all required great effort and also caused me hardship. Mum came and told me that the staff were talking about keeping me constantly sedated. I said that they would have to fight me every time they tried, and she sighed. She knew I was a very determined child, and she had always regarded this as one of my strengths. Now she tried to convince me that it was self-destructive, but I didn’t care. I decided that I’d have to show the staff that they should let me go home. I began by tra-la-la-ing loudly whenever a nurse spoke to me, so that I couldn’t hear them.
When at last a nurse came to tell me that arrangements were being made to send me home, she grabbed my hands and yelled into my face to get my attention. I thought I heard her say, ‘You’re going home’, but I couldn’t trust my own ears. When she yelled it again, I was tra-la-ing a little more quietly in order to catch her words.
‘Doctor spoke to your mother and she said she can handle you, so you’re being allowed to go.’ When she left I didn’t feel victorious but lay huddled in my bed, crying at the pain of the ordeal I’d been put through. The nurse came back to pack my few things into a paper bag, and she said, ‘Well, I thought you’d be happy now. What are you still crying for?’
There was nothing I could say.
A taxi brought Mum and me home. Neighbours came running out and helped her take me into the house. She could have carried me herself, however, because I was as light as a feather, and during the next few months she had to carry me many times. Nellie, her friend, had waited at the house to help Mum get me settled in. I was so happy to be home, but they were all looking at me sadly and shaking their heads.
Later, Mum had a serious talk with me. I was lying on her bed and she came in and sat by me. She said she was a bit sorry I’d come home early because she was having a room enclosed for me on the end of the verandah and had ordered furniture to be made especially for me, because the doctors had told her that I’d be confined to bed for a long time, perhaps as long as six months, and she wanted me to be comfortable. She said I’d been ‘saved’ because I was obviously meant to do something special with my life.
She also told me she’d had to lie to the hospital staff because she didn’t like the way they were looking after me, and because she thought I may have ended up killing myself with the foolish things I’d been doing, if I had to stay there any longer. The truth was that she couldn’t look after me in the way she had convinced them she could, because she couldn’t stay home from work. Short of staying home, she said, she’d do everything else to help me, but I really had to look after myself from then on. I was so pleased to be back in my familiar environment that I would have agreed to anything.
Between Mum, Nellie and the neighbours, I had someone in the house with me most of the time for the next few days. They would prop pillows around me so I could sit up and feed myself from a tray, but my arm muscles were so wasted I could barely lift a spoon to my mouth. Every mealtime someone sat with me and gave me a pep talk because I had no appetite, but I had promised to eat. I choked on the food but, little by little, my capacity increased. My sisters came to the door and whinged at me for all the special attention I was getting, but they looked wide-eyed and somehow afraid of me and of the changes that had taken place in their lives because of my illness.
A lattice wall was built at the end of the verandah—I heard the hammering but wasn’t able to see the progress. In time, the furniture was delivered and the day I was moved into the new room was regarded as quite an event. Nellie and some of the neighbours came to watch. I was carried to the door and we paused there so I could feast my eyes. The furniture was pastel pink, not a colour I particularly cared for but Mum must have thought it appropriate, and consisted of a single bed with a bedhead and a cupboard, which was half hanging space with drawers and mirror attached to one side. A doily and vase of flowers stood on the dressing table. Mum had sewn curtains and hung them across the latticework to afford me privacy, while the latticework allowed me to watch people coming and going and did not isolate me completely, as a solid wall would have done. The verandah was narrow and the room tiny, but it felt wonderful to have my own space.
My sisters, at ages ten and eight, were too young to appreciate the gravity of my condition or to understand the tension in the house. I heard Mum bellowing at them that they couldn’t go to the pictures while their sister was close to death and I felt awful about being the cause of their getting into trouble. Nellie told me that throughout the time I’d spent in the coma, Mum had sat in the cane chair on the verandah every night, fully dressed with her handbag at her side at the ready, looking out for the ambulance the hospital had promised to send for her if my condition had worsened. The strain must have been enormous and the demands of my sisters caused an overload. So, Nellie took them out a few times to get them off Mum’s hands.
Before long, I was bored stiff because there was nothing for me to do. Mum took me by taxi to an optometrist who fitted me with glasses. He felt that my eyes would strengthen and that my previous good vision would return over time. He len
t me a pair of spectacles until I no longer needed them, and he charged us very little. I was pleased because Mum was having to work doubly hard now that I wasn’t able to help her. Her almost complete dependence on me for so many years meant that neither of my sisters was as skilled and competent as I had become. I’d graduated to ironing, folding and packing long-sleeved starched shirts, and could take over the laundry when Mum wasn’t feeling well.
I was happier once I had glasses as I was able to read. Mum told Dellie and Leonie to bring the encyclopedias into my room and, until my sisters began to complain that they needed them for their homework, the books stayed under my bed. Knowing I was going to be there for the long haul, I started at A and worked my way through to Z, reading the entire set. When Mum had to take them away for my sisters to use, I’d drop out of bed and crawl through the house on my hands and knees to get one, then push it ahead of me back to the bed. I usually returned it to the bookcase before Mum came home from work, but once I dropped off to sleep while I was reading. Mum discovered the book in my room and knew it hadn’t been there when she left that morning. I received her ‘both-barrels’ lecture about how I’d have a relapse, but I had become used to that one by then.
Being lost in the encyclopedias was one of the most pleasant and rewarding experiences of my childhood. I drank them in, filling my mind with information, much of which I would never need, such as the gestation period of elephants and other animals, and some of which has been invaluable. I absorbed the illustrations, including photos of sculptures from all over the world, and fascinating data about people and their different ways of life, much of which was presented in racist and elitist ways by today’s standards but which, nevertheless, left me with a yearning to travel and meet these people and see all these things for myself.
Snake Cradle Page 11