by Cook, R
Another patient at the centre who would help me discover what sort of disabled person I would become was a young girl in her early twenties. After a car crash she had some movement in her arms and plenty of potential to recover well, but she flatly refused to try.
‘Come on,’ the therapist would encourage. ‘I really need you to try and move your arm.’
‘I fucking hate this,’ the girl yelled. ‘This is stupid, why am I even here?’
I knew why she was there, just the same as I knew why I was there. We made choices that led to us both being involved in accidents. It was frustrating to watch someone with more potential than me throw away the opportunity to use her arms again. What shocked me the most about these two patients was the way they recklessly pushed away the people who mattered most in their lives. Throughout my recovery at the centre, I noticed that the more they resisted what life had served them, the angrier and lonelier they became. I then made a conscious decision never to push away the people who matter to me, because without them I’d be stuffed.
I was now confined to a wheelchair, but as far as my mates were concerned, nothing much had changed. Over the last few months I had shared a few beers and a couple of rums, but I’d never been game enough to venture inside a pub. When my mate Talby and brother-in-law Shane visited in January, there was no escaping it, so along with several family members we went out one afternoon to the Enfield Hotel. Talby held our beers at the pokies, taking turns between giving me a sip, before taking one himself. He also very discreetly tapped my leg bag connected to the catheter, checking it wasn’t overfull. It felt good to be out in a social environment, reminiscing about the past. After a while our beers had run dry and Talby was looking around for another one.
‘Do you want another?’ he asked.
‘Yeah mate, that’d be great,’ I replied, expecting him to go to the bar.
‘Well it’s your shout,’ he said seriously.
‘Yeah, righto mate,’ I laughed at him.
‘I’m not fucking joking,’ he said with a smile, placing a twenty-dollar note in my mouth. ‘Go and get the beers, you lazy bastard.’
So over I wheeled to the bar and ordered some more drinks, with Talby following me to pick them up. In his own special way he was helping me to get on with life, without babying me. I knew what he was doing and I enjoyed his approach, so different from having everything being done for me. As we started on the new beers, again Talby reached down and felt my leg bag.
‘I think we’d better go for a walk,’ he said quietly.
‘What? Is it full?’ I asked.
‘Yeah mate,’ he replied casually.
The two of us made for the toilets at the hotel, but I began to wonder whether Sarah should have been coming with me. Talby hadn’t ever been involved with people in wheelchairs and had probably never seen a catheter bag before that night, but it didn’t seem to worry him.
‘What’s the story?’ he asked, looking down at my leg.
‘Well, you just unclip the lid and pour it out,’ I said. ‘Be careful not to get it all over you.’
Taking the bag, he emptied it into the urine trough, before replacing it back under my jeans. He then went over to the sink to wash his hands.
‘Oh, this is typical,’ he joked. ‘You get to take a piss and I have to wash my hands.’
I laughed uncontrollably as we returned to our beers at the bar. It was a good bonding moment for us, which had been few and far between since the accident. I had a great evening at the pub, but while some of the family had left it wasn’t over for me yet.
‘Guess what I’ve got?’ said Talby excitedly, as we moved through the car park of the hotel.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘The Young Guns movie on DVD!’ he said. ‘We should go back and watch it.’
It was our favourite movie. We’d lived off it at Suplejack in the days when we had worked together, only we’d normally be pretty drunk when we watched it.
‘We need a few rumbos, Rob,’ he pointed out. ‘We can’t go and watch it sober.’
‘OK, I noticed there’s a drive-through bottle shop here at the pub,’ I replied. ‘You can get some there.’
‘I’m not getting them, it’s your shout,’ he said, as a pattern began to emerge. ‘It’s a drive-through, so drive-through the bugger.’
Realising he was again serious, I wheeled over to the shop as the assistant came out to help me. After asking for a six-pack of rum cans, the lady brought them over and placed them on my lap, as everyone else stood across the road watching me.
‘How would you like to pay for these?’ she asked.
‘I’ve got money in my pocket here,’ I suggested. ‘If you reach into my pocket you can get it.’
‘Oh no, I can’t do that,’ she replied.
Eventually I twisted her arm, so to speak, and she pulled out some cash from my wallet to pay for the grog. Again, it was another way of Talby forcing me to operate independently – and it worked. Back at Hampstead, Talby and I, along with Shane, managed to sweet-talk the staff into allowing us to drink the rum in the room while we watched our movie. It was a good end to a great night. A couple of days later, Talby had to return to work in Queensland and as he was leaving he bent down and licked me straight up the side of my face.
‘Something to remember me by,’ he said with a grin.
There was no other way to describe this period of my life than as a ‘journey’. It is a cliché but it’s true. As I wrestled with internal demons, my friends and family also struggled with their own. Some chose to hide them, others talked openly about their worries, while I chose to delete them from my mind. I went into this episode with a beautiful, caring wife, two great children and an amazing network of family and friends and, although the hard work wasn’t over yet, I was emerging from the dust with the same people beside me. Sarah’s constant support gave me the greatest gift someone in my condition could possibly have: confidence. Had I been that young bloke or girl in rehab and not had such support, perhaps I would have blamed anyone or anything. But I was lucky. There was so much for me to live for: how could I suddenly give up and let down all those people behind me? My dream had been to bring up my children on a cattle station along with the love of my life. I had hit a major road block in trying to achieve that goal and now I had to rely on my family and friends more than ever. I would get my life back. If I couldn’t walk, I’d wheel or whatever it took to get home, because that’s where I wanted to be.
16
ROUGH RIDE
Shane was horrified as he watched me turn purple and slowly suffocate before his eyes. I was trying to wriggle and suck for air but my throat was blocked. Coughing by myself was not an option. Alarms sounded as ‘Code Blue’ rang through the speaker system at the rehab centre. Another nurse appeared at the doorway, running towards my wheelchair.
‘Hold on!’ she cried. ‘This is going to hurt.’
Taking a big windup, she slapped me hard across the back. I’m sure it would have hurt if I’d actually had any feeling. Luckily, the gauze in my throat dislodged with a cough and I immediately began to breathe again. A nurse had been changing the dressing in my neck where the tracheotomy had been. The cap had now been removed and we were waiting for the hole in my throat to heal. Unfortunately, the wad of gauze used to plug the hole was missing and couldn’t be dug out with tweezers. It wasn’t long before it slipped inside my throat and down to my lungs where it began choking me. I was taken to hospital by ambulance for a bronchoscopy to remove the gauze.
It had been another close call for me, but it wasn’t to be the only one during my rehabilitation. I had eventually been given a suprapubic catheter, which went in through my abdomen and into my bladder, instead of through my penis. Such a surgical procedure is mostly suited to people who will need a catheter long-term, or those who suffer from constant urinary infections. For me, it was a good option, as I would be dependent indefinitely. I had the suprapubic catheter for six weeks before it required i
ts first semi-regular change. A urologist made the change in my room and demonstrated to Sarah how to perform the replacement as she might be required to do so in the future. However, a couple of hours after the doctor left we noticed the bag filling up with fat and blood instead of urine. I continued to drink more water but still there was no urine and none of the nurses could work out what was happening.
‘This is bullshit,’ I told them angrily. ‘I’ve drunk a lot of water and it should be draining.’
But the staff took the cautious approach, insisting if the procedure is done too often, it can cause infection. Over the next sixteen hours my bladder became rock hard and so full that it began leaking through my penis. Finally a catheter was returned to my penis and my bladder drained immediately; it was all but exploding. I was then taken back to hospital by ambulance where the whole operation had to be redone. Instead of inserting the tube into my bladder, the urologist had inserted it between my abdomen muscle and stomach lining, hence the blood and fat in the catheter bag. It had disastrous consequences for me, leaving me with a urinary tract infection and putting me back in bed for days, not to mention the psychological trauma; another day worth forgetting.
Despite the many setbacks during recovery, Sarah and I were dead set on returning to the station, and we flatly refused to listen to anyone who said otherwise. The resistance came mostly from the doctors and insurance company. We didn’t know how we would do it, what we would need to make it work or what it would cost. There were a lot of unknowns but just one goal. I was encouraged by Angus Conners from Yandama Station near Broken Hill who had been in a vehicle rollover some years earlier. He’d suffered a similar level injury to mine and went on to marry, have a child and run the sheep station. Angus explained to me that over time he gradually regained movement in his arms, which increased the little bit of hope I had for my own body. On the same day, I also had an encounter with another injured man, hooning around the hallways in a powered chair. He was using a Magic Mobility off-road, four-wheel drive chair, and the possibilities it created were very exciting. Until then I had been using the Quantum 6000 town chair, which was so hopeless off the beaten track it would get stuck on a garden hose on the lawn, whereas this four-wheel drive looked unstoppable – and it was, as I later discovered. This was one of those days that helped forge my future. Both the bloke with the four-wheel drive wheelchair and the visit from Angus not only showed me it was indeed possible to live and work to some degree on a farm, but also that I should be making every effort to get my right arm moving. And so that’s just what I did, working hard to increase the strength of the muscle twitch in my bicep.
Since October 2008, while Dad, Brad and Bec, and Cam and Leza were with me in Adelaide, my sister Lilly and her husband Shane had taken on the management role of the station. Shane had been working there for the best part of a year prior to the accident, so he knew how to keep the place running. In the early stages there was no mustering required, but checking bores and maintaining fences were important. If there was something he wasn’t sure of, then he would call Dad to ask, but he rarely did. Shane was the glue at home that allowed most of my family to be with me. Hans and Sonia had also moved back to the station in 2008, with Hans heading to the gold mine for work. As he always did, Hans would help out around the station on his weeks off. We could not have pulled through that time without their support. Lilly and Sonia flew down for different periods of time, and they said Suplejack felt very empty, as though it had no heart when Dad and Mum were away for so long. Brad and Cam eventually headed home to begin the first round of the mustering season. They continued to visit when they could, along with Tiani and Loretta, down from Alice Springs. In late March 2009, Lilly was interviewed on radio by ABC Rural and described some of the support we had received since the accident:
We’ve had some amazing people touch our lives, it’s quite humbling. Two special ladies in the Alice Springs region, Tanya Fogarty and Cody Hollingsworth, walked street after street fundraising for our Robby so he can lead as good a quality of life as he possibly can. He is going to walk, our Rob. We also had all of my dad’s family in Queensland who held a Black Tie Ball and BBQ to raise money. I would like to, on behalf of our family, thank them very much.
Lilly had summed up part of the effort that was unfolding before our eyes as communities in different parts of Australia contributed financially to get me back to a happier place. I will always owe those people for their kind thoughts and generosity.
In the meantime, I slowly began spending more time away from the rehab centre and more time at the rented house with the family. Every Friday and Saturday night I would stay over, sleeping on a memory-foam mattress. During the night, Sarah would tirelessly roll me every two hours to prevent pressure sores, Mum would help with the physio exercises in the morning and Dad was the muscle to lift me in and out of the chair. It had a sense of normality about it, living in a house instead of the hospital, but still it was very foreign to what we were all used to. The showering and toileting had to be kept very simple, using a bucket and hose in the laundry. It was really the only option we had at the house without major renovations, however it didn’t worry us too much. It was fortunate the property had a high house yard surrounding it, as Sarah would often push me outside into the sun and wash me down with the garden hose. Staying away from the rehab centre was one step closer to returning to the Territory and we wanted to make it work. The bedroom Sarah had been sleeping in for months was just off the lounge room, so when the rugby league was on, Sarah and Dad would roll me on my side and twist the bed around so I could see the TV. Unfortunately, given that we were living in AFL country, the only NRL games we could catch were at 2 a.m.
On one of the weekends during my home visit, I was watching Braxton do some drawings outside on the patio area. A seed had been planted in my mind a few weeks earlier when a mouth-painting workshop was held at Hampstead for those who wished to take it up. It wasn’t something that had really interested me until Gordy, who was also visiting at the time, challenged me to a paint-off, using a brush in our mouths. My first painting was very basic, featuring a bucking bull in an arena, complete with a clown. Gordy’s effort was a bit more complex, picturing a tractor, but he gave up only using his mouth halfway through and finished it with his hands. Uncle Bernard and Aunty Marie watched on and seemed to be impressed with my artistic talent, or lack thereof.
‘Can you sign that?’ Marie asked me. ‘I would like a copy of it.’
‘Are you sure?’ I replied. ‘It’s pretty shitty.’
‘I don’t care,’ she said nonchalantly. ‘When you’re a famous artist, I can say I’ve got your first painting.’
When I visited their house later at Cooven, where Dad had grown up, I saw the painting mounted above the fireplace. All they need now is for me to become that famous artist, but at this stage it isn’t looking good. I did enjoy the fuss that was made about my painting and it encouraged me to take it a bit more seriously next time I had the brush in my mouth. One of my first was a copy of a photo we had taken of the stock camp at the Eight Mile yards, with a windmill, turkey nest and trough in the background. At his request, I gave Dad that painting and made no duplicates. However, the drawback of painting with acrylic on canvas was the massive headaches I’d get from inhaling the fumes: with my face only fifteen centimetres away from the canvas and brush, my nose was right in the firing line. My efforts slowed after the first few attempts and I was quick to cut down on the length of my painting sessions to avoid getting high.
Staying at the rental house was inevitably introducing me to the life I had waiting for me at home and also the world I had been shielded from for much of my recovery. I had learnt to deal with my fear of movement, and the anxiety attacks had waned, but being in public, especially around large groups of people, still made me nervous. It took time for me to become used to the idea that everyone tends to stare at a person in a wheelchair. From my perspective, I still saw the world through the same eyes as I
always had and nothing had really changed. I was a bit closer to the ground but that was all and to see some people looking at me as though I had two heads created challenging moments for me. An example of that was the day we went to the Adelaide races at Morphettville. Sarah, Mum and Dad, Braxton and Lawson, along with a couple of friends, all got dressed up to have a day out at the track. It was all very exciting and my boys loved the attention they were getting from riding on the back of my chair. The excitement, however, soon left me feeling a little overwhelmed as we reached the front gate. There were thousands of people milling through the turnstiles in their finest outfits, the lines at the bars were huge and the queues to the toilets were even longer. The old Alice Springs races turnout that I was used to didn’t have much on the Adelaide spectacle. I felt like that scrub bull not wanting to be put through the yards, shying at shadows and carrying on, so it took some encouragement. But once I finally got inside and had a first beer, I was feeling more relaxed. It was difficult to find an area where I wasn’t running someone over or blocking their view, while still being able to see the track ourselves. Eventually, we decided to settle in the walkway at the top of the grandstand. While it wasn’t ideal, it was the best I could do without going down the grandstand stairs.
After a couple more beers, my leg bag was filling up quickly, so instead of taking me through the queues to the toilet, Dad discreetly emptied the bag into a Powerade bottle that had been left on the ground. While probably not a recommended technique, we found it was easier to throw a full bottle in the bin than having to navigate my way through thousands of people to find the toilet. On this occasion, however, after Dad filled it up and clipped the lid shut on the bag, he screwed the top back on the Powerade bottle and sat it on the ground in front of my footrests. I didn’t take much notice, being more interested in the races and where my next beer was coming from. About an hour or so later, three-year-old Braxton picked up the Powerade bottle, not thinking it could contain anything other than what the label described, and took a mouthful. He immediately spluttered and began dry-retching before anyone could register what had happened.