My most vivid memory from the family’s visit is of his daughter: as her parents and family friend walked away from the alcove where we met at our hotel, she doubled back, going down on her knees and bowing before us, hands gripped, begging forgiveness or understanding.
It became unnerving that they continued to frequently visit Andrew in hospital. I ran into them a couple of times later, and they would leave food or drink or lucky charms and written messages by Andrew’s bed. One day, I entered to a mounted card beside his bed with the message: ‘I apologize for accident. Get well soon.’
We were not comfortable with their regular visits and I feared they would one day be there when Chris arrived at the hospital, which was an experience she would not have been able to handle. I was about to, through Laurie, insist that they no longer visit Andrew when, late one morning, the father, his wife, daughter and friend arrived as I was crying after sitting with Andrew alone for a couple of hours. The father had shaved his head and was wearing saffron monk’s robes. Their arrival tipped me over the edge and I immediately left, glaring at them in a way that undoubtedly signified that I was not comfortable with them coming into the ward whenever they liked. As far as I know, they did not come again.
Although I knew the circumstances of the accident, I was resigned to never knowing where Andrew had been, who he was with and how he was feeling that night; whether he was content, or lonely and unhappy.
About five weeks after the accident I logged on to Andrew’s Face-book account and found a message that had been sent three weeks earlier from George Guthrie, an Australian from the Gold Coast who was trying to get in contact to tell me he was with Andrew that night and was riding a motor scooter behind him when the accident occurred. They’d met only hours earlier and Andrew offered his Christian name but said, ‘Call me Cad, everyone does.’ George left Chiang Mai three days later for London, and while there his brother (who lived in the UK) somehow tracked down stories about Andrew’s walk on the internet. This enabled them to discover his identity and make contact through Facebook. I am very glad George took the trouble to do so; it was a breakthrough that provided the missing piece in the puzzle of what happened that night.
In his email I found that George had only met Andrew that night and, both being Australians away from home, got along well. He was on a motor scooter behind Andrew when the accident happened, and ran to his rescue, trying to comfort Andrew, who was unconscious. Later in the day he contacted his father in Australia to ask him to contact the Australian embassy to offer assistance. After leaving for the UK, he wasn’t able to get any information about what happened to Andrew.
I spoke with George by telephone a few days later when he’d returned to Australia and found that he’d run into Andrew just before midnight on the street near the Thapae Gate on the city walls. It was near Starbucks, where Andrew drank coffee and went to work on his diaries and to get on the internet. I had already learned that Andrew was Facebook messaging until nearly midnight.
They talked and decided to go to a bar to have a few quiet drinks and a chat. About 4 am, George followed Andrew’s motor scooter on his. They were riding along the main road and were approaching the Chiang Mai Gate when the collision happened.
It seems, in a freakish case of centimetres determining his fate, Andrew’s head hit a vertical steel bar holding up the canopy on the sidecar, so there was no chance to brace himself or cushion the impact. It must have been horrifying for George to witness the accident involving a bloke he had only met that night. He immediately stopped and cradled our bloodied son in his arms, screaming for onlookers to stay away and yelling for someone to call an ambulance.
The wife of the other driver had told us said she also cradled Andrew’s head and when the first of two ambulances arrived she insisted that he was taken away and that her husband, also injured, could wait for the next.
Closely observing the traffic in Chiang Mai for all those weeks I was there, I was left with an overwhelming feeling that these sort of needless occurrences and tens of thousands of road deaths a year have to be greatly reduced; surely someone has to take responsibility. There has to be more policing, greater penalties and thus far more serious deterrents for motorists in Thailand. The roads are simply mayhem, unsafe and especially so for foreign drivers who subconsciously expect those around them will follow the road rules because that is just second nature at home.
The real story of how many deaths there are on the roads in Thailand is somewhere between what you read and who you listen to. The government figures are around 12,000 a year but other sources told me the real figure was certainly upwards of 20,000, and one person told me it was as high as 70,000, which seems almost unbelievable. Certainly Thailand is regarded as having the highest per population rate of road deaths of all Asian countries. Motorbike accidents account for 70 per cent of road deaths and the level of riders and/or passengers who do not wear helmets is the highest in Asia. One official figure I saw was that only 47 per cent wear helmets.
I hardly saw a policeman on the road, and when I did they seemed disinterested in any traffic control. I would often count the bikes and the ratio of those wearing helmets and those who did not. It wavered between 40 per cent and 60 per cent. Sadly, tourists seemed less inclined to don a helmet than the locals. My theory was that they were in an environment where the strict traffic rules they were used to did not exist, so they relaxed their compliance, and their sense, too. It’s a potentially fatal mistake.
Local motorists would ignore the basic road rules. If a light was red and there was no traffic crossing, they would turn left anyway or, at times, just drive ahead. Pedestrian crossings meant nothing; in fact, pedestrians were at the very bottom of the totem pole on the roads. Often we would walk across a pedestrian crossing having waited for the green ‘walk’ light only to have to stop suddenly as a bike ploughed through. On our second day there I had to pull an unsuspecting Chris back to the kerb as this happened; she would have been hit for sure. Another time I was crossing the road on a green ‘walk’ light at the two-lane each way main road; the car on the inside lane stopped at the red light; the car on the next lane did … then a motorbike whipped along the parking lane closest to the curb and missed me by centimetres.
This was the environment in which Andrew placed himself when he elected to get a scooter as his mode of transport while in Chiang Mai; so he had to take responsibility for that. But after talking to George, at least I know now that Cad was happy and relaxed that night, when his life as he knew it ended.
What I also knew was that we were in the heart of a nightmare we never envisaged, and for a long, long time there just seemed no escape.
16
TRAPPED IN THAILAND
15 JULY–19 SEPTEMBER 2012
Words cannot explain the pain and the helplessness a father feels when, day after day, he sits and watches his son – always active, energetic and full-bore into life – lie in a hospital bed staring blankly ahead, not responding to words, touch, music played through headphones or any stimulus I could think of providing. Andrew was alive but had no life. Lying on the bed in front of me was a slowly diminishing body, but no working mind.
Day after day, week after week.
Trapped.
The weeks Chris and I spent in Thailand watching him in this state was the most disturbing and difficult thing I will ever do in my life.
I forced myself to enter a zone of numb stoicism every time I walked, always with a knot in my stomach, into Cad’s hospital ward but it never got easier to watch him. I just pretended it did to help those around me, especially Chris.
The cruel reality was that, according to all the doctors we consulted, there was hardly a miniscule chance that the once exciting, often adventurist and rarely dull life of Andrew Cadigan would continue in anything but this terrible state and it seemed there was nothing I or anyone could do for him. After all the close calls with road trains during his around-Australia walk and after surviving all his mad antics over the years, whic
h left him seemingly bulletproof in the eyes of so many, some poor, small, feeble old Thai man driving a patched-up old motorcycle and side cart had destroyed him. How the hell could this be – how the hell could his life be ripped apart like this in a flash of time?
This existence went on for almost nine weeks in a Chiang Mai hospital where only a few of the nurses, as helpful and polite as they were, had even basic broken English. Any information from the doctors came in the form of brief responses to my questions, responses that were rarely clear, often contradictory and almost always forcefully extracted from them. Don’t get me wrong, they were, I can only hope, fine neurologists, but for all those weeks in Chiang Mai Chris and I battled to understand what was truly going on. Andrew could not tell us how he felt. He could not tell us anything at all, and the doctors seemed intent on providing little commitment (or perhaps they had no real idea) about how long he might stay alive, or alternatively how long he might take to get ‘better’.
Twice Andrew looked like he would be well enough for us to get him out of the crowded public hospital, where there wasn’t even the facility to put him into isolation in his own room, only to have to abandon the plans as he was beset with complications. Pneumonia then swelling and bleeding of the brain on his good (right) side were detected, so he required further surgery the week we were first due to fly him home (6 August – twenty-three days after the accident). He continually sparred with infections which threatened to end his life, amazing us and the doctors by winning each battle. Naturally, I prayed for a miracle, trying to believe that just maybe there was some hope he could defy everyone and lead some sort of normal life, but I was told from the outset that that was very, very unlikely. At the other end of the scale, I’d often hope he would pass away in that lonely bed so that we didn’t have to take his living corpse back to Oz for a life that he would have been shocking.
All the while Andrew’s well-trained spirit and natural toughness and fitness kept defying the odds without him realising it. Or maybe he did.
Even though the first opinion we received from the hospital in Chiang Mai was dire, Chris and I naturally wanted further medical opinion. So, through some contacts of great friends of ours, Ian and Joy Heads, I was put in contact with a leading neurosurgeon in Sydney, and sent him Andrew’s report and scans. The Australian consulate in Bangkok had also referred me to an Australian, Dr Peter Morley, who worked at the highly regarded Bumrungrad private hospital in Bangkok, to whom I also sent all the information on Andrew’s condition, which he passed onto all his neurology department specialists. The message came back from both sources that every indication was, as advised by the Maharaj doctors, that Andrew had little chance of progressing past remaining in a vegetative state if he woke from his coma. If the accident had happened in Australia, I understand his life support would have been turned off, but the culture and religion in Thailand dictates a different attitude.
The doctor in Sydney asked me to find out what Andrew’s Glasgow Coma Scale score was. It was a term I had never heard before, but after googling I found it was what the medical profession regards as the most accurate measure of likely brain damage, taken during the telling hours after trauma occurs. It relates to the person’s eye-opening response, verbal response and motor response. The scale goes from three (the least responsive and thus most serious damage) to fifteen. Andrew’s rating was four.
Before Nicole left, we had been advised by one of the neurology team that Andrew may not live more than a few days. He surprised so many and hung on for over two and a half months. Every day of that period was an emotional roller-coaster that, truly, we would have battled to survive without the incredible support of family and friends, fifteen of whom came to Chiang Mai to comfort and support us, or more specifically Andrew, over the two-month period we were there.
Cad was taken off life support five days after the accident and was able to breathe independently, albeit with the use of an oxygen mask. He emerged from his coma after five and a half weeks, as far as I can ascertain, as there was no definitive announcement of this by the doctors. His right eye progressively opened wider and he would stare blankly ahead; eventually it would open fully and his head would move laterally at random; he would look back at us, never acknowledging he was in any way aware of our presence, making it confusing about whether he could digest some of what anyone was saying. It didn’t matter. I knew I had to keep talking to him just in case he could take any of it in. His left eye was badly fractured (although we weren’t made aware of this until we moved him to Bangkok weeks later), stopping it opening.
I encouraged him, continually telling him that I loved him; I told him about the day’s events, that we wanted to get him home. Other times I became so dejected at the lack of progress; because his fight seemed so in vain, I begged him to give up and put himself out of the misery. Eventually, so inspired by Cad’s refusal to give in to the constant threats thrown at him, I made a vow that I would get him back to Australia, telling him that every day, and I begged him to hold on. Thank God, if there is one, we were both able to honour that commitment.
I (and Chris and whoever else may have come to Chiang Mai) spoke to Andrew endlessly, praying for a response. I stroked his arms, moved his feet and legs and arms and fingers, and wiped the sweat from his forehead; I watched as his heart rate and body temperature fluctuate widely. I watched him breathe through his neck after he had a tracheotomy. When he closed his eyes, I would be relieved that he seemed asleep and at peace. I looked at him and thought, ‘How tragic; how bloody unfair; how meaningless – is this nightmare ever going to end for him?’ Then I would snap and think, ‘This is reality; man up and show the toughness and single-mindedness that he always showed.’
Needless to say, those fifty-eight days Chris and I spent in Chiang Mai were the toughest of our lives, which includes thirty-seven years shared as husband and wife. Yet it was special for the support we received from home, and especially from those who travelled to Thailand: Nicole; Chris’s brother, Ken; Andrew’s close mates Matt Delaney, Todd Bailey and Adam Martin; Jaime and her mother, Mandy; Ken’s wife, Llewellyn, and daughter, Nicala; my sister Alison and her husband, Wayne; my nephew Luke Naividi; Matt’s mother, Kerryanne, who headed up for a few days from a holiday in Phuket; and Chris’s sister, Lynne, and their mother, Maureen. We shared many tears, we accepted the silence between us, and we laughed at and revelled in some of the memories of Cad. Having each of them there gave Chris and me the strength that we so desperately needed, even though at times we had to detach ourselves when we needed time just to us.
Matt and Todd, schoolmates of Andrew’s and very close ever since, were desperate to fly over within a day of the accident, but we begged them not to until Chris and I could digest the seriousness of Andrew’s condition and get ourselves together. We also needed to consider whether we could endure having someone witness firsthand how Andrew looked and was, and whether he would indeed even be alive when they arrived. I’m glad they came; we spent some heartrending and special moments together (as we did with the others).
Jaime, who we still get on great with and who will always have a place in our hearts, just as desperately wanted to come over (and we asked her, too, to hold off), even though she and Andrew had been apart for about twenty-one months. She obviously still had strong feelings for him, and I have no doubt he did for her. Fortunately, they had communicated by text messages the day he flew out for Thailand (on his prompting). While in Chiang Mai, Jaime was able to cope with longer stints at his bedside than any of us, which Chris and I were thankful for and which was very special to us.
Apart from the hotel Andrew had stayed at, our home away from home became Maharaj Nakorn Hospital, where I felt very much felt like a farung (foreigner) every time I stepped foot into the always frantic ground level of the hospital. Getting out of the ‘red car’ or tuk-tuk at the hospital was a daily challenge, and it never became less confronting as the weeks went on.
The Maharaj is the larger of the tw
o major public hospitals in Chiang Mai and was a beehive of activity on weekdays, with the emergency department and the administrative section on the ground floor heaving with people. The care appeared good, although basic, but it was obviously an overutilised and underfunded facility – third world, really. It was only when we had Andrew transferred to the Samitivej Srinakarin Hospital in Bangkok that we really understood how basic the facilities, and communication, in Chiang Mai were by Western standards. I won’t mention the most basic, yet still inadequate, ‘comforts’ that we had to pay cash for.
However, the nurses always appeared pristine in their light blue uniforms, and seemed very efficient and happy in their work. There were two nurses in the ICU neurology ward who had a little English, and Andrew became their favourite patient. Maybe it was because he was the only foreigner in the ward, or maybe it was because that natural Cad charm could still be seen in the glint in his one starry eye that could open. They would speak to him calling ‘An-rew … Hello, Anrew’ (or ‘And-ew’) to see if there was any hint of a response.
Andrew’s regular neurologist, the young Dr Khemmachat, was always courteous and generous with his time, even though I had to start the conversations and ask all the questions. However, when he wasn’t on the twice-a-day rounds with the other doctors (many of them interns, as it was the country’s chief teaching hospital with a university next door), they would often walk to Andrew’s bed, look at his chart and totally ignore me. The bizarre situation we’d found ourselves in, while receiving little clear information from the doctors in Chiang Mai, was that we had to ask questions of those in Bangkok and Australia and have them relayed to the Chiang Mai doctors on our behalf, because too often we couldn’t get explanations from the Maharaj team. Too often they either wouldn’t tell us, couldn’t tell us or the information varied so much from day to day or doctor to doctor it left us totally confused, but more so stressed and frantic. Sometimes I felt they were telling us whatever sounded plausible just to save face, which is a big part of their culture, or they felt threatened that I had sought advice from elsewhere.
With Every Step Page 27