After a few weeks the staff seemed unhappy if we were there outside of visiting hours, so we had the task of enduring the many empty hours away from the hospital. There were the meals and massages (desperately needed to relieve the body tension), contact with those back home, and for me the transcribing of his diaries and writing these pages.
And there was the walking … hour after hour of walking. During the first day at Andrew’s hotel we asked how far the hospital was away and if we could walk it. ‘Oh no,’ the woman shrieked with a smile, ‘too far.’ The hotel was just inside the north-east corner of the old city area, while the hospital was just outside the south-western corner. Almost every day we walked the thirty-five minutes one way or the other, often finishing in a lather of sweat on the hottest, most humid days, but as we had so much time to fill, it became somewhat therapeutic. Then I would walk around the canal and ruins of the city walls alone with my iPod playing in my ears, in my own world, hour upon hour, sometimes with Chris.
Back home in Australia was another world altogether, where hope sprung eternal, where support from people we either knew dearly or never knew at all but who were very familiar with Cad’s story, was just overwhelming.
Facebook became the most expedient and convenient way of communicating beyond our inner circle of family and friends. But knowing there were well over a thousand people in Andrew’s, Oz On Foot’s and my own friends groups, I couldn’t bring myself to spell out the degree of his terrible diagnosis for all to see and share. And things changed so dramatically from day to day; it would have only been spreading a potentially unclear situation anyway. But I knew a few days after coming to grips with the prognosis, when it appeared Andrew was going to live past the first week or two, that I couldn’t sugarcoat the severity of his condition. So, after an initial post advising people of his accident, I announced that he had suffered ‘permanent severe damage from the brain trauma suffered in the collision, so we have effectively lost the Cad we knew’. I thanked everyone for the overwhelming love and support that had been expressed since his accident.
Andrew had no travel insurance, although even if he did have the standard cover, he would not have been covered because he was riding a motor scooter, and with no helmet. I implore anyone travelling overseas to ensure they have insurance, and to check its details, as it can make such a difference in emergency cases like this.
Soon after my Facebook post I learned that, in a gesture that was a godsend and absolutely unexpected and overwhelming for us, a fund had been set up to help with expenses by Andrew’s friends and family; it raised an amount that Chris and I could never have envisaged. We are forever grateful to Fleur Lloyd for starting that fund (and Haidee Hines, a former workmate of Cad’s, for later refining and administering it), and to those who contributed; it made a massive difference to our lives having that money to reimburse our extensive costs during the whole ordeal. Sadly, Fleur lost her brother Aaron less than a year after Andrew’s death; life is unbelievably cruel sometimes.
It was weeks after Andrew had died before I gained (through the records of donations), the full picture of how many people contributed and I still get quite overcome when I consider this – why us? Close to $90,000 was donated … I’m still lost for words. Any surplus after all our costs in Thailand and back home was used to continue Cad’s charitable spirit in his memory; the fund has been named Cad’s Cause.
I was advised that Channel Nine promoted the fund extensively through their rugby league coverage, no doubt organised through my lifetime mate Steve Crawley, who is head of sport there. Several web-sites also published something, and supportive column items appeared in the newspapers. (I found all this out later.) I was stunned but so thankful to the people responsible. To all those who donated, messaged us and said those kind words, please accept a massive thankyou from our family.
As I went through Cad’s diaries and starting writing this book while in Chiang Mai, it was difficult to reconcile that the person I would bring to life in these pages was a very different person to the one lying lifeless beside me.
Great regret hit me as I sat there telling Andrew of the admiration I had for things he had achieved in his life, blurting out all my inner thoughts; neither of us had ever created an opportunity to share such things before. I so wished I had taken a week out of my life, as I had planned, to walk with him on his around-Australia trek, instead of finding myself trapped in the mindset that I was too busy with work. There’s a lesson for all of us there: while it is easy to say ‘I’ll do that another time’, you can so unexpectedly find that ‘another time’ may never arrive. Time, especially with those you love, is indeed precious.
After being in Chiang Mai for just over six weeks, I had to get home for four days to do a job changeover (I had resigned from the agents’ accreditation scheme), and just to have a brief break. Chris had had one a week and a half earlier, returning to be with Nicole and Glenn. Chris’s mother, Maureen, and sister, Lynne, had offered to come over and stay with her while I was away.
A week after I returned from Australia, Andrew’s condition (after deteriorating for days) had improved enough to plan another attempt to fly him home. I can’t explain the trauma that Chris and I, who were alone in Chiang Mai by this time, felt when this again had to be aborted the day before the scheduled departure because of further infection and other complications; it was the second cancellation of a scheduled escape back to Australia, five weeks apart.
Thai Airways’ medical evacuation specialist ruled that Andrew was not safe to travel to Bangkok, although authorities in Bangkok and Australia had deemed him fine to fly home. I was at the end of my tether and asked – well, I virtually demanded – that surely it was safe for Andrew to at least be taken to Bangkok by road ambulance, a ten-hour journey. We didn’t want to stay in Chiang Mai a day longer. Fortunately, he was ruled fit enough for this.
So, on the evening Cad had been due to fly home, he instead was in an ambulance bound for Samitivej private hospital in Bangkok, where he could be assessed and hopefully made well enough for the longer journey. We were one step closer to home.
Samitivej was a stark contrast to what we had become accustomed to in Chiang Mai; it was like we had entered a new world. Andrew was admitted into his own private luxury room, with a nurse allocated to each of the mostly foreign patients in his ward. The hospital had three staff members whose sole roles were liaison with foreigners. It was just absolutely first class. The hospital was new, roomy and as extravagant as any I had visited, with three cafes, hairdresser, mini-mart, donut and juice outlets, a vast crèche and children’s playground area, wi-fi access and a department to service foreign patients and families.
I cried upon first entering Andrew’s private room (we had to put on a gown and mask and wash our hands when entering and exiting – no such precautions were ever requested in Chiang Mai); so starkly different was it to what we’d had had to endure in what seemed another world, a third world, away in Chiang Mai.
We were flattened when told it could be two weeks at least before Andrew might be able to go home but, thankfully, it took only eight days before doctors somehow got him in a good enough condition to fly him to Sydney – on 19 September, eight weeks and five days after his accident. It was at Samitivej that we learned Andrew had contracted meningitis in Chiang Mai, although he no longer had pneumonia.
The big thing was that we were going home. Hallelujah.
We were very fortunate that the Australian embassy had introduced us to Dr Morley at Bumrungrad very early in the piece. He became a valued confidant as I struggled with the cultural and language issues at the Maharaj, and he had been trying for six weeks to organise Andrew’s repatriation to Sydney. ‘Dr Peter’ cannot practise in Thailand so he manages the international affairs at the big private hospital, but he goes beyond his normal job description to help others like us. I never met Peter in person but we had several phone and email conversations.
Then there was the contact I received thro
ugh Dr Glenn McKay, managing director of Air Rescue Australia (and Air Rescue New Zealand), who had heard that Andrew had just walked around Australia raising money for charity and the dilemma he was in by having no travel insurance coverage. Glenn offered his or his company’s services at no charge to escort Andrew home, plus cost-only access to an air ambulance if needed. I was overwhelmed by his generosity, and he worked hard to borrow equipment from other organisations and arrange for Dr Harley Hunt and also nurse Stephen McNally to accompany Andrew home on a Qantas commercial flight, bringing the cost of taking Cad back to Sydney down by thousands and thousands of dollars. Chris and I are forever indebted to all three men, and I have got to know the Gold Coast-based Glenn in the past year.
Qantas amazingly also came to the party through the representation of the National Rugby League, after I made contact with my long-time mate John Brady at the NRL. The hard work of Matt Raward at the NRL (and later Glenn McKay) in gaining the support of Qantas in greatly reducing the repatriation costs is also something for which we will always be grateful. Such an exercise requires at least two rows to be removed for medical equipment and apparatus, and more seats need to be assigned for accompanying medical staff, and Qantas were just magnificent; thank you.
I am extremely grateful too for the assistance we received from the DFAT staff in Bangkok – David Costa, who we had the most contact with, Amanda, Trudy and Calum, who were very supportive and co-operative. Those who watched Channel Nine’s documentary series The Embassy: Bangkok would have seen Trudy McGowan and Calum Starr and what they go through in their jobs, and how many cases like Andrew’s they deal with.
Chris flew back on her return ticket with Thai Airways and I boarded a Qantas flight for Sydney with Andrew, Dr Hunt and nurse McNally. I felt drained and overcome but relieved that the first long chapter of the nightmare was ending. As Andrew was brought onto the plane separately to me (I was already seated), I couldn’t hold back the tears.
I looked at him and told him that we had done it; we’d kept our commitment to each other that he would go back to Australia. At the same time it was heart-wrenching to consider his condition compared to when he’d flown the same route in the opposite direction three months earlier – the people’s hero, albeit an exhausted one, four days after completing his walk; a young man so full of hope, ready for ‘the rest of my life’. I wish he had never boarded that plane from Sydney.
I had no idea what we were going home to, just that we were leaving this hell and the confusion that fogged our every day and that we were at least returning to an environment where, for the first time for over two months, we might get a clear, true indication of what lay ahead – in plain English.
17
HOME … AND THE END
20 SEPTEMBER–12 OCTOBER 2012
I could hardly sleep on the way back to Australia. I was nervous, tortured by the uncertainty Andrew was about to enter into, but relieved that someone was at least now going to give us a precise insight and understandable explanation of his injuries, and his likely future. I was expecting, however, that he was facing a life of months to years of permanent care.
We were home now, at least, and that brought obvious comfort and relief. But it was like a whole new journey was about to begin.
We elected to have Andrew admitted to Westmead Hospital, in Sydney’s west, where both Chris and I grew up. But there was an eleventh-hour issue, relayed to us by Glenn McKay hours before we left Bangkok, because the public hospital system dictated that a patient had to be allocated according to his place of residence, and despite Andrew’s acute type of injuries suffered overseas, and the fact he’d had no fixed address for almost two years, he was no exception. I had chosen Westmead because it was accessible and recommended as having a very good neurology ward. Fortunately, the problem was somehow overcome, which I was glad about as in the end it meant the last two weeks of Andrew’s life were to be played out right across the road to where Chris went to high school (Catherine McCauley) and my grandfather grew up, at Westmead Boys Home, and near the heart of where we both were raised (and Andrew was conceived). It ended up being a symbolic pilgrimage back to our roots, and over the next two weeks we drove and walked around the area when we needed a break from the hospital, which had a nostalgic effect on me.
Within twenty-four hours of Andrew’s admission, after tests results were examined, we learned that the extent of Andrew’s terrible injuries had been complicated by the fact he had contracted a methicillin- resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection. This, in short, is a ‘staph’ infection that is basically immune to just about all the common antibiotics, and is potentially fatal for someone in Andrew’s condition. On top of the pneumonia Cad had somehow fought off in Thailand, meningitis and the deteriorating condition of his much-damaged brain, he would not be capable of beating this.
Doctors at Westmead also confirmed that the initial injuries most certainly were as terrible as we had been told. The head of the orthopaedic section at Westmead, Dr Andrew Dexter, uttered one word that finally gave us a true validating impression of what happened from the impact on Andrew’s head the night of the accident, describing his brain injury as ‘catastrophic’. It also got back to us that the staff at Westmead were generally stunned that Andrew had even survived long enough to get back to Australia.
I, and others who knew him, could believe this, though, because it typified the incredible fighting spirit of Cad. I don’t know what I believe any more – that there is a God, that there is a true spirit and soul within us, or that the brain, of which so much is unknown, is such a powerful thing that it can defy what we consider impossible. What I do believe is that somewhere in his mangled mind was a power that determined that Cad wasn’t going to surrender his life in Chiang Mai and that he had to get back home. And I’m so grateful now that he didn’t die in that lonely, faraway place.
Nicole happened to be in Sydney for a work conference and came to the hospital the day after Andrew was admitted. I was worried about how she would respond to seeing him; when she was in Chiang Mai soon after the accident his head was bandaged and he was swollen, bruised and beat up, but now he was more skeletal and, well … no more detail. But she was fine – and brave.
Over the ensuing two weeks, the people at Westmead Hospital were wonderful. Our first mission was to give Andrew’s relatives and closest friends the opportunity to see him and say their goodbyes. News of his fatal scenario so soon after his return would have been a shock to most, as there was a wide hope that he would come home and miraculously recover – this was Cannonball Cad, the most determined, resilient, immortal person they knew.
We spaced visits over the next few days between family and his closest friends. It was hard to watch the shock and sadness on their faces but we shared tears and laughter and I will be forever grateful that Cad, and they, had that time. They were very intimate, deeply personal days for Chris and me.
Did Cad sense anyone was there? We’ll never know for sure, but I wasn’t the only one who believed that he could. It didn’t stop him being the receiver of many confessions, vows and reminisces. Cousins and their partners, aunties and uncles, grandparents and his close friends came in small groups. Kim and Wayne Simpson, in a very emotional experience for them and us, came down; Josh was back in Western Australia working, and struggling with what had happened. Who could have envisaged that, just months from the day we met for the first time on the last leg of Andrew’s walk, we would share their grief of losing a son so young?
As Andrew’s condition deteriorated, Chris and I made the decision to stop other visitors after Nicole had made a second trip from Brisbane to see her brother for the last time. Enough pain had been shared with others. We then bunkered down, most nights staying at the hospital and others close by with Chris’s sister Lynne or our great friends the Leabeaters. It was terrible. It left me with such a strong belief that euthanasia, in appropriate circumstances like these, is a right Australians should have. It was, I felt, unnecess
arily traumatic watching Andrew slowly die.
It was the following Friday, at 5 pm on the dot, that Andrew finally left us. It was a relief; a blessing that the nightmare had ended and Andrew’s ordeal was over. We could now celebrate his life and somehow try to wipe out the past twelve weeks with memories of how he lived and the many things he achieved, instead of him lingering on and on in a horrible state.
He had not spoken a word in the eighty-three days since the accident. We’ll never know whether he heard or understood a word spoken to him. But it didn’t stop me having the longest, most revealing (as one-sided as they may have been) conversations with him.
As Chris and I walked to the car that night, the thing that hit me was that I had witnessed both my father’s and my son’s last breaths; my dad had died at age sixty-three from cancer in 1987 (just before I had turned thirty-one; Andrew was six), at home under the care of my sister Robyn, a nurse. You naturally expect to outlive your father, but not your son. You certainly don’t expect to watch them both slowly die.
As we drove back to the Central Coast, to Mandy and Alan’s, I instantly switched to funeral mode, another example where my surreal daily existence was on autopilot and I couldn’t consider beyond the next necessary duty. Another vow I’d made to myself and to Andrew was that we would have the best damn celebration of someone’s life that anyone on the Central Coast had seen. With the help of Cad’s mates, who rallied to put together a most amazing, emotional tribute video that was played to about 650 people at the service, it was a mission that was accomplished.
I didn’t want it to be called or to feel like a funeral, so we communicated it as a celebration of Cad’s life. And rather than conduct it in a church, which would have been hypocritical, considering Andrew’s beliefs, or a chapel that could not have coped with the attendance, we elected to use the auditorium at the Mingara Recreation Club. We could not have hoped for the event to be better.
With Every Step Page 28