How Far Can You Go

by John Maclean

  On Monday 27 June 1988, I set off to go visit my friend in St Clair to see how the tandem bike was coming along. St Clair was about forty kilometres away. Rather than drive, I set out on my bike. I was feeling good. The day before, I’d played one of my best football games of the season. I took the day off from my day job at the primary school. It was too perfect to waste at work. Instead, I put on my headphones, cranked up Talking Heads, my favourite band at the time, and set out for St Clair. I took the M4 highway, a four lane highway, where cars and trucks share the road with cyclists. I always stayed on the shoulder, which was wide enough that I never felt unsafe on the road.

  Most of the trip to St Clair was downhill. At one point I managed to hit eighty kilometres per hour. I pushed as hard as I could to move the needle higher, but I could not. The tandem will do it, I told myself. That only made me more anxious to see the bike finished and try it out. My stay in St Clair was brief. I wanted to get back on the road while my muscles were still loose. A long, hard climb lay ahead of me. In a sick way I looked forward to it, not to the pain such a steep incline demanded, but to the challenge of it. The push up the Mountains would leave my legs and chest burning, but nothing would feel better than getting to the top.

  I headed back onto the M4 and started toward the big hill ahead of me. Standing on the pedals, I lowered my head and pedalled hard to build a good cadence while avoiding the broken bottles and other rubbish that pile up on highway shoulders. Traffic buzzed past me. I looked up. I still had a bit to go before I attacked the hill. I took a deep breath and pushed harder to build momentum before I hit the incline. That is my last memory of my ride.

  A truck driver coming up behind me at one hundred and ten kilometres per hour glanced over his shoulder to see if the lane was clear to pass another vehicle. As he glanced over his shoulder, the eight-ton Pantech truck filled with empty fire extinguishers drifted slightly onto the shoulder. The lane was clear. The driver accelerated and changed lanes. If he had listened closely, he might have heard the sound of one of his headlights shattering along with the lens of the indicator. But he didn’t. Nor did he feel the slight nudge of the truck rumbling over something on the road. He didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary until a motorcycle came racing up to him nearly a mile down the road. The motorcyclist frantically motioned for him to pull over, which he did. The truck driver wondered if the motorcyclist had lost his mind.

  Thirteen-year-old Michael McKenzie sat in the backseat of his mother’s car as she headed east toward the city. Bored, he stared idly out the window, watching the traffic in the opposite lanes zip by. “What? Stop!” he screamed at his mother as he saw a body and a silver bicycle flipping end over end up into the air on the other side of the highway. A truck briefly obscured his view. When it passed, he saw the body bounce along the ground and come to rest wedged up against the guardrail. His mother pulled over. Before she could ask him what was wrong, he flew out of the car, darted across the grass median strip, and ran to the broken man lying on the shoulder of the road. Another car had stopped. A priest was already next to the body, administering last rites.

  A police car from nearby Penrith arrived next. A call had come in that a cyclist had been struck and killed on the M4. Such calls are, unfortunately, not uncommon. An ambulance had also been dispatched. When it arrived, the ambos found a crumpled body lying under the guardrail that leads to the Kingswood Road overpass. A bowed silver bike lay off to one side. To their surprise, I was still breathing. They loaded me into the ambulance, but they doubted I would survive the forty-kilometre drive to Sydney’s Westmead Hospital emergency department.

  2

  Back from the Brink

  * * *

  My father tells me my first words in the hospital were, “How’s my bike?” I don’t remember saying that, but it sounds like me. I loved that bike. My father held on to my words as a reason to hope I would pull through. When he first arrived at the hospital, he was told to prepare himself for the worst. I was not expected to live.

  I do not remember the accident or my first few days in the hospital. My first memory is waking up in the intensive-care unit, struggling to breathe. My face hurt and I could not understand why. My mind cleared enough to realise I had an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth. The pain from the mask’s pressure on my nose made me wince. Slowly I became aware of the rest of my body. My skin felt like someone had taken a grinder to me from head to toe. I lifted my arm. Wires and tubes connected it to beeping machines around me. The more awake I became, the more I hurt. Pain shot at me from every corner of my body. Every corner except my legs, that is. I couldn’t feel them. From the prone position in which I was lying, I couldn’t see them either. Panicked, I pressed the nurse call button with my left thumb over and over like a deranged contestant on Jeopardy! After what felt like an eternity but was in truth perhaps thirty seconds, a nurse came into my room.

  “Where are my legs?” I asked as she entered the room. “What happened to my legs? Have they been amputated?”

  “No, no, John; they’re right here,” she said. She pulled the sheet back and lifted them, one at a time, for me to see.

  I was so relieved I passed out.

  I spent most of that week moving in and out of consciousness. My injuries were massive, or exactly what one might expect after being run over by an eight-ton truck. I suffered a pulmonary contusion, retroperitoneal hemorrhage, head trauma, chest trauma, vertebral trauma and pelvic trauma. I broke my back in three places, my pelvis in four and my right arm in two places. I also had a broken sternum, and scrapes and abrasions from the pavement. When I first arrived at the emergency department, they pumped seven units of blood into me. The ED doctors shared the ambos’ doubts about my ability to survive. One of the male nurses later told me that during the frantic attempts to save my life, one of the doctors actually referred to my condition as “mahogany or pine?”—as in the type of coffin that would be selected. They believed I would not survive.

  I have a hazy recollection that I could have chosen to give up and die. Death’s door beckoned me. All I needed to do was open it and the indescribable pain would be over. Yet I clearly recall saying to myself, “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!”

  Close friends and family surrounded me. My dad and mum, brother Marc, and sister Marion stayed close by. My girlfriend at the time was there as well. Colin came to see me. The sight of my broken body in the hospital bed was more than he could take. His knees grew weak; his stomach lurched. He tried to move away from me but he only got as far as the bedside curtain before throwing up. The charge nurse made him clean it up himself. Also my teammate from Warragamba John Young, who lived at Wallacia, over an hour away from the hospital, came to see me every week, without fail, for four months.

  Once I was stable enough for transport, I was airlifted from Westmead to the Royal North Shore Hospital, one of two Sydney hospitals with a spinal unit. I vaguely remember the thumping of the helicopter blades. As injured as I was, I also recall being excited about riding in a helicopter for the first time. Perhaps that tells you everything you need to know about my personality. My family had cause to be optimistic with the move. In the top right-hand corner of my discharge papers was the notation, “Discharged to survive”. I was officially off the critical list. I was not, however, out of the ICU.

  After a few more days in the ICU at Royal North Shore, they placed me in the acute care spinal unit. For the next eight weeks I lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling and counting the bricks outside my window. The morphine they gave me kept me in a fog. When my brain cleared enough to comprehend where I was and why I was there, I nearly drowned in fear. The pain was so intense. Lying in bed, it felt like someone had crept under me with a blowtorch with which they were now torturing me. The hospital tried several different beds, looking for a way to relieve my pain. Nothing worked. When the pain grew so excruciating that I could not bear it, I received more pain meds that immediately put me back into the deep fog. Depression
set in. I understood why spinal patients are closely monitored. Many find it easier to end it all rather than deal with the pain and the loss of use of one’s limbs. I was one of the lucky ones. Only my legs seemed to be affected.

  At some point during the eight weeks on my back, Colin came back to see me. He brought along my friend Warren Hurst. The two of them rode their bikes nearly fifty kilometres to Sydney’s lower North Shore to visit me, even braving the heavy traffic of the Harbour Bridge. On their way into my room, a nurse handed them a fruit salad she’d just made for me out of all the fruit well-wishers had sent. The nurse intended for them to give it to me. Colin and Warren had other ideas. Without saying a word, the two walked in and proceeded to eat the entire salad in front of me. When they finished the last bits of fruit, they turned around, dropped their bike pants, and mooned me. After pulling their pants back up, Colin turned and said, “We gotta get back.” They rode their bikes fifty kilometres and spoke only these four words. Then they walked out the door.

  Lying there, helpless to do anything, I couldn’t force any words out. I wasn’t angry. Well, I was over the salad, but I wasn’t angry with Colin. This prank was his way of saying, “I got you this time. Now get up out of that bed and try to get me back.”

  Getting up out of the bed was easier said than done. Oddly enough, no one ever came in and had “the talk” with me. No one, not a doctor or my father or my brothers or sister, ever looked me in the eye and said, “John, you will probably never walk again.” At least I don’t remember such a talk, and believe me—I would remember that. Running was my life. I don’t think I could forget someone informing me that that life was now gone.

  Perhaps no one told me because it should have been obvious to me. I learned that one of the three breaks in my back injured my spine at the twelfth thoracic vertebra (T12). However, my spinal cord was not completely severed. A small sliver remained. Officially that makes me an incomplete paraplegic. After all my other injuries healed and I was able to start physical therapy, I found I had perhaps 25 per cent use of my left leg, while my right hardly worked at all. That was the good news and I seized on it. From the start I was determined to get my old life back. The doctors told me that the first two years after my accident were critical. “Wherever you are in terms of your motor skills after two years is likely where you will be the rest of your life,” they said repeatedly. To me, that meant I had two years to get back on my feet and not only walk but run again. I still harboured dreams of playing professional rugby league and taking advantage of all the possibilities that lay before me when I pulled my bike out onto the M4 that sunny June day.

  I was never told getting my old life back was impossible, perhaps because no one, not my neurologist or any of the team of therapists with which I worked, knew how much progress I might make. Every spinal cord injury is different, as is every patient’s recovery. Looking back, I am sure they had a pretty good idea of how far I would go. However, no one ever came in and burst my dreams of walking and running again. My family encouraged me to keep pushing. My brother Marc told me over and over, “John, you need to think of your recovery as a race. This will be a marathon, not a sprint. But you’ll get to the finish line. Don’t worry.” Marc is a nurse, so I seized on to his words as more than just the encouragement of one brother to another.

  I also grabbed ahold of the words of my family GP. Dr Atif Gabreal had been patching me back together since I was a kid. Pretty early on into my recovery he came to see me in the hospital. “Don’t worry, John,” he told me with that deep, authoritative doctor voice. “One day you will be bigger, stronger and faster than ever before.” If anyone should know, I reasoned, it was Dr Gabreal. I did not stop and consider the fact that he was not part of the medical team caring for me, nor had he examined my charts in any detail. He was simply there as a friend, and friends give one another hope. Years later Dr Gabreal told me he was so devastated by the sight of me broken in that hospital bed that he had to say something to encourage me.

  During my first couple of months in the hospital words were about the only thing I had to hold on to. I had to lie still in bed and not move. The one day I defied that order and used all of my strength to roll over on my own I received a stern rebuke from the charge nurse. I felt like a little boy. In a way I was. I had no control over anything happening to me, while every shred of dignity I had was stripped away. A catheter drained my bladder, while daily enemas took care of the rest of my waste system. Several times a day orderlies came in and flipped me over in my bed. Each time they did, bits of broken skin and scabs stuck to the bedding and ruptured as they lifted me up, causing new levels of pain to shoot through my body. I endured regular sponge baths, which I hated. There’s nothing pleasant about a rough sponge being dragged across broken flesh. I didn’t even have a say about my hair. A hospital barber came in and cut it whenever the staff deemed necessary.

  My first step towards regaining my old life—a life I controlled, not some hospital staffer—came when my nurse mentioned that they planned on gradually weaning me off the morphine that kept my pain manageable. “Gradually?” I said. “I don’t think so,” I thought. “I’m a football player and I can take a hit.” Cut it off cold turkey.

  The nurse looked at me like I was a little touched in the head. “If that’s what you want,” he said.

  “That’s what I want,” I replied. My reasoning was simple. I’d been on the drugs long enough. I didn’t want to risk adding addiction to the long list of obstacles I had to overcome to get back to my old life.

  Finally the day came when my spinal specialist, Dr John Yeo, told me I was cleared to do more than lie still. “That’s what I have been waiting to hear,” I said. Dr Yeo just smiled. Throughout my time in the hospital he became a good friend and mentor. We remain close to this day.

  With Dr Yeo’s blessing, I threw myself into my rehab. Just sitting up proved to be a challenge, but I kept at it like I had once run into opposing lines on the football field. I planned on winning this fight. I announced to the hospital psychologist, Helen, that I would walk out the hospital doors when I was released. The first order of business, however, was to regain full use of my right hand. The accident had badly damaged the radial nerve. Thankfully, the nerve regenerated and I regained full use of my hand after long sessions of occupational therapy. I saw regaining use of my hand as a sign that my legs were next.

  Much of my physical therapy took place in the hydrotherapy pool. I loved the sense of freedom the water gave me. Decked out in a makeshift flotation device, I almost felt normal in the water. I couldn’t swim laps at first, but eventually I managed to swim the twenty-five-metre length of the pool. Looking back, that twenty-five-metre swim is perhaps my biggest achievement in the water.

  The staff at Royal North Shore Hospital were amazing. I think the longer I was there the more I appreciated each and every one of them. They were hard taskmasters, but they were doing their best to assist everyone in the best way they could. I remember the physical therapist named Debbie. I was on the gymnastic mats in my tracksuit pants, and she told me to get on my knees and try to crawl. I guess the old saying holds true—you have to crawl before you can walk. I got down on my hands and knees when suddenly Debbie pushed me, not hard, just a gentle nudge, but that was enough to topple me over. I struggled to get back into a crawling position then she pushed me over again. I thought, Why is Debbie pushing me over? Before I could ask her she explained that she was evaluating what muscles I had control over and which ones I did not. That made me feel a little better, until I thought a little more about what was happening. I used to play football against a bunch of blokes much bigger than Debbie. If she can push me over this easily, I still have a long way to go.

  A few weeks into my rehab, out of the blue, I happened upon a reminder of my old life. Back when I played for the Penrith Panthers under-23 team, our biggest fan was a young woman named Rhonda. Rhonda was at every game, waving her Panthers flag, cheering like crazy. Before my accident, she w
as the only person I’d ever met who was confined to a wheelchair. After one of our games, the team held an event in the Panthers club across Mulgoa Road from the stadium. I ran into Rhonda. She asked me to have a dance with her. Now, I wasn’t too good at dancing with anyone, let alone someone in a wheelchair, but I said, “Of course.” I moved about with the music the best I could, and the two of us had a nice little dance.

  I had not seen Rhonda since the Panthers told me my services were no longer needed, until I ran into her in the spinal unit. She was there for some sort of procedure for her back. Just seeing her brought back a flood of memories of my time with the Panthers. She snapped me out of my déjà vu when she said, “I’m sorry about your accident, John.”

  “Thanks, Rhonda,” I said. There wasn’t much more to the conversation than that, just a bit of small talk, but it made me flash back to our brief dance. Let me tell you, I was very happy I did not let my uneasiness with dancing keep me from giving her that moment. Thinking about that night also reminded me of the man I once was. Although a short time on the calendar had passed since then, it now felt like another life completely. Thinking back to who I once was only made me that much more determined to beat these injuries and get back on the dance floor on my own two feet.

  My first real, honest look of where I was came on what should have been a triumphant day. I had finally progressed far enough that I could move out of my wheelchair and onto a toilet by myself. Just that simple act placed me far ahead of many of my fellow spinal unit patients who never regain control of their bladder and bowels. I made the big move and was feeling pretty good about myself until I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror. I did not recognise the ashen, emaciated figure staring back at me. Both my arm and leg muscles had shrivelled to nothing. My normally sun-bleached hair had turned dark. Scars covered my face and body. I looked closer. The dull eyes staring back at me were sunk into my skull. Now I understood the looks on the faces of everyone who came to visit me.