Forged with Flames (15 page)

It is late August 1969. I've just returned to Ribchester from a summer job in between college terms on the Isle of Wight. After six weeks of working as a “mother's helper”, looking after three young children and being a general dogsbody for the family, I am relieved to be back home. I'd never lived with another family before and, being so painfully shy, didn't feel comfortable there.

‘You know your father was worried about you,' my mother says.

‘Oh?'

‘Yes. He read your letters and said to me “She doesn't sound at all happy, does she? Do you think we should go down there and bring her home?”'

I didn't think my father even read my letters, and the Isle of Wight was a long way away to think of coming to fetch me. I'm surprised and touched.

Sadly, however, neither such shows of concern, nor the gift of the scroll, changed things between us. Dad was a man bound up by his era and upbringing when men didn't—or couldn't—demonstrate their love for their children openly. I'll never know whether he regretted this or not. He died in 1994.

In the days leading up to Easter, which started that year on the 1st of April, it looked as if I might not survive. My friends arranged for someone to pray for me around the clock. They
all had allotted hours—one friend later told me she was given from two to four in the morning—lucky her! My family back in England prayed for me at the time, too—my father, Jill, my godmother Auntie Peggy, and others. Dad was one of eight and Mum one of four so there were numerous cousins. Mum said her whole church—she'd started going to church after I came to Australia—was praying even though they'd never met me. Parishioners in Upper Beaconsfield held a day of prayer in another church near our home. Much later when I heard about this day, knowing that so many of the congregation's own lives were still in turmoil, I was deeply moved. I've no doubt that the love and concern of family and friends helped me to sustain the will to live long enough to recover.

At times people I didn't even know, who'd somehow heard about me, sent letters wishing me well. Elderly ladies posted letters with a five-dollar note or a handkerchief, just as a grandmother would do. People with holiday houses would write, ‘When you're better, come and stay'. Someone else who owned a restaurant wrote, ‘We'd love you to come and have a meal'. Another person sent a little lace cloth she'd taken to Lourdes and had blessed. The letters, as well as the visitors, offered a window to the outside world. My battle to stay alive had been all-consuming for many weeks but now I'd started to take in news from beyond the hospital walls.

Bit by bit as I became increasingly coherent and a bit stronger, I wanted to know what happened to our community in the fires. Terry had been dreading me asking about Alison and Kerry, the mother and daughter who were going to come for lunch the day after the fires. I didn't ask him about them in the first round of questions but when I found out that they'd both died I was
heartbroken—Kerry was only sixteen. Nell, the other woman coming to lunch that day, survived; our neighbour, Procie, had lost his house but fortunately got down the hill safely. There were some other deaths amongst our acquaintances, and many friends who lost everything except their lives.

Terry had already told me that our house had burned down, but this didn't seem important given everything else that had happened. I took in all this information, but it was a long time before I could feel it, or process it. People protected me, too, from knowing the full extent of the national tragedy that had been dubbed the Ash Wednesday fires. When Terry read out letters from people who had written to me, he would refrain from reading the bits he didn't think I should hear. Interestingly, the nurses reprimanded him about this.

I was only vaguely aware of the other bushfire victims being treated in the Alfred; by the time I was up to seeing people, most survivors had left. But there was one woman who had lived in the same street as us and with whom I connected straight away in hospital. Sheila was also English and had been caught in St Georges Road with her daughters Jane, who was badly burned, and Karen, not as severely. I'd seen Sheila once before in the Post Office but it wasn't until she and her husband visited me in Intensive Care after she was released that I actually met her. The effects of the shared disaster reverberated in similar ways for each of us over the years to come, but Sheila was left with a legacy from which I was spared: her son, Chris, tragically died in the fires on that day.

The critical operation to clear the septicaemia from my shoulders finally took place. I lay on the operating table immobilised, but
in my mind there was a girl running through fields on a velvety ribbon of grass.

She is racing with the speed of a gazelle, her long dark hair streaming behind her, her legs striding free and loose. Something dark is behind her, clawing wildly, trying to catch her to drag her down. But she is outpacing it, her lungs full of air, her legs powerful. She races towards a crowd of people who are cheering her on. She pulls up, then slips to the ground exhausted, to rest. She continues to lie there, calm, knowing that she has finally won.

17

NO PILLOWS UNDER HEAD

A
s time went on, the masked men and women of the wards gained personalities. Peter, one of the interns, seemed to me rather earnest at first but this small, quiet man genuinely cared and listened with great empathy. I could tell him about matters that concerned me, and he'd actively do something about them. One day I told him I was worried about my teeth, suspecting that they were deteriorating after weeks of not being cleaned. I was only just beginning to eat food, though not solid food, at this stage—and my mouth felt like a drain. I guess dental hygiene wasn't as life-threatening as some of the other things I was dealing with. Shortly after we talked, the hospital dentist appeared. At a time when small kindnesses were magnified this was a wonderful development—when else would you be pleased to see a dentist!

Another young doctor appeared who made all the difference to my experiences in theatre. I'd been in hospital for almost two months with many operations already behind me, when a new anaesthetist came into my room in Intensive Care to introduce
himself. Even hidden behind all the protective clothing, he seemed very understanding. Geoff made me think of a gentle old bear. When he first spoke to me he seemed almost shy, but in theatre he exuded authority which is exactly what you want. When the staff lifted me onto the operating table without taking sufficient care, he told them firmly to do it more gently. Geoff was infinitely careful himself as he arranged all the monitors on my skin (what there was left of it), always asking, ‘Is everything okay, sweetheart?' Even his anaesthetics were different. When the surgery was about to begin, he'd start to inject the drugs gradually, standing close to my head where I could see him, talking to me warmly all the time until I closed my eyes and drifted off in the most peaceful way. I decided that if I were to die of my burns, this would be the best place for it.

I was talking to Jane one day about how much I appreciated Geoff, and she said right off, ‘Why don't you tell him?' It was a startling thought. We English, and my reserved family, didn't do that sort of thing. But, why not? So I decided to tell him when I saw him next. I'm not sure really who was the more embarrassed but I was glad I said it. Later, when Geoff was off my case—he'd been on a three-month rotation—he still made the time to visit me and see that I was progressing well. He made a significant difference at a difficult time.

When I was first admitted to the Alfred, the physio sessions seemed to involve an awful lot of thumping on the back spurred on by exhortations to cough up as much undesirable matter as possible—most unpleasant and difficult because of the movement involved. Then one day, Ken appeared and upped the sessions to a whole new level. He was
very
enthusiastic about the exercises he had devised and seemed to have made it his mission
in life to get me moving—and movement in any shape or form had become one of my least favourite activities. I liked him, but dreaded seeing his head appearing around the isolation room door. ‘Not you again!' I'd think. I just couldn't believe that you could be so sick and yet still be expected to do so much. Besides which, I was just too ill to have a cheerful person around.

Ken was young, and I think, fair-haired. I could only see his eyes but must have got the idea that he was handsome because I was embarrassed that I never had any clothes on when the Burns Team, which included him, did their rounds. I'd become desperate to wear clothes again after weeks of being swaddled in bandages—even a hospital gown would have been a thrill.

The doctors called on Ken to do some work on my neck after a problematic session in surgery when the anaesthetist had difficulty inserting a tube down my throat. My neck, and all around my chin, was badly burned. This had been the first area to be grafted, and the newly grafted skin was much less flexible than normal skin. Eventually, the anaesthetist succeeded in getting the tube down but Ken was asked to make my neck muscles more flexible so they could tilt my head back in future operations.

After some thought, he decided to turn it into a game. Some game! He made up a chart, which he affixed to the wall of my room in the ICU and announced that we'd work together each day to tilt my head further and further backwards, stretching the new skin as far as it would go and recording our progress. Despite the discomfort, I did get caught up in Ken's enthusiasm and became quite keen on the challenge of increasing the figures on the chart. The ‘game' worked and as far as I know
the anaesthetists had no further trouble during any of the subsequent operations.

Not content with our stretching exercises, Ken banned the use of any pillows under my head, deciding that my neck should
always
remain slightly stretched. He devised another notice for the wall that said, ‘IMPORTANT! NO PILLOWS UNDER HEAD AT ANy TIME!'

Those pillows were one of my small luxuries in life. I thought some pretty awful things about Ken when he designed this extra measure. Sometimes one of the softer-hearted nurses would take pity on me and allow me a pillow for a short while if I pleaded enough, but mostly he had his way. To a large degree, I can attribute the fact that I ended up with a lot of mobility in this area to his constant pushing. So I am grateful, in retrospect!

Eventually, I reached the stage in Intensive Care where I turned the corner and began to get well. All the monitors, tubes, feeding lines and other instruments began gradually to be taken away. Ken's excitement knew no bounds. He could hardly wait to sit me up and let me see life from an angle other than horizontal. As usual I was much less excited; everything still hurt so much.

Being upright in bed was progress, but the day I sat up in a wheelchair and was wheeled into the corridor of the ICU to look out a window, was huge. I'd been in a small isolation room for almost three months and when the nurse steered me out of it and left me, parked, to look outside, I was ecstatic. I stared down at the small quadrangle of lawn at the base of the building, then up at the sky. The sky was so vividly blue and the grass so intensely green, it was like looking at tourist photos
of tropical islands. I gazed out, thinking how beautiful it all seemed, not realising how starved of colour and life I'd been in that room. Here was the world again; and when I saw that sky I felt that I was reconnecting with it, now infinitely more alive to its beauty. When the nurse returned to wheel me back to my room, all I could say was, ‘I can never remember the sky being so blue before'. It must have sounded ridiculous but I didn't care.

I had to leave Ken and his boundless enthusiasm behind when it came time to leave Intensive Care and return to the Burns Unit in mid-May. Here, I was in the hands of another physio called Carol. As it turned out, she had been the one thumping my back in the very early days, but my memory of her was so vague I felt as if I were meeting her for the first time. Carol was petite, blonde and gorgeous, and a real ally during the times when the Burns Team came on their rounds.

I cringed when I contemplated these twice-weekly inspections. There were at least six people in the Burns Team involved in my care: Prof, Carol, Helen the occupational therapist, Peter the intern, Trish the charge sister, and other doctors and interns. They'd all enter my room with only their eyes visible under all the protective clothing, while I'd lie naked under a sheet with all my burns unbandaged, wrapped in plastic so that the team could see exactly what was going on. Everyone would position themselves around my bed as the sheet was lifted off my cling-filmed body. The team would then talk amongst themselves about which parts were healing and what needed to be done next, exclaiming ‘Look how this is healing, it's the good nutrition!' or ‘Perhaps we need to work on this area the
next time we take her into surgery for grafting'. It wasn't that they were ignoring me but I always felt like a slab of meat. There's not much dignity being a patient in hospital and even less when you're lying naked and wrapped in plastic! At these times, Carol would catch my eye and give me a smile with her eyes. As soon as the discussions ended, she'd be the one to quickly and carefully cover me with the sheet, making me feel like a person again.

18

HALF AN EAR

W
hat happened in Intensive Care one day in early May shouldn't be at all funny, but for some reason it has always made me laugh.

A huge part of my daily routine was spent having the dressings changed. The nurse would take off the old bandages, debride the scabs with tweezers, apply anti-bacterial cream, cover me in gauze and wrap me in cotton wool and crepe bandages. For a long time, this was done three times a day and took hours—sometimes up to eight hours.

True to my stoic English upbringing, I would often refuse extra medication and cause myself more pain than was really necessary. If the nurse doing the dressing changes was sympathetic and competent I could manage reasonably well, but if they were even slightly careless or unsure, everything would overwhelm me. I'd try not to cry, but sometimes couldn't help it. If I cried, matters were usually taken out of my hands and they'd give me more drugs, which was probably a relief all round.