Diary Chapter 2

We were at Adelaide hospital on the morning of the 28 Dec 2004. I don't really have much awareness of it. All I remember, is the spinal ward itself. There were curtains around my bed and I was dosed up with Panamax and Morphine. There was a permanent injection hole for the morphine "glad wrapped" to my arm.

I know the room with dark, dingy and old-fashioned. The around eight or ten of us to a room and between Sandy and I was an elderly lady, who said she was 85 years old. They told me that Sandy was a bed apart so we'd get along.

I hated that ward. It was airless and dark. This seemed to be very few windows, or if there were windows , they were behind our beds. In a row in front of our beds were the offices of the medical and nursing staff. There were also storage places and wardrobe for medication. The presence of the staff didn't cheer the room up a little bit. It was dark and dreary.

The staff at the hospital may have been okay people, but they spoke extremely loudly. I wondered whether they were used to speaking to hearing impaired people or very old people. Each conversation with them led to a headache. The male staff seemed audible but not loud. I'm not sure whether they were more efficient, though they seemed it.

I had no interest in whether a women or men saw me naked. I just simply didn't care at all. What is more, they touch you like a piece of meat at the butchers and didn't care whether they were touching the genitals or the arm. It's pretty disconcerting, though, I guess it's useful for the patient - there is absolutely no point in embarrassment. Every few hours, or whenever you asked, they dropped another Morphine or Panamax into you for pain. I didn't care which they gave me, since the inevitable result of medication was oblivion and all I sought at that stage was oblivion.

I hated my neck collar and using the loo. Inevitably, someone had pee'd on the floor and the nurses who guided me had to put stuff on the floor to walk on. But also hated that the was only one shower for the entire spinal ward, and that there was always pee on the floor. I hate pee on the floor, its depressing.

Sometimes the ward was only 10 or so, but sometimes it was 18 or 19. They would start bathing you at 8 a.m. after breakfast, and continue ,one at a time, until 11 or even 12 PM. Some of the bather's had broken a neck and with the right neck brace could be walked down to the shower. Others had broken their backs and could only go for a shower on mattress type things. It was absolutely so dreary and distressing. I fetl so sorry for the nursing staff.

Also, some of the beds had TVs and some didn't. It was just you and your luck. My bed had no TV. Sandy had a TV but the range of channels it showed were very limited. Most TVs did Channel 10, seven and/or nine. Most did not do Channels two or SBS. Ewwwww.

From the very start, I could never sleep between about 9.30 pm and 3.30 am. What a dreary, long, time it felt. It was full of nothing as I stared into the darkness. Full of nothing, the clock would bloody never turn round. All I could think of were drugs.

The doctors at the hospital would come round to patients, mouth a few platitudes and we were expected to quietly acquiesce to their greatness. One doctor was OK, but he left after the Christmas holidays. I told him how, when I lifted my arm as instructed, my right arm hurt like hell. He went back to my X-Rays and found that I actually had a broken shoulder. He finally told the others and then they stopped asking me to use my arm to lift myself and made me a safety-pinned together harness to protect my arm. The sling hurt my bicep, but at least they didn't ask me to use it any more.

Most of the doctors followed each other around. We would have discussions whereby I asked questions about Sandy and I as their rounds occurred every morning between 8.30 and 9.00, when they visited us. I discussed the fact that I could no longer retain information in the way that I had before and this was noted in the file.

One evening I asked a male nurse when we would be returned to Melbourne. This was after a visiting social worker had assessed Sandy as quite badly injured brain-wise. She also thought that although I had escaped her test, I might also be brain damaged. She told me she had put her notes into Sandy's patient file and that she thought we should return to Melbourne in an ambulance designed to cater for our brain illness. It seems that the ward was only set up for spinal injuries and not the gamut of wounds, including the brain injury and broken limbs that we had displayed. That night I asked the consulting doctor how we might be returned home. I made a case for both Sandy and I to be returned by Flying Doctor or something else because the impact of returning to Melbourne might injure our brains, at least until we were assessed. He replied that the hospital had done what they were required to do by law by restoring our lives and that the tax payers of South Australia owed us no further obligation. He said that I would be released on my own in a few days and that when Sandy was ready, we would be booked on a commercial flight to Melbourne. The only answer to this was that I would take it up with the Social Worker in the morning. I felt very alone even though my family was in South Australia, because they couldn't be there all the time. I knew then I had to fight for both Sandy and I.

When I spoke to Sandy the next morning, he continued to believe that the nurses and doctors were our enemy. He felt that they should be fought on every level, from neck guards to accompanying us to the toilet and showers. When I spoke to him he said he felt fine and would be able to be released into the community at any time. This simply wasn't true. He also thought they hid weekends and that we had videos of my grandfather turning garden refuse into gold. He was fine most of the time, but like me, he was clearly fantasising at times too.

I told him that I needed to make arrangements for both of us and that in my view he was brain damaged. I also said I thought he was in worse condition than I was. He winked at me, ginned and continued to make "funny" suggestions. I told him that this behavior was fine, but that I had to make arrangements for the two of us, regardless of how he felt.

I didn't see the Social Worker for the next day or two. Before I continue though, I want to talk about my family in chapter 3, who were absolutely fabulous, and to provide some further detail about our injuries.