Tag: surgery

I am an addict

October 25, 2015October 9, 2018 · 40 Comments ·

I posted a rant on my chasing away salt water page earlier today, much of which I’ve included in this piece. It involves the Cystic Fibrosis community – my community, if you will – and my burning question was this: when will people start taking responsibility for their lives? Why are there GoFundMe pages being created to ask for money so that CF’ers can reap the rewards for doing nothing? You are NOT a special fucking snowflake as the late, great Stella Young would say. You can listen to her fuck off amazing TEDx talk here. Her inspiration porn and snowflake theory applies to the entire illness and disability community. No one is exempt #sorrynotsorry.

I see CF’ers who are diabetic with failing kidneys poisoning their bodies by drinking Coke and eating crap for breakfast, lunch and dinner; pumping themselves full of insulin because they’re ‘addicted to sugar’. Trust me – there are worse things to be addicted to and this is where I share my ultimate shame story for the very first time.

MY NAME IS CARLY-JAY AND I AM AN ADDICT.

As some of you may know, I’ve been addicted to opiates over the years due to the pitfalls of CF, transplant and cancer – morphine, pethidine, oxycontin and more. I mentioned my on/off struggle with being addicted to drugs in my TEDx talk, but when I gave that talk, I had been keeping a far deeper secret I’ve not had the courage to write about until now because of the deep shame that feels like burning kindling in my marrow. Seriously – that’s how it feels.

In fact, the reason I had to use a lectern during my TEDx talk was because my brain hadn’t recovered from the damage done from the previous two years of drug (ab)use and as such, I felt like an abject failure. I could not learn my eighteen minute speech in the three weeks I had been allotted, and for me this was mortifying. But once I walked out on that stage, I was fine; nerves a distant memory. I owe everlasting gratitude to the very empathetic Lisa Watts from TEDx Brisbane after crying my way through a conversation as to why my brain wouldn’t suck my speech up like the sponge it had once been.

I am well aware that I have paid my donor and her family the ultimate disrespect by getting addicted to drugs. And not just any drugs – schedule 8 controlled drugs as they’re called in Australia. I thought that because I was on prescription drugs and I wasn’t drug seeking on the streets that I was safe; that I wasn’t a drug addict. Except I was.

In fact, I remember my first hit of Omnopon in 1994 after I’d had surgery for endometriosis. It just so happens that the first love of my life was the one who injected me (in a hospital setting, of course), and that’s when the first flush of addiction bloomed. I unknowingly had sent myself to sea in a sinking ship. Marcello said I’d feel a little giddy, but the accompanying rush of ecstasy that washed over me as I sunk into my bed, yet rising into the air at the same time in one beautiful, sweeping motion is something I’ve never forgotten. In 1996, I became addicted to IV pethidine after complications with surgery, needing more and more every day until my doctors brought down my dose enough for me to get home. Funnily enough, I didn’t miss it and got on with life.

It was following my transplant when the seeds of addiction really came alive. My bones were honeycombed from osteoporosis and as such would not heal. My sternum refused to knit back together, and every time I rolled over in bed my chest bones would concertina and I would hear and feel them pop. Up until I had my cancer surgery in 2007, I had never experienced such pain as when my epidural was removed on day five post-transplant. It was as though someone had poured fuel all over my chest and set it alight. When I was discharged, I’d drink my morphine straight out of the bottle like an alcoholic would with whiskey.

After six months, my transplant doctor Scott Bell and my surgeon, Robert Tam sat me down and told me I was addicted to morphine. The first thing I felt was relief, and my first thought was, ‘no shit, Sherlock’. After agreeing to their suggested two week inpatient detox, I went home, poured my morphine down the sink and went cold turkey. I pissed the bed (and the rest), vomited, sweated like a beast in Hades, and felt like I’d been thrown from my skin. When you’re coming down, you get to a point where you feel like you’re climbing out of your own skin and so you actually try. And then, when you’re back in the world of the living, you emerge like a calf being born. Replete with an inevitably messy start, you find your feet, feeling fragile and a little lost. But as the days go on, you get stronger and a little more fearless. On day four, I began to feel human, and for now at least, the ride was over. I had my life back.

My addiction was most out of control when I wasn’t living with my parents. When you have nobody to be accountable to, you can just shoot up and flake out. The second you see that flash of blood in the syringe, you know you’re about to enter heaven, yet you go nowhere. It is like taking the deepest of breaths. That flash of red, so ironically the same colour as the flower it comes from. You feel totally dissociated and disconnected from everything and everyone, but when you’re high you’re hyper-sensitive to other people’s emotions. You laugh and you cry with people and then suddenly, the high has gone and you’re not sure where to go or what to do apart from wanting another hit, although for a few years I went without pain killers altogether. Why? Because I can.

But then 2003 came reeling into me, and sometimes restless rivers run deep. By 2004 I was back in the throes of addiction and I did ridiculous things like inject pethidine and morphine directly into my port-a-cath. That shit was going straight to my heart. Colour me surprised, but I’m lucky that I didn’t stop breathing. Because I’d built up such a tolerance to these kinds of drugs over the years, I reason that that is the only way I’ve survived such reckless behaviour. I have punished myself enough now knowing that I risked my life every day.

2004 came and went and I stayed clean until I was diagnosed with my pre-cancer on my vulva. Yes, my vulva. In order to get the pre-cancer under control, I had to use a drug called Efudix – a topical chemotherapy ointment which is supposed to burn the cancer away. I was on a potent mix of narcotics, but for good reason. My gynaecological oncologist (broken cunt doctor) couldn’t quite believe the doses I could tolerate, but when you have strips of skin hanging off and peeling away from your vulva, you need ALL THE DRUGS.

When Efudix was off the menu as a treatment, I underwent a radical vulvectomy which very nearly killed me. For pain relief, I had an epidural and was on ketamine and morphine, yet the pain team still could not get my pain under control. As I speak about in my TEDx talk, my Dad arrived at the hospital one morning to find me drooling like a vegetable and essentially non-responsive. Not long after I began have tonic clonic (grand mal) seizures and was rushed to ICU. If it were not for my father calling my lung transplant consultant Peter Hopkins, I’d be dead.

Pete told the doctors to rip me off all of the pain medication, which they did. As a result, I went into acute narcotic withdrawal where my body would thrash around the bed – and despite being in a coma – my system was fighting that sudden absence of opiates. To cut a long story short, I survived, had to learn to walk, talk, feed myself and had to deal with a poo bag. I was drug free and wasn’t even taking paracetamol, despite having a few ‘oxies’ left over from before my surgery which I made quick work of in 2008 when I was in the relationship from hell. The ex in question also happened to have a penchant for drugs and ran me dry, which was fine. I didn’t want to be on anything and was happily clean.

In 2013, I’d been back on narcotics for maybe two years. I was going nowhere fast and like any addict, I was always needing more. I would take drugs when I was happy, I would take them when I was sad and I would take them when I was indifferent. I doctor shopped, lied, and had no one else to blame except myself.

There were times when I was using where I had taken far too much because I hadn’t hit that high fast enough. My breathing would become laboured and just to get some perspective, after my cancer surgery I recall having such massive quantities of ketamine, morphine and other drugs that I would often get down to four to six breaths a minute. I remember waking up with a group of doctors and nurses surrounding my bed saying that I’d had ‘a little trouble with my breathing’. They had in fact pulled me back from the brink with a drug called Narcan which is what you see paramedics using on television with people who have needles stuck in their arms (or in Pulp Fiction. That big breath that Uma takes once she’s stabbed through the chest? Bullshit. Sorry to ruin the illusion).

In 2013, I was shaking the hand of death far too often, yet I still persevered with taking as many drugs as I could. I was in Barcaldine when I realised I was in trouble. I was in the middle of nowhere and only had a minute supply of drugs left for the duration of my stay, so I did what any self-serving addict would do and began rationing them out in the hope that my restless legs, vomiting and night sweats would settle down long enough for me to get back to Brisbane to replenish my supply . One of my closest friends and her husband spent some time at my friend’s cattle station with me and while I knew that Nic knew, I said nothing because I wasn’t ready to get clean and as is typical, I refused to ask for help. Nic said later she knew I was in the throes of addiction, but there was nothing she could do until I was ready. I had to be ready, but I needed help like it was yesterday.

A few weeks after I returned to Brisbane, I was having a very casual conversation with my Mum and for some reason I broke down. She asked what was wrong and while she was in the spices section of Coles, I told her that I was addicted again. She lovingly said that she would get me help and that we would get through it. Why we? Because my family and I are a formidable team – my Mum, my Dad, and my sister always offer me a soft place to land.

This confessional does not make me brave. I am not inspiring. I am not that snowflake that so many people wish to be or use as as excuse to be an asshole. I am human and humans are not infallible. I had to earn back the trust and respect of my family which is what hurt the most. My Dad could not believe that I had gambled so thoughtlessly with my life. He said he was disappointed – possibly the most most biting thing anyone has ever said to me. He wasn’t upset, he was disappointed. I cried, said I was sorry, but that wasn’t enough. I am still so, so sorry and am in tears as I write this. You should never have to earn back the trust of your family, but that was something I was so resolute about doing. My sister was incredibly supportive as were the literal handful of friends I told. They let me get on with my recovery, but were there to back me and I can’t thank them enough.

I’ve been clean for two years and while I’ve always maintained I’ve been compliant with my treatment (taking medication, regular check ups, eating well, exercise) I did the unthinkable – I gambled with my life that I’ve nearly lost so many times through no fault of my own, yet here I was throwing it away with every pill I swallowed and every (clean, single use) needle I was shoving into my skin. I only ever took drugs when I was alone.

In regards to the illness and disability community, I see people who are non-compliant with treatment and medication after transplant and other life preserving procedures. Over the years, I’ve seen transplant recipients start smoking again after their lives have been saved and hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent to keep them alive. Just like my drug addiction, how disrespectful is that to your donor, their family and your medical team? The thing is, I got help because I asked for it. I went to an addiction specialist who put me on opiate antagonist treatment and I’m happy to say that I’m going to be off it for good before Christmas. I saw a great therapist, but after about three sessions my psychologist said I was too well adjusted to keep seeing him. We both believed that I was in a safe space and would not use again. And I haven’t. The only narcotics I’ve had have been when I’ve needed a central line placed in my jugular for IV antibiotics (they ~~can~~ sting and bruise a little ~~like a motherfucker~~).

So what brought on this confession? This morning as I wrote about Cystic Fibrosis and suffering in general not being a competition, and about the ‘hierarchy of illness’ that has been created over the years, I sensed that I needed to own my shit because I was telling other people to do just that. You have a choice. It’s called being pro-active instead of being a victim. Whether you’ve had a hard life or not, there are many who have had it far tougher than you, but again – it’s not a competition of who is sicker than who, who is suffering more, or who is the most hard done by. If you can get out of your own head and ego, you’ll see that we are surrounded by suffering and we (you) have it relatively easy when it comes to illness. We live in a first world country, have world class medical services and welfare. For fuck’s sake, our transplants are FREE. In the United States, you have to basically crowd fund and hope for the best if your health takes a turn for the worse.

Having an illness or a disability doesn’t entitle you to have a Facebook or GoFundMe page where you’re essentially begging for money, ‘stuff’ and ‘experiences’ like hot laps and swimming with dolphins being given to you for just existing (and shame on you for going to Seaworld. Animals in captivity is cruel. Go and watch Blackfish).

So you – yeah you. Do you actually believe that the world owes you? Because it doesn’t. Life owes you nothing. But you owe life EVERYTHING, so stop being a self-entitled twat. Get a job, get your shit together, get an education or better your skills, get help if you need it like I did (all you have to do is ask), stop the victim blaming, lose the ego and get real. Be accountable and set a good example.

Drugs are a scourge and I know that I will never use again. But how can I be certain? The proof is in the pudding. I’ve achieved so much since being clean. I’ve found my purpose and I am bloody good at what I do. I’ve worked for the first time in years, spoken at TEDx and other events, my writing has been published widely, I’ve been churning out my memoir, poetry and I’m close to having a first draft of a novel I am thrilled with. I’ve made new and lasting friendships with my involvement in palliative care, my death midwifery and the death cafes I host, I started a Masters degree in Spiritual Care and have done my first unit of Clinical Pastoral Education so I could become a secular hospital chaplain. Maybe we’re all wounded healers to some degree.

So many opportunities have presented themselves and I’ve been in the right head space to take full advantage of that. Most importantly, I’ve had no cravings for drugs over the last two years because life is enough. I am enough. To be able to write and say that to people is something I’m proud of. Again, it is not so much that I am brave or inspiring. I’m just a human who wants to be a good person – to love and be there for my family and friends, to write like a motherfucker, to care for the sick and dying and to love and be loved. Life really can be that beautifully simple.

The night I lived again: part three

August 22, 2015October 16, 2016 · 13 Comments ·

There is beauty in the ordinary. Waking up, making coffee, washing my hair, going to the post office. All ordinary things made extra-ordinary because I am here to do them. I woke early to watch the moon sink and the sun rise. The east screamed tangerine and the sun pierced the thin veil of sky with a restless yearning – as if it needed to be seen by humans so it had proof of life. ‘I am here!’ it bellowed through the clouds.

Not surprisingly, I was much the same when I woke up after my transplant. I was still intubated (on life support), and my first physical response was to try and pull out the ~~hose~~ tube that was down my throat. I remember Dad finding me a notebook and giving me a pen so that I could write, but all I could manage was scrawl and for a few seconds, I thought I was brain-damaged. But was I even alive? I could see Mum, Dad, my sister Nikki, my boyfriend Lachie and one of my best friends, Laura. Someone then found Dad an alphabet board, so I could point to the letters. The first letters I pointed at were –

‘A M I A L I V E’

Everyone laughed and nodded their heads, saying ‘yes, you’re here – you’ve made it.’ Then I pointed out the letters ‘I L O V E Y O U’ and I couldn’t tell if everyone was laughing or crying or both. All I wanted to know was if I was alive, so when I knew for certain, I started thrashing around on the bed because the tube down my throat was choking me. At least that was how it felt.

For the next three days, whenever the sedation wore off, I would thump around like a frightened yearling and try to pull the tube out. That was until a nurse rushed at me and pushed more sedation through the I.V in my neck. What surprised the doctors, was that I needed about five times more sedation than the average patient of my age and size. They worked out it was a combination of stubborn and a high tolerance for not only sedatives, but barbiturates, general anaesthesia. Here’s Mum watching over me. It saddens me to see the distress etched along her cheekbones and forehead. I often wonder how much this experience both eroded and strengthened her.

My friend Sharon, who introduced me to Alicia (they were studying the same course at the Queensland College of Art), and my Mum are smiling here because they can see that my fingers are pink after having been cyanotic (blue) from the lack of oxygen in my blood for so long. The fact that Sharon would cry and faint at the sight of a needle and/or blood (I remember her screaming when we had to have our TB immunisation at school), she did incredibly well with all of the needles, tubes and machines. Sharon has since had three babies and can now deal with blood. I’m very proud of her evolution.

This is what an end stage Cystic Fibrosis lung looks like. I always liken it to a dead bat.

When I initially went on the transplant list, I was told that I would more than likely have a long wait because my lungs were so small, which meant that I might need the lungs of a child. This never sat well with me. It was like a stone in my belly. Knowing that I was essentially waiting for someone to die so that I may live was an already heavy burden, let alone knowing I may end up with the lungs of a child inside me who had not lived a long enough life, often made me feel physically ill.

Transplant ~~can be~~ is a mental and moral minefield. A girl I had grown up with could never reconcile the fact that she had another persons lungs inside of her, and she died a couple of years after her transplant full of that terror. During a transplant assessment to determine if you’re medically viable for transplant, among the barrage of tests is a psychiatric evaluation in order to ascertain if you’re stable enough to endure the possible mental rigours that go hand in hand with having such life-altering surgery. The transplant team has to know if you’re going to be compliant. Are you going to take your medication every day and at the right time? Are you going to look after yourself when you leave hospital? Do you have adequate familial and emotional support to cope post-surgery? If the patient has emphysema, will they start smoking again? Unfortunately the answer to the last question can be ‘yes’. I’ve known patients who have taken up smoking post-transplant, and I can only imagine how this makes the doctors and other medical professionals feel. Personally, I want to give them a high-five. In the face. With a SHOVEL. I want to repossess their lungs and give them to someone who deserves and respects them.

For me, having a transplant is a shared responsibility between my donor and I. It’s a shared duty of care. They’re not my lungs – they’re ours. I’ll say ‘my lungs’, but what I really mean is ‘mine and hers’.

And so, I was extubated (taken off life support and breathing on my own) after three days and I didn’t stop talking. For days.

Mum, Dad, Laura, Lachie and Nikki were never far away.

And neither was Sharon, my Blood/Sharps Princess Warrior 🙂

Lachie would often leave me writhing in pain because he made me laugh so much. He was incredible.

My first walk. I call this ‘The walk of life’.

One of my favourite ICU nurses, Allan. He did a superb job of extubating me and he thought my post-transplant boobs were magnificent, so I love him extra hard for that.

But like any journey worth writing about, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. In the second week, I began to wheeze and it became steadily worse over a weekend. I was home on day pass and I bounded up the stairs where I did a Rocky victory jig (except that no one was watching). I let everyone know that I’d made it to the top of the stairs without dying, and I noticed I was wheezing.

‘I must have got an asthmatics lungs,’ I said, and everyone applauded my efforts and laughed at what I had said about my wheezy lungs.

Scott Bell, my lung transplant consultant, was sick that weekend, so another doctor – a heart transplant consultant (hearts –> chalk/lungs –> cheese) assumed that it was asthma and so prescribed me nebulised ventolin. The problem was that it wasn’t asthma and by Monday morning, I was critically ill with the worst rejection Scott had seen up until that point. I had essentially been misdiagnosed. Scott was not happy. You don’t get Scott unhappy.

I had bronchoscopy after bronchoscopy, was moved back into acute ICU for a day for observation and my morphine dose was increased about ten fold. Rejection was the worst pain I had been in since the epidural had been removed a week earlier. When the epidural was pulled, it was as though someone had poured fuel over my chest and set it alight. I’d never suffered – really suffered – with pain so fierce and searing before, and I’ve been unfortunate enough to have experienced it a couple of times since (once was after my cancer surgery in 2007). In my ‘Transplant Diary’, where Mum and Nikki wrote everything down every single day, Mum writes on the 31st August, ‘Carly is in extreme pain, like someone is sitting on her chest. She is having morphine.’

The other drug they increased was my prednisone (cortico-steroids). Massive doses of methyl-prednisolone pulsed through my body for three solid days, as well as other drugs you’d think would be better at stripping paint off the walls. My doctors were calling transplant units all over the world to try and save my life, and though we knew the rejection I had was serious, it wasn’t until six months later that Scott told me how close I came to dying. Even when I see Scott now around the hospital, he still shakes his head and says, ‘I’ll never forget that rejection. It really was an extraordinary time.’

There’s that word again. Extraordinary.

But I’m more than happy with ordinary. Ordinary means simple, and simple is beautiful in its truth and brevity. As I head out with my family today, I will look back to this ordinary day in all of its staggering and miraculous beauty and all of the blessings that come with that.

The night I lived again: part two

August 21, 2015October 16, 2016 · 9 Comments ·

By the time it was definite that the donor lungs were a match, there would have been at least thirty-five people at the hospital – all friends and family. Even a friend’s boyfriend (now husband) had driven down from uni at Gatton, so he could be there for both me, his now wife and my other friends (love you, Davey!)

My boyfriend at the time, bless, had arrived at the Prince Charles drunk. With flowers and chocolates which I couldn’t eat. I think they became someone’s breakfast. He had been having a night in with the boys at his place, and they all very quickly sobered up when I arrived by ambulance. In fact, most people had beaten ME to the hospital. My Dad ran about three red lights and my best friend ran at least one.

I was taken up to the respiratory ward and we waited in the day room for a couple of hours before I was put in the wards only private room. The only problem was, with the amount of people I had with me, there was a fair bit of noise and it was now around 1.30am. We kept on getting in trouble from one particular nurse who reminded me of Maggie Kirkpatrick’s character on ‘Prisoner’. Or Nurse Ratched. She could get as angry as she wanted, because I soon discovered that she was going on six weeks of leave when she left handover that morning.

Carly: 1

Nurse Ratched: 0

You do silly things when you’re about to die like putting vomit bowls on your head.

I got to say my goodbyes to each of my friends, one by one, and it was excruciating, both physically and emotionally. My friends held me so close – I remember my friend Tammy especially – and the pain was almost unbearable, but I wanted to do it. Parents of friends who lived in Melbourne brought up prayers and messages for me, and while I was grateful, I was too sick to give any sort of response, except for ‘thank you’.

I was told to ‘have a sleep’, but I wanted to spend as much time with my family, my partner and my friends as possible. And so, around 8am on the 22nd August, I was taken to theatre. The distress is so palpable on my sisters face, you can almost touch it.

If there is a photograph to capture my most life defining moment, this has to be it – saying goodbye to my sister. So many goodbyes that morning.

I hugged my parents and my sister, kissed Lachie goodbye and was wheeled away.

All night and all morning I had been at peace. I wasn’t particularly worried and at one point, I’d had to tell everyone else to calm down. But when the orderlies began moving my bed in the opposite direction of my family and friends, I lost it. Up until then, I hadn’t been too worried – a possible combination of morphine and the desperate yearning to have my old lungs taken out of my decaying body. I wanted the next moment more than the last, and while my body couldn’t fight for it, my mind could. But then my brain broke. Split open like over ripe fruit.

I don’t know where the sound came from, but as I was being spirited away, I looked at the people gathered behind me and I wailed. My body was wracked with sobs because I had finally realised that I may never see any of these people again. I could die on the table (that’s another story) or I could make it through the surgery, get out of theatre and into recovery, only to die.

My friends subsisted on chocolate, cigarettes and a carload of Maccas when I was sleeping. Cigarettes. The irony has never been lost on me. Inside the O.R was (as all O.R’s are), subarctic. I was covered in foil to maintain body temperature and given warm blankets as I lay there waiting to go to sleep. I had beautiful conversations with doctors and the nurses and they were able to get me into a state of repose where I even asked the surgeon if I could have a couple of 500ml bags of saline popped into my chest

The Propofol leaked through an intravenous line in my chest, and I happily surrendered to the milky white liquid like a little death. My last words? ‘Save me, for I am the Sex Goddess.’ ‘Sex goddess’ had followed me through high school as a nickname, except I didn’t have sex until after I’d left school. But ‘sex goddess’ it was. The theatre big me a collective ‘good night’ and ‘of course you are’.

Here are a few of Alicia’s brilliant photographs while I was having my transplant. I would encourage you to click on these photos so you can see the more minute details. Below, the surgeons are suturing up my clamshell cut after six hours of surgery. Little did they know that they’d have to rip their delicate embroidery apart when I had to be taken back to theatre because I was bleeding.

Tubes

In recovery. Alicia snapped at the *exact* moment my anaesthetist realised I was bleeding internally, so it was back to theatre to resolve some ‘plumbing’ issues. It pulls on my heart when I see the nurse holding my hand. It’s the little things that for me, mean so much, and I know my family would have appreciated the comfort she was giving me, even though I was in a coma. It’s the whole ‘show, don’t tell’ mantra that writers use, or ‘demonstrate, don’t state.’ And in this gentle gesture, this is exactly what she was doing.

And so this time seventeen years ago, I was dying. I am just a few hours away from getting ‘the call’. I get a little introspective on Transplant Eve, but tonight I’m writing. Fitting seeing as how writing has played such a big role in my survival. I’m having a quiet celebration with my folks tomorrow where we will toast my donor and her family. We will toast my heroes; so many peoples heroes.

Part three of my transplant journey will be with you sometime tomorrow.

My night without armour

August 14, 2015July 11, 2016 · 15 Comments ·

May-August 1998

I was in the dying room. You know the one. It’s quiet. People slip in and out as though they were never there. Festering in a bed for three months, I had grown tired. My arms were the shape of soft baguettes, peppered with freckles like sesame seeds. Lips, a permanent shade of blue. Colourless fingers and toes – lily matchsticks, sans red ends. My hair had been falling out and I had forgotten how to use my legs. Twenty-one not out. For every year, I had lived four. I was a pale vintage just short of eighty-five. But I was sick.

Sick of white sheets. Sick of fluorescent lights. Sick of ward vagrants hobbling into my room, bottles full of piss hanging from petechia stained fingers, begging for my help; their gowns askew showing either flat and wrinkly bottoms or saggy, hairless balls.

Friday 21 August, 1998 8pm.

I watched Burke’s Backyard and said goodbye to my family for the night. Said hello to a morphine bolus. Like a little death itself, that pause from pain. I would feel every drop spread through each cell of my body; like someone had cast a hot blanket over me. It would anchor me to the bed, carving out a grave in the hollow of my mattress. Interweave me, you two thick threads, I would whisper; one flame licking the other in need of a partner. Show me mercy.

Saturday 22 August 1998. Midnight, or just after.

In rushes Daisy, my midnight oriental muse. She injects drugs into my chest to buy me another day’s grace so that one life may be taken and given to another.

Tonight it was to be my turn. Eight months and twenty-two days I had waited for the beeper to beep. But instead of its rapid fire chirp, it was a phone call, shrill and cutting. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. I hang up the phone and nurses keen in and carry me into the toilet where I piss blood for the last time.

With my possessions gathered – my Auden and my Heaney, my copper bookmark and a sputum cup – the room looks like I have never been there. Flowers on my bedside table hold me to ransom – the colours having taken on a death hue. I winch my wasted legs into a pair of jeans, my flat bum loathe to fill the denim mould. Daisy finds me a shirt that disguises my barrelled chest, breasts having shrivelled long ago, but ready to be full again. I try to wedge my blue feet into my stinking blue converse while another nurse succours me with another jab of morphine.

The ambulance sits in one of the emergency bays like a glorified hearse waiting to transport the living dead. But what of the person whose lungs were going to be settled into my body tonight? Was it a man or a woman? How did they die? Was it a car crash? It couldn’t be. The lungs and heart get squashed like soft fruit between over eager fingers. Could it have been a brain bleed? How old were they? What of their family? What of their children? I wonder if it was a woman. Who would she want me to be? One woman dies for another – I didn’t want to disappoint. Responsibilities weigh on my wilted head, soon to be fat from steroids.

My mind peels off, focusing on the next breath. Anything of consequence, outside that esky with my or her or his lungs in it, worsted with each breath and I think ‘I don’t know how to be with this’. What I did know what that there were going to be chains pulling my ribcage apart. Pulling my ribcage apart so my sternum could break. Breaking my sternum so surgeons could push past muscle, sinew, bone, veins and nerves to get to my lungs – those blackened masses like giant mussels having sat in stagnant water; lips covered in downy fur, shell white and slimy, but like bedrock where no knife could pierce. My empty treasure chest. I likened the surgeons cutting through a dense back wood to find a decomposing body. They were going to uproot the trees poisoning the forest. Make the forest clean again.

Wet roads prompted thoughts of car crashes. Absurd conversations about public holidays and the road toll had been a primitive form of optimism. Easter was a pensive time. Then we’re told that hearts and lungs are squashed on impact. I would feel self-disgust mixed with equal parts of hope, but you learn to live lighter when you’ve been dying for nearly nine months, and friend after friend has breathed their last waiting for their second chance that never came.

The night I coughed up a cup of blood, my father said he’d find a triathlete and hire a hit man to save me. Is it selfish to hinge onto the notion that someone must die so that I can cease to exist and begin to live?

I sit up in the ambulance and spit out what looks like a brown slug, flecked with red. The cup is soon flooded with molasses – fatter and far blacker than any leech – and I rattle like a bag of marbles.

One-thirty am.

My red and white hearse clogs two emergency bays while the rain swathing the city has has evaporated. The sky is smudged with patchy clouds and the moon hangs with its silent lull, while winds fat with caution slap my cheeks; the warp and weft intangible in their bearing. Squalls skirling down from the ranges sprint off lands edge and the thumping blades of a helicopter unnerve me and I turn on myself; questioning whether my new lungs were being hauled across sticky linoleum in a store bought esky.

I’m then hankering for food. Hadn’t eaten a solid meal in six months, but I’m hungry. My boyfriend had dropped in at a late night store to buy me flowers and chocolate that I couldn’t eat. How I loved him.

People stood on the kerb – drunk boys and grieving girls. Grieving for what was, what may be, what may not come to pass.

Father chain smoking. Sister crying. Nuns praying. Mother’s hands wringing. Friends mouths twisted into concern. Thirty-six of them lashed together; spine against spine.

I’m taken up to the ward to an onslaught of questions and a nurse Ratchet type who tells us to be quiet – ‘other patients are sleeping’. She makes us feel like impish school kids until Chelse spits back, ‘she’s only having a fucking transplant.’ My doctor sits next to me, his hair and glasses askew. Dog tired and skittish, he tells me that ‘it’s not going to be easy’. The heck I cared. Just cut me open and do your dirty work.

Eight-thirty am.

Thick knots of shit slink down my middle. Dead skinks, their tails unmoving in soft peaks as slow, thick cramps cling to my bowel. A bowel collapse would make me feel less of a stranger. Instead, I am in the bowels of the hospital. Visions of dancing and having sex without a tank of oxygen suffuse my thoughts, then the rusted cogs begin to shift. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, and time starts to slip until I am all death throes and thoughts of ‘my-god-what-if-die-on-the-table?’

The sun had climbed out of the shadows of rain. A cloth cap is placed on my head and I am wheeled away to my very own green mile. The payload of valium dissolved, I look to see the congregation of thirty odd. The thirty odd I might never see again. What of my mother, my father, my sister, my partner? What would I do? I’d be dead. Shame it be that way.

Screams echoed through the halls and I didn’t know how or care where the breath was coming from to fuel them. My mother would later tell me she didn’t know how I made such a noise, but we wagered that it was my death cry.

I didn’t want to lay down in the room with lights as big as satellite dishes, because I was afraid that once my body was supine, I would die. The room was checkered with strangers in masks and gowns and after some soft words, the collective theatre voice bade me good night.

‘Save me, for I am the Sex Goddess’, I retorted. A nurse stroked my face and said, ‘yes, yes you are.’

I surrendered myself to the milk in the syringe; lily white, liquid purity. The kind of death reserved for prisoners on death row who would never wake. The anaesthetic was such a flooding wave of orgasmic joy, it was almost agony.

My armour is cut open so hands and tools can busy and bury themselves in my torso. My breasts are peeled up to my neck, and I am literally off my tits. In the photos I see four days later, I notice that breast tissue looks not dissimilar to a cerebrum – just more finely textured; the patterns more intricate.

While scalpels excavate masses of scar tissue and bloody holes are packed with gauze, I sleep. My ‘native’ lungs – like dead, shrivelled bats – are dumped into a plastic bucket, then surgeons ease in the donor lungs one by one. They stitch and wire them into my chest whereupon they are met with oxygen and inflate in a great rush of life.

My chest is candle wicked with such care; sewn up with silken loops only to be released with the flick of a blade and the pull of a string, for my lungs were swimming with blood and needed to be plumbed. After a couple of hours, the clam-shaped hole resembled a scar once again – my armour back on.

Sunday 23 August, 1998. 9.30am.

I open my eyes to tubes and lines down my throat, up my nose, in my chest, up my vagina and in my neck. A machine breathes for me and would for the next three days. My chest is raw and puckered, and four tubes the size of garden hoses stick out of my chest at even angles like badges on a soldier’s lapel.

I was going lose my breath, I was going to lose my dignity and I was going to lose my cheekbones. But I was coming away with my life – armour on, sheltering my fall.

every woman bleeds

May 22, 2012May 27, 2017 · 4 Comments ·

The day after the scalpel was pulled,

I dropped clots the size of Nebraska.

Several shades of red on toilet paper and cotton

I tried to wipe it away,

but the stain hovered and lingered

as a murder of crows do at dusk.

With this, there is pain and there is tarry and worry.

My macramé brain, swarming with holes

where stitches were dropped.

Heart tacked together with whispers on the wind

where you are a lost suggestion.

Swallowing words into the pit of my stomach,

they taste of blood and bullets – tangy and metallic.

I am sick from the taste and sight of blood;

from the freckles of warmth gushing between my legs –

it’s waxy patina, shining like Strawberry Fields

but joyless as an empty glass of whiskey.

What is this faint leaking,

so public and sudden

like an unexpected freight train?