48 Useless scrub

These happenings were cutting into my farm time. I had to get back to the raspberries and the freedom of space uncluttered by humans and human events. She came too.

She took it quietly, taking short walks into the bush and sitting thinking and absorbing the sounds and actions of the wild things. An hour resting on a granite rock in the sun watching a grey fantail going about its business and unconcerned with her was somehow calming. These daily short walks took on a pattern. I’m off up my hill she would say. She always said where she was going in case she couldn’t make it back unassisted. Her hill became quite used to her.

It was only a small hill and was very scrubby being covered mainly in straggly and small Eucalyptus pauciflora trees. It had the significant benefit that its top was wide and had lots of small rocks that were a comfortable sitting height. It was steep enough so that reaching the top was an achievement. The long periods of daily contemplation about the problems and the unknown future became increasingly interrupted by that scrubby bush as the days passed; the hill started to take her over. One day she returned excited. She had discovered some mauve flowers amongst the rocks. The plants had seemed dead but weren’t. We had no idea what they were so looked in our one flower picture book for identification. That was no help. I must get a better book she said.

Remarkably other flowers started appearing amongst the rocks and in the scrappy ground cover and within a week or two she was seeing more than ten different things that had been hiding from her eyes and mine. She might see just one flower of a type and then they were everywhere. It was almost as though permission to view was only granted after you had passed their test; they were there but you couldn’t actually see them until you had the password for that species.

She had worked for two decades at the Canberra and South East Region Environment Centre largely as a volunteer editing and laying out their journal, so that seemed a good place to start to find a book on wild flowers for our place. She talked to her friends Ian, Margaret and Helen there who were putting together just the book she needed but it was not yet ready. She came home after spending a small fortune on alternative books, one by Leon Costermain “Native trees and shrubs of SE Australia” and a second by Alan Fairley and Philip Moore “Native plants of the Sydney district”. These covered thousands of plants and she had discovered just ten that she wanted to identify. It seemed like overkill to me so I told her. Still, anything that got her mind back into gear had to be worthwhile. She was taking time off from being a lawyer so a gap-filler was needed.

The hill continued to take a beating. It was used so much I asked if she wanted me to set it up with wheel chair access for the future. OK it was a joke. She was a strange sight struggling up there with her Sony Walkman permanently plugged in, her 10x botanists’ magnifier dangling from her neck and a plastic bag in her hand for putting specimens into for later identification. The Walkman was her constant friend day and night. It was there to overwhelm the continuous sounds buzzing and ringing in her head. Sleep at night was difficult without it.

47 Handling grief

How can anybody handle such news? Within a couple of days you learn your friend has died, a friend you had been looking forward to sharing your new and exciting stories with, and simultaneously you find you might have a serious illness that could incapacitate you and wipe you out within a short period. It was very difficult.

The head noises started, tinnitus they called it, the pains got worse spreading to the arm on the same side as the bad leg and she spent a lot of time in deep thought about the present and miserable future.

Sleepless nights were filled writing letters about everything and nothing to her mother. She received no replies.

Physical tests and MRI scans confirmed MS. She had sclerotic dead patches over her brain stem meaning that control signals to and feedback from certain organs were likely to be muffled. It was a matter of course that sclerosis would continue and spread and other functions would be reduced and finally lost. The rate of spread could not be forecast but her positive attitude might help general well-being. Drugs were being developed but at this stage MS was poorly understood. Her case wasn’t all that bad.

46 Inconvenient passing

She had been writing a diary of our travels around Turkey, the UK and US and this was being put together to present to her mother on our return home along with a selection of photos. It was a bit like writing letters, but not sending them till they made a worthwhile story. Her mother had had to be satisfied with the occasional picture postcard sent en route.

We arrived home; the doctor was visited immediately and showed considerable concern but no real diagnosis and suggested a specialist. It could be MS. She had a cousin with the disease.

She had a phone call from her brother in Adelaide. Her mother had just died from a heart attack.

45 Definitely avoid holidays

The profits from that raspberry season and useful income from the new lawyer raised the bar on possible holidays that year. We could even go to Blackpool and watch the murky sea rattling in over shingle beaches and eat fish and chips from a newspaper in the howling wind. That was clearly just an unattainable dream so we downscaled to a few weeks exploring Turkey, a couple of weeks in the UK and a wrap up in the US. Round-the-world air tickets were good value that year. Turkey was amazing, UK was normal and the US, a place we had studiously avoided previously, far exceeded all expectations.

The whole holiday was fairly demanding physically and even mentally because we always travelled by the seat of our pants determining our next destinations as the journey unfolded, and used local transport, whatever that was. The final stint in Oregon was easy because we had old friends to stay with.

Maybe that was the problem; she relaxed too much in the glow of old shared memories and the catching up on years she had missed. She woke up in the night crying out in relentless excruciating pain. Her leg had seized up in a massive cramp that wasn’t a cramp. The leg was no longer hers but a useless appendage that shouted for attention remorselessly but didn’t respond to controls. We had been doing lots of walking but this was ridiculous. She couldn’t walk at all that day. She couldn’t bear to put any weight on it or have it in contact with solid things. She rang Qantas to change our flight home to as soon as possible instead of our 10-days ahead schedule. She wanted her own doctor. As we were on a special airfare we couldn’t change bookings without paying a very large sum. This rule could be dissolved if changed travel was because of a death in the family or in extenuating medical circumstances. The latter may apply here but a doctor’s certificate would be needed. A doctor’s appointment was made for the next day on the assumption she would be able to move.

The US surgery was an eye-opener. It was an expansive area with cash registers behind a safety glass wall and lots of comfortable seating occupied by lots of waiting people. There were writing tables with numerous forms. We sat down.

Several people came in after us and most went to pickup forms and fill them in. This turned out to be phase 1 of any doctor visit. We filled in the details required, more or less identifying the medical condition ourselves by ticking the right boxes. That complete and passed to a clerk we sat down to wait some more while the clerk entered the data into a computer. After around half an hour we were ushered into a small room. A woman nurse checked blood pressure and went through the form to verbally confirm our ticks and crosses. We returned to the waiting area.
The doctor was ready to see her after a further 40 minutes. The annotated form was checked through again and a diagnosis made. You seem to have strained your leg and back muscles he declared without stooping to any serious hands-on activity. I suggest you take pain killers and rest. After a few days it may clear up. However, as I don’t have your medical history, I can’t make a definitive diagnosis. Can I have a signed certificate from you that specifies I am sick and need to travel home on Qantas at the earliest date, she asked? I really am in considerable pain and distress and have never had any problems like this before.

She can be pretty persuasive but the doctor wasn’t interested in any further interaction, only in his cheque. We were dismissed to pay the required large sum through the safety glass screen. Paperwork was provided that detailed the possible diagnosis and suggested treatment, all under the letterhead of the surgery. This might be enough she said.

Indeed, it was enough. She rang Qantas again and talked to somebody different who readily agreed to change our bookings after hearing the symptoms and doctor story. No paperwork was required and no additional fee. After a couple of days we packed and went home via San Francisco. She was still having a lot of trouble with her leg, now called her bad leg.