I have been putting off filling in the forms I must attend to on behalf of my mother. After the third attempt at applying for my Dad’s super I feel like giving up. Always in need of certification, or a photocopier. I have given my address for my mother to make it more streamlined so that mail comes straight to me instead of to the nursing home but the super company wants a letter with her residential address on it. Nothing else will do. To forge or not to forge. In the end I must go to Centrelink.
It is raining after all and I cannot walk the dog. I wanted to try a new route near the river. New smells for him. I wanted him to run through weeds, snort in sand, but instead I am driving to Centrelink to queue.
The woman at the computer screen says I can just hand in the form. No I really want to see someone because I am fearful I will not have all the right stuff with me and I want to know. Now that I am doing it I want to make sure it is done. Sitting across from someone real makes me confident it will be recorded.
There’s a wait you know. Forty five minutes at least.
Wish I’d brought my book to read. But it’s okay. It’s Centrelink. There’s always something to see.
A woman with no shoes and what looks like either bird shit or glue in her hair is at the counter next. She has bruises on her calves. I suspect they are from abuse. I think this because she is at Centrelink and I have already labelled her as deprived. She is agitated and stalking around. She trails a cotton shirt. Then she puts this over the top of her puffy jacket. There is definitely something not right with her. She queues. She stops queueing. She asks the room for a pen. I don’t offer her mine because how else will I write about her?
I sit with others waiting in a semi circle around a television where Larry Emdur tells us about great new shopping opportunities. Steam cleaning carpets or pet insurance. Pet insurance seems particularly ridiculous in here. Larry looks exceptionally clean, so rock jawed and white teethed when compared to my fellow Centrelink customers. Most have vinyl rain jackets on. Most have down turned mouths and nobody is smiling enough to see the colour of their teeth, but I suspect not the same sheen as Larry’s.
A woman comes in with a three year old scally wag. She threatens him continuously. He has a shaven head except that the fringe is left long. It is an extremely ugly haircut. She keeps saying, Do you want me to smack you in front of all these people? He is running around out of her reach. Don’t go out there or that big dog will get ya. She wants him to sit down next to her and have his juice and chips that she keeps saying she has. Perhaps they are in the Thomas the Tank engine knapsack. Bribe, threat, bribe, threat. He is zooming. On a run past she grabs him by the neck of the jacket and swings him up onto her lap. She pinches his earlobe and he says, you hurting my ear. She says, Not yours. It’s my ear. I made it.
“She had little to say about love, fidelity or morals. She talked about money, and his failure to find work; and when she mentioned the lady of his choice, it was not as a siren who had stolen his love, but as the cause of the shiftlessness that lately had come over him. He broke in frequently, making excuses for himself, and repeating that there was no work, and insisting bitterly that if Mrs Biederhof had come into his life, a guy was entitled to some peace, instead of a constant nagging over things that lay beyond his control. They spoke quickly, as though they were saying things that scalded their mouths, and had to be cooled with spit. Indeed, the whole scene had an ancient, almost classical ugliness to it, for they uttered the same recriminations that have been uttered since the beginning of marriage, and added little of originality to them, and nothing of beauty.”
“She was a thin, dark woman of forty or so, with lines on her face that might have come from care, and might have come from liquor.”
September 11 ten years ago we were watching Omega Man, a Charlton Heston film, when Graham’s brother rang and told us to switch on the telly. We saw the North tower burning after a plane had crashed into it and then proceeded to watch as the second plane hit and then the towers collapsed, falling straight down like they were made of paper. I was pregnant and spent the next two days watching the television and crying, disbelieving the scale of the tragedy.
In 2011, September 11 is a Sunday; one of my regular work days at the vet clinic. I have a routine caesarian to do on a French Bulldog called Blondie. This is her fourth litter. Last week another bitch owned by the same breeder had three pups by caesarian, but all the puppies died without explanation. I don’t want the same thing to happen on my watch. The caesarian goes smoothly and six puppies are born. One, we discover has a cleft palate, so it is not allowed to survive. The other five are fine. Frenchies are not good breathers and I take many precautions to ensure a smooth anaesthetic recovery. She is kept intubated until she is fully alert and able to hold her head upright. Then we extubate. The pups have their first feed off her and we send them all home. Her mucous membrane colour is paler than I would like but I reassure myself that the surgery was dry when I closed up her abdomen and she is, perhaps paler, only because she had an ovariohysterectomy as well. But two hours later she is back in the clinic after two episodes of collapse at home.
The owner has had to slam her on the concrete to get her breathing, she tells me.
Blondie is indeed extremely pale and I conclude she must be bleeding internally. I reanaesthetise her and open her up, yet again. Her abdomen is full of uncoagulated blood. Her intestines swim in a soup of dark red. I soak up the blood with laparotomy sponges and search for the bleeding. I retie the uterine stump where I suspect the bleeding has come from and retie both ovarian pedicles despite all ligatures being still in place. We take a blood sample and measure her packed cell volume (PCV) to find it is 13, less than a third of what it should be. She has lost so much blood that she needs a transfusion.
The breeder is sent home to get another healthy dog to act as a donor and we collect a bag of blood from a drain pipe jugular vein in the robust Staffy cross. We run in some blood to Blondie and she has had about half a bag when I notice her puffy eyes. She looks like a dog which has been stung by a bee. She has oedematous eyelids. I think she is having a transfusion reaction. Her PCV has come up to 23. We stop the blood transfusion. I give her steroids and antihistamine to stop the allergic reaction, but her face still looks like it has gone ten rounds.
When she is awake enough to have her tube out we withdraw it slowly. She attempts to breath but makes only gurgled, choking sounds. It is a sound I dread. She throws her head back, arches her neck and collapses. She is not breathing, and is not going to. We need to reinsert the tube. But now her airway has disappeared into an oedematous swollen mess of mucosal membrane. She is apnoeic, her gums are blue and her pupils are dilating to black unresponsive pools. She is dying fast. The breeder beside me cranks open the jaws as I attempt to intubate her. Even with a laryngoscope I cannot see the airway. There is no hole to tube. As I keep trying to find an airway I am thinking she will not survive this. I can see her black eyes like her soul has gone. I search with a finger down her gullet for an airway and miraculously get a tube down. She is hooked up to oxygen and a vet student is doing chest compressions. I give her adrenalin. I listen to her chest and remarkably she has a heart beat. She’s back, I tell the stunned staff and the two breeders.
Now we have a dog who is alive, but one which we cannot extubate. I make the decision to perform an tracheostomy. She will need a safe breathing passage until her airways have lost their swelling. From an endotracheal tube we fashion a tracheostomy tube and I look up the surgical text book on how it’s done. The tracheostomy is performed and on unattaching the gaseous anaesthetic the end of the ET tube comes away. I nearly lose the tracheostomy tube down the trachea. I manage to grab it with forceps before it disappears altogether and then secure it with superglue, from the vet student’s flat. Blondie is ready to be recovered for the third time.
I make the decision to take her home with me since it requires that someone spend the night by her side making sure the tube stays open and she keeps breathing. We have spent five hours saving her. Her respiration is fast but she has a better airway now than she does normally and so her oxygen saturation stays at a high level. In a basket with warmed wheat bags surrounding her, I take her home, driving without the radio, listening to her breathing.
At home, Murphy our Border terrier, is locked outside and the Frenchie is in the lounge room, the drip hanging from the lamp. On the TV is a documentary about 9/11 called Rebirth. I set up my bed on the couch, beside her. She has pain relief every three hours to keep her calm and settled. She survives the night. I am reminded of being a breast feeding mother. In the wee hours I switch on the light and check her vitals. She is responsive and sad looking. She cannot make a sound except for her breathing, fast and regular. I am reminded of being a vet student doing the shift at the university hospital. Padding downstairs in bare feet to the kennels to check on patients and give medication. I am desperate for her to survive for I feel I have put her in this predicament. I am the surgeon who started this whole cascade of disaster going and I must stop it.
By three in the morning she is looking more normal and her breathing isn’t as fast. I am beginning to think she will make it. She has a pinkish hue around her muzzle.
I take her back to the vet clinic and we measure her blood pressure and her PCV. It has risen to 28 and her blood pressure is 80. Not bad, considering. Today we will take out the tracheostomy and hopefully she will breathe on her own. We reanaesthetise her and place two stay sutures on either side of the cut tracheal rings so that we can easily locate this hole again if she fails to breathe unaided. We place an ET tube through her mouth and then we switch her off the anaesthetic. Finally she is awake enough to have the tube out and she breathes. She doesn’t gag or gurgle or choke. She breathes. She looks concerned, confused. She breathes. We breathe.
She spends the day in the clinic looking doped out and tired. She goes home about 4pm, more than twenty four hours after her dramas began. The bitch whose pups all died the week before has fostered her puppies so she will not be required to nurse them. Blondie can spend her time recouping.
I have the remainder of the day to work but cannot stop thinking about her.
Blondie in my lounge room after surviving the night
I am eating toast with strawberry jam and thin slithers of tasty cheese on top. This is something Graham claims to have taught me but I tell him we did it in my family too. He never believes me. The dog is chewing his feet with his incisors. Gnawing at their underside, between the pads, despite his expensive cyclosporin medication. Next door, the neighbour’s new baby cries like a wind up toy. I wonder if she feels the same ineptitude I felt at a baby’s crying. I get a phone call from a woman who used to be vet student in the clinic where I work. She wants me to be a referee for a job she is applying for. She has had two children and hasn’t worked in a while. She also wants my advice on her son. He is four and she thinks he lacks self esteem. I have a son too so perhaps I will know how to help her. How do you make a boy confident in himself, she asks me. I feel like every day is an experiment I am conducting, trying to find the right way, she says. It is like a one take movie making, she says in her Chinese accent. She is wise without knowing how wise she is. I tell her to find something he likes to do and help him to succeed at that. I think it is advice I have stolen from one of the many parenting books I read in those crying years. John Marsden perhaps. I tell her to get him Lego. Her phone call has taken my mind of the fact I am waiting to go to the doctor for a biopsy result. I think it could be the last morning before I start bargaining with God and in a hour everything could be different. I chastise the dog over the continued licking.
I am lying on a sink in thin pure cotton pyjamas. The shorts have elasticised bands around the thighs. I don’t know they are called bloomers. All I know is that I love the pattern and the feel of the cloth. Maybe I am a toddler or at kindergarten. The sink is hard and not very comfortable. There is a single small basin with a wooden surround, by the kitchen window, facing south. It is the window where my mother signals to my father to come inside by simply banging on the glass. Later when we are older, as he becomes more distracted, or less interested in the goings on within the house, we are sent to get him from deep in the yard.
The sink is high and far from the floor. I have been lifted onto it and told to lie down with my head over the sink. My head is like a too heavy flower on a not strong enough stem. Head back. Head back, says mother. From a cup she pours tepid water over my head. It falls in a gentle stream. A hand shields my face from the flow. She is shampooing my hair. Her fingers back and forth on my skull. Kneading. The lather is white and soft. It dribbles down my temples and pools in crevices of my ears. Water is flowing back down into the sink.
I don’t like it. I don’t hate it, either. I don’t remember crying or protesting. I like the warm water and the firm touch on my head. I don’t like the trickle of liquid into my ears or the soap finding the corners of my eyes. I don’t like the hard sink at my back. I like being lifted down and placed on the floor. I like a towel piled high and wobbly on my head.
The sink is the same sink in the same kitchen that I must clean as my mother prepares to leave the house she has lived in since the 1960s. She is entering a nursing home to be reunited with her husband, my father, who is already there, having been accepted straight from the hospital after his fall. The sink would not do these days. It is not deep or wide enough for the mountains of dishes that a household goes through. It is a simple single shallow sink. Not a double with one for rinsing. No large draining boards. Its cupboards beneath are made from chipboard and have swollen and buckled from water damage over the years. There is still old lino covering the shelves that my father laid back in the seventies. On the windowsill sits a battered steelo my father would use on the pots and pans.
The sink looks not long enough to hold a child’s prone frame. But it did.
I look out a hibiscus bush; watch a bee find its way inside the trumpet of the flower. Then, back out on the petal, it staggers around.
Washing my hair now in the shower, the stinging of the shampoo in my eyes sends the memory flooding back.
I am sitting in the kitchen on a chair so high my feet are swinging above the floor. I am under a home hair dryer. Hot air rushes in under the cap and puffs it out. Hot, hot air all over my head. My mother has put my hair in curlers. It has taken an infinity. Her bending in front. Her pulling and snapping the bands. The clips scraping the skin of my skull. I will be the spitting image of Shirley Temple, my mother tells me. She is a favourite of hers but yet to be seen by me. For we still don’t have a television and it will be a few more years before we sit down on Saturday afternoons to watch her movies. My hair is blonde and pliable and loves to curl. Each ringlet is bouncy and like a spring. Close your mouth and your eyes. Pinch your nose. Like preparing to bob under in the silty Swan. She sprays a mist of hair spray. Now the hair has been glued into position. I am fogged by a strange metallic smell. My mother holds up a hand mirror. Her face is hidden behind it. Under my hand I feel the hair. Stiff, unwavering curls. Mother says, it is Shirley Temple hair.
He says we are educating children out of creativity and explains why he needs to concentrate when he is frying an egg. And why some people need to move to think.
the chook house 