Emails from the Edge (39 page)
Read Emails from the Edge Online
Authors: Ken Haley
St Jude's, in the south-eastern Melbourne suburb of Chadstone, was home to men and women from age 20 to 70, ranging from the very active onesâwho were free to head off to Chadstone shopping centre unaccompaniedâto a couple of elderly inmates with advanced dementia. For some reason, at that juncture the prospect of living in a nursing home, especially one dedicated to the patron saint of lost causes, tickled my funnybone no end.
The actual experience wasn't nearly so amusing. The regimentation was more inflexible than life at the Austin. Breakfast was standard fare issued at a standard time, without privacy. If you were lucky, toast and tea and tepid soup were served at 5 pm: if you were detained somewhere else for fifteen minutes, the humiliating threat of going to bed hungry was held over youâand occasionally made good. What else can I say? At my age, one soon tires of bingo.
Three months at St Jude's had what I call a positively negative effect, giving me all the incentive I needed to move into the community earlier than anyone had foreseen.
The problems of finding a suitable place in which to live independently as a wheelchair user are complicated by the general practice among real estate agents of not identifying which properties are accessible. They also send staff out to meet you who haven't a clue whether there is a step at the threshold and, if there is, what it will take to surmount it.
There is no point in arranging a âview' of a flat that has a step of 60 centimetres' depth (a sheer drop) with no ramp. Much less than that and I can grab both the walls and lever myself into the apartment, provided the floor is level from there on in, with no ghastly dips and perilous obstructions to negotiate.
On occasion a flummoxed agent would try to retrieve the situation by offering to supply a ramp, under terms to be agreed, but sometimes the angle at which such a ramp would have to be placed could not have avoided obstructing the driveway. Too steep, and it would be of no practical use. âIf I can't get inside, then I can't live here.' I remember drilling this basic fact of life into more than one head seemingly unable to wrap itself around this, to me, bleeding obvious reality.
After a couple of weeks spent scouring the suburbs, I found my perfect flat in the suburb of Carnegie. Of course, like most house- or flat-dwellers, I just knew it was the one. I was elated to find somewhere I could call my ownâeven if I was rentingâand this, along with my new work situation, made a vast difference to my quality of life, mental health and happiness in the succeeding years.
Before being sent home from the Austin again at Christmas, someone had recommended that, rather than take haloperidol (which I refused to go back on), I should visit a good psychoanalyst. Even with my doubts about how useful that would be, I submitted. Anything was better than more tablets with their untold side effects. This particular psychoanalyst was a calm, quietly spoken sixty-something with an established practice in a solid 1920s house in the suburb of Auburn. Much to my discredit, I cannot remember his name. Suffice to say he was one of those avuncular types with the all-too-rare gift of timing who knows just when progress is possible. Halfway through our eighth hour together, and seeing that I was ready, he put the golden question: Would I like to go back to work?
I would love to sub-edit, I said, but if I went back to my old paper, the
iAge
, where scores of my former co-workers knew me as an upright (I had initiated him into the jargon), what would they think on seeing me in a wheelchair? Wouldn't I have to explain my past, about which I remained hugely embarrassed, to each and every one of them?
âNo,' he said. âYou will find people are very understanding.' And so they were. In the next four years, during which I worked every week on the newspaper's Sunday publication, not one colleague ever asked how I came to be in a chair. Given the insatiable curiosity of journalists as a species, it makes my hair stand on end just to think of it. But journalists can also claim a higher-than-average ratio of caring individuals within their ranks, and it is passionate caring that attracts many to the profession in the first place. (As a more aware individual now, it would amaze me if most of those colleagues didn't know, broadly speaking, how I came to be a paraplegic, but their consideration will forever be appreciated by me.)
Gaining access to the big red-brick building on Spencer Street called for a modicum of understanding on the part of security guards, who put out a ramp for me each Saturday, and other mornings as more shifts came my way. In the newsroom itself, new computer platforms were installed in 1993, with their own inclined edges which made it possible for me to work among, not apart from, the other sub-editors.
Apart from a love of the work itself, I knew why I was coming back, but never confided it to any of my colleagues lest they laugh out loud. Not only could I practise a craft I cherished, but the past two years had taught me in the harshest conceivable way that without the social outlet provided by work I would probably relapse into madness. The pit of insanity was one from which I might not clamber out a second time, and work, along with the social interaction that came with it, would keep me sane.
For the first time I thought how lucky, or providential, it was that my handsâwith which I earn my livingâhad been undamaged. Had I been a footballer, or a dancer, the loss of my legs would have been a much more grievous blow.
Since those grim days of 1991 I have practised my craft in various cities of the world, from London to Hong Kong to Johannesburg.
I have to say that the disappearance of my mental problems about the same time as I resumed work remains as much a mystery to me now as it did then. I can think of no external reason why the oppressive weight of negativity, which had lingered months after the trigger event and right through to my second release from hospital after the haloperidol scare, dispersed just then like clouds vanishing before the dawn of a peerless new day. But it did, allowing me to look my new life in the face and relish the challenges of reconnecting with the community from which I had been isolated for almost a decade.
It was a mercy that, by the time my best friend found out what had happened to me, hospital visits were a thing of the past and I was on good terms with myself again. Nevertheless, I couldn't escape the knowledge that it caused great pain to Neil, whom I had known since we were eight-year-olds. True, we had drifted apart while I was overseas and it was he I had decided to spare âthe burden of seeing me as I now knew myself to be', helpless as I felt, on returning to Australia in September 1990.
Newly reintegrated into the community, it was in the back of my mind that one day I would probably run into him, his wife or their twins, in a shopping centre somewhere and there would be brief shock and embarrassment all round. Still, as I was not yet reconciled to my new life and felt a lingering stigma about being in a wheelchair, I was not going to take the initiative to get back in touch. Then, alerted through a mutual friend on Boxing Day 1993 that I was back in town, Neil rang me at work. We arranged to meet up for what would be the first time in almost ten years, although we had kept in touch by phone right through till 1988.
Our reunion took place in the first week of the New Year, 1994. An hour before he was due to come over, adopting that technique I would later use with my ex-employers in Bahrain, I rang to break the news as gently, and as close to the projected time of meeting, as I could. We adjourned to my local pub, where it took two hours to convey what had happened to me. As I came to the point of recounting the suicide attempt, Neil's eyes brimmed with tears (and he is not an overly emotional man), reminding me once again, as had been the case with family members, that I had caused grief and sadness. When that happens to people who matter to you, it is not a feeling you would wish upon anyone else.
From this point on, my best friend became part of my life again, for which I will always be grateful.
It would be foolish to recommend the wheelchair life to uprights, but it does have its moments.
Only people with similarly sick minds will relish the scene when, with one wheelchair just back from being repaired and another still on hire, I visited the local shops one day in 1995 while looking after Neil's twin sons during the school holidays. After Brad and I raced each other down to the shopping strip in the chairs, I explained to his brother, Ryan, what we were about to do. Then I told Brad to get up out of his chair, in full view of a mother and daughter just approaching us along the footpath, and walk into the bakery outside which we had parked our respective chariots.
As he did so, I turned to Ryan and shouted, âThat's amazing. The boy's never walked before. It's a miracle!' You should have seen the mother and daughter: they nearly keeled over with shock. As I say, this is a prank that it takes a truly sick mind to appreciate. But, oh, that's another benefit of being in a chair: when you're only 142 centimetres tall, people never expect you to grow upâand for my part I'm determined not to let them down.
Another time, I was playing backyard basketball and, in our heroic but unsuccessful attempt to complete a slam dunk, I cannoned into the garage, unable to put on the brakes or otherwise slow myself down after my mighty throw. A few days later, a taxidriver helping me into his vehicle and noticing my feet swathed in bandages commiserated, âI see you're in a wheelchair because you broke your foot.' âNo,' I grimaced, âI broke my foot because I'm in a wheelchair.'
By the mid-1990s the
Sunday Age
had developed its own brand image to the point where it received the ultimate accoladeâdramatisation in a television series,
Mercury
. An ABC series, it took a revealing look inside a Melbourne Sunday paper's newsroom, and which one it was out of the two possibilities did not exactly come wrapped in thick disguise. The foreign editor in this series (one job I would love to have had, ironically) was a character in a wheelchairâbased on guess whoâand portrayed as rather headstrong.
Later that year I received an ultimate accolade of my own, winning a Walkley Award, Australia's most prestigious journalistic prize, for the best headlines published in a metropolitan daily newspaper that year. The awards ceremony was held at Brisbane's Hilton Hotel. A colleague who attended the ceremony and was at my table pointed out that the ceremony's organisers had contrived to get a ramp installed up to the stage. I smiled in recognition that this meant my chances of taking off the statuette looked promising, but was anxious not to jinx myself by reading too much into it. When my name was announced it came as one of the great thrills of my life, and I was up that ramp as quick as my wheels could carry me to shake the hand of Bill Hayden, the then Governor-General.
The award was not just gratifying in the normal way of such things. It also gave me an oddly humbling sense that, whatever had happened in the past, my second-life work was worthwhile, and that, after 1990 and all that, I had lived for something.
At the same time I felt due for a break, a change of pace, so, taking the view that it is always best to leave when you're in top form, I returned to Britain early in 1996. Six more months of sub-editing on Fleet Street newspapers followed. This time the main strings to my career bow were the
Sunday Telegraph
and the
Independent
.
Professionally, this was a restless time of life. My visa didn't permit me to stay in Britain for more than six months, so I returned to the
Age
to write editorials. But that, too, left me chafing at the bit, and in 1997 I landed a job sub-editing on the
South China Morning Post
in Hong Kong. A memorable year was in store, with the British colony reverting to Chinese rule that July under the terms of an agreement hammered out back in the 1980s between Beijing and Margaret Thatcher's government.
In 1998 I took to the road again. This wasn't the first time I had travelled in the chair. I'd been to the Philippines, then to South Africa and, in 1998, I visited ten countries in Southern and East Africa. For the second time in my life, I crossed Africa from east to westâfrom Zanzibar to Namibiaâonly to find that Livingstone had already achieved the feat.
This 1998 foray taught me that, far from solo wheelchair travel being too much of a strain, it inspires you to discover techniques for overcoming the most common impediments to a smooth trip. Africa offered the first proof for my conjecture that seeing the world from a wheelchair should not be insuperably more difficult than seeing it on foot, and confirmed that I had the personal resources to undertake another long-haul journey.
Like all good journeys, this was one of self-discovery, too, and I discovered that people almost everywhere are very accepting: they do see past the wheel casing and metal housing to the person. Seated with fellow travellers in a bar at the end of the day in some remote corner of Malawi, the consciousness of physical difference between us quickly seeped away. Sometimes I would find myself drawing attention to it, but only as part of that venting of humour which embraced many other topics.
âI'm glad to get here early in the evening,' I would say to them, âbecause I'm paralytic when I arrive: you have to work at it all night.'
Or âYou know why my friends don't like playing cricket with me? Because when they get me out I refuse to walk.' (I play that one just for the look on people's face
before
the punchline.)
The way I look at it, fairly freewheeling humour is a boon that prevents us taking ourselves too seriouslyâand that is a snare to be side-stepped at all costs. Some of the funniest cracks came from colleagues on the paper. One of them, a sports sub-editor named Mark, on seeing me carry a precariously balanced tray of snacks and coffees up from the canteen, quipped, âHere comes Meals on Wheels.' (I nearly dropped the tray, which would have served him right.)
The actual experience wasn't nearly so amusing. The regimentation was more inflexible than life at the Austin. Breakfast was standard fare issued at a standard time, without privacy. If you were lucky, toast and tea and tepid soup were served at 5 pm: if you were detained somewhere else for fifteen minutes, the humiliating threat of going to bed hungry was held over youâand occasionally made good. What else can I say? At my age, one soon tires of bingo.
Three months at St Jude's had what I call a positively negative effect, giving me all the incentive I needed to move into the community earlier than anyone had foreseen.
The problems of finding a suitable place in which to live independently as a wheelchair user are complicated by the general practice among real estate agents of not identifying which properties are accessible. They also send staff out to meet you who haven't a clue whether there is a step at the threshold and, if there is, what it will take to surmount it.
There is no point in arranging a âview' of a flat that has a step of 60 centimetres' depth (a sheer drop) with no ramp. Much less than that and I can grab both the walls and lever myself into the apartment, provided the floor is level from there on in, with no ghastly dips and perilous obstructions to negotiate.
On occasion a flummoxed agent would try to retrieve the situation by offering to supply a ramp, under terms to be agreed, but sometimes the angle at which such a ramp would have to be placed could not have avoided obstructing the driveway. Too steep, and it would be of no practical use. âIf I can't get inside, then I can't live here.' I remember drilling this basic fact of life into more than one head seemingly unable to wrap itself around this, to me, bleeding obvious reality.
After a couple of weeks spent scouring the suburbs, I found my perfect flat in the suburb of Carnegie. Of course, like most house- or flat-dwellers, I just knew it was the one. I was elated to find somewhere I could call my ownâeven if I was rentingâand this, along with my new work situation, made a vast difference to my quality of life, mental health and happiness in the succeeding years.
Before being sent home from the Austin again at Christmas, someone had recommended that, rather than take haloperidol (which I refused to go back on), I should visit a good psychoanalyst. Even with my doubts about how useful that would be, I submitted. Anything was better than more tablets with their untold side effects. This particular psychoanalyst was a calm, quietly spoken sixty-something with an established practice in a solid 1920s house in the suburb of Auburn. Much to my discredit, I cannot remember his name. Suffice to say he was one of those avuncular types with the all-too-rare gift of timing who knows just when progress is possible. Halfway through our eighth hour together, and seeing that I was ready, he put the golden question: Would I like to go back to work?
I would love to sub-edit, I said, but if I went back to my old paper, the
iAge
, where scores of my former co-workers knew me as an upright (I had initiated him into the jargon), what would they think on seeing me in a wheelchair? Wouldn't I have to explain my past, about which I remained hugely embarrassed, to each and every one of them?
âNo,' he said. âYou will find people are very understanding.' And so they were. In the next four years, during which I worked every week on the newspaper's Sunday publication, not one colleague ever asked how I came to be in a chair. Given the insatiable curiosity of journalists as a species, it makes my hair stand on end just to think of it. But journalists can also claim a higher-than-average ratio of caring individuals within their ranks, and it is passionate caring that attracts many to the profession in the first place. (As a more aware individual now, it would amaze me if most of those colleagues didn't know, broadly speaking, how I came to be a paraplegic, but their consideration will forever be appreciated by me.)
Gaining access to the big red-brick building on Spencer Street called for a modicum of understanding on the part of security guards, who put out a ramp for me each Saturday, and other mornings as more shifts came my way. In the newsroom itself, new computer platforms were installed in 1993, with their own inclined edges which made it possible for me to work among, not apart from, the other sub-editors.
Apart from a love of the work itself, I knew why I was coming back, but never confided it to any of my colleagues lest they laugh out loud. Not only could I practise a craft I cherished, but the past two years had taught me in the harshest conceivable way that without the social outlet provided by work I would probably relapse into madness. The pit of insanity was one from which I might not clamber out a second time, and work, along with the social interaction that came with it, would keep me sane.
For the first time I thought how lucky, or providential, it was that my handsâwith which I earn my livingâhad been undamaged. Had I been a footballer, or a dancer, the loss of my legs would have been a much more grievous blow.
Since those grim days of 1991 I have practised my craft in various cities of the world, from London to Hong Kong to Johannesburg.
I have to say that the disappearance of my mental problems about the same time as I resumed work remains as much a mystery to me now as it did then. I can think of no external reason why the oppressive weight of negativity, which had lingered months after the trigger event and right through to my second release from hospital after the haloperidol scare, dispersed just then like clouds vanishing before the dawn of a peerless new day. But it did, allowing me to look my new life in the face and relish the challenges of reconnecting with the community from which I had been isolated for almost a decade.
It was a mercy that, by the time my best friend found out what had happened to me, hospital visits were a thing of the past and I was on good terms with myself again. Nevertheless, I couldn't escape the knowledge that it caused great pain to Neil, whom I had known since we were eight-year-olds. True, we had drifted apart while I was overseas and it was he I had decided to spare âthe burden of seeing me as I now knew myself to be', helpless as I felt, on returning to Australia in September 1990.
Newly reintegrated into the community, it was in the back of my mind that one day I would probably run into him, his wife or their twins, in a shopping centre somewhere and there would be brief shock and embarrassment all round. Still, as I was not yet reconciled to my new life and felt a lingering stigma about being in a wheelchair, I was not going to take the initiative to get back in touch. Then, alerted through a mutual friend on Boxing Day 1993 that I was back in town, Neil rang me at work. We arranged to meet up for what would be the first time in almost ten years, although we had kept in touch by phone right through till 1988.
Our reunion took place in the first week of the New Year, 1994. An hour before he was due to come over, adopting that technique I would later use with my ex-employers in Bahrain, I rang to break the news as gently, and as close to the projected time of meeting, as I could. We adjourned to my local pub, where it took two hours to convey what had happened to me. As I came to the point of recounting the suicide attempt, Neil's eyes brimmed with tears (and he is not an overly emotional man), reminding me once again, as had been the case with family members, that I had caused grief and sadness. When that happens to people who matter to you, it is not a feeling you would wish upon anyone else.
From this point on, my best friend became part of my life again, for which I will always be grateful.
It would be foolish to recommend the wheelchair life to uprights, but it does have its moments.
Only people with similarly sick minds will relish the scene when, with one wheelchair just back from being repaired and another still on hire, I visited the local shops one day in 1995 while looking after Neil's twin sons during the school holidays. After Brad and I raced each other down to the shopping strip in the chairs, I explained to his brother, Ryan, what we were about to do. Then I told Brad to get up out of his chair, in full view of a mother and daughter just approaching us along the footpath, and walk into the bakery outside which we had parked our respective chariots.
As he did so, I turned to Ryan and shouted, âThat's amazing. The boy's never walked before. It's a miracle!' You should have seen the mother and daughter: they nearly keeled over with shock. As I say, this is a prank that it takes a truly sick mind to appreciate. But, oh, that's another benefit of being in a chair: when you're only 142 centimetres tall, people never expect you to grow upâand for my part I'm determined not to let them down.
Another time, I was playing backyard basketball and, in our heroic but unsuccessful attempt to complete a slam dunk, I cannoned into the garage, unable to put on the brakes or otherwise slow myself down after my mighty throw. A few days later, a taxidriver helping me into his vehicle and noticing my feet swathed in bandages commiserated, âI see you're in a wheelchair because you broke your foot.' âNo,' I grimaced, âI broke my foot because I'm in a wheelchair.'
By the mid-1990s the
Sunday Age
had developed its own brand image to the point where it received the ultimate accoladeâdramatisation in a television series,
Mercury
. An ABC series, it took a revealing look inside a Melbourne Sunday paper's newsroom, and which one it was out of the two possibilities did not exactly come wrapped in thick disguise. The foreign editor in this series (one job I would love to have had, ironically) was a character in a wheelchairâbased on guess whoâand portrayed as rather headstrong.
Later that year I received an ultimate accolade of my own, winning a Walkley Award, Australia's most prestigious journalistic prize, for the best headlines published in a metropolitan daily newspaper that year. The awards ceremony was held at Brisbane's Hilton Hotel. A colleague who attended the ceremony and was at my table pointed out that the ceremony's organisers had contrived to get a ramp installed up to the stage. I smiled in recognition that this meant my chances of taking off the statuette looked promising, but was anxious not to jinx myself by reading too much into it. When my name was announced it came as one of the great thrills of my life, and I was up that ramp as quick as my wheels could carry me to shake the hand of Bill Hayden, the then Governor-General.
The award was not just gratifying in the normal way of such things. It also gave me an oddly humbling sense that, whatever had happened in the past, my second-life work was worthwhile, and that, after 1990 and all that, I had lived for something.
At the same time I felt due for a break, a change of pace, so, taking the view that it is always best to leave when you're in top form, I returned to Britain early in 1996. Six more months of sub-editing on Fleet Street newspapers followed. This time the main strings to my career bow were the
Sunday Telegraph
and the
Independent
.
Professionally, this was a restless time of life. My visa didn't permit me to stay in Britain for more than six months, so I returned to the
Age
to write editorials. But that, too, left me chafing at the bit, and in 1997 I landed a job sub-editing on the
South China Morning Post
in Hong Kong. A memorable year was in store, with the British colony reverting to Chinese rule that July under the terms of an agreement hammered out back in the 1980s between Beijing and Margaret Thatcher's government.
In 1998 I took to the road again. This wasn't the first time I had travelled in the chair. I'd been to the Philippines, then to South Africa and, in 1998, I visited ten countries in Southern and East Africa. For the second time in my life, I crossed Africa from east to westâfrom Zanzibar to Namibiaâonly to find that Livingstone had already achieved the feat.
This 1998 foray taught me that, far from solo wheelchair travel being too much of a strain, it inspires you to discover techniques for overcoming the most common impediments to a smooth trip. Africa offered the first proof for my conjecture that seeing the world from a wheelchair should not be insuperably more difficult than seeing it on foot, and confirmed that I had the personal resources to undertake another long-haul journey.
Like all good journeys, this was one of self-discovery, too, and I discovered that people almost everywhere are very accepting: they do see past the wheel casing and metal housing to the person. Seated with fellow travellers in a bar at the end of the day in some remote corner of Malawi, the consciousness of physical difference between us quickly seeped away. Sometimes I would find myself drawing attention to it, but only as part of that venting of humour which embraced many other topics.
âI'm glad to get here early in the evening,' I would say to them, âbecause I'm paralytic when I arrive: you have to work at it all night.'
Or âYou know why my friends don't like playing cricket with me? Because when they get me out I refuse to walk.' (I play that one just for the look on people's face
before
the punchline.)
The way I look at it, fairly freewheeling humour is a boon that prevents us taking ourselves too seriouslyâand that is a snare to be side-stepped at all costs. Some of the funniest cracks came from colleagues on the paper. One of them, a sports sub-editor named Mark, on seeing me carry a precariously balanced tray of snacks and coffees up from the canteen, quipped, âHere comes Meals on Wheels.' (I nearly dropped the tray, which would have served him right.)
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