Everything to Live For: The Inspirational Story of Turia Pitt (16 page)

Michael responded on 19 January:

Yes Mary we can meet up. I think it would be best if we all sit down together with the professors looking after Turia at the burns unit on Monday. They can discuss with you Turia’s future treatment, insurance costs to cover her bills etc. The RacingthePlanet will have a clear idea of the issues Turia is faced with. Hopefully we can devise a plan on how and what you guys can do to help. Thanks and look forward to Monday.

Mary Gadams’ response the same day was to ask if the meeting could be moved to Wednesday morning, as she was actually scheduled to arrive on Tuesday night, but she would be very glad to finally meet Turia’s family.

Michael’s response same day:

Turia’s family are in Sydney on Monday before heading back down the coast. So Monday would be best. We have a room organised at the burns unit where we can all discuss your support for Turia. Now I just want to make one thing clear – that you guys RacingthePlanet are willing to support and help Turia on her road to recovery? Because if you are not willing to help support her the meeting should not take place. So around 1pm?

Mary Gadams’ response the next day – 20 January – was that while she could not meet on the basis of Michael’s email, she still believed it would be helpful to meet with him, Turia’s doctors and her family. To get to Sydney by Monday, she would need to know by Friday to arrange flights.

Michael replied the same day:

It’s your call like I said if you are willing to help and support Turia come to the meeting; we will be waiting at the burns unit on Monday at 1pm.

Mary Gadams’ reply, still 20 January, was a plea for him to understand that she was not in a position to discuss ‘help and support’ for Turia at that meeting. But it would be helpful to get a clearer understanding of the ‘issues’ Turia faced.

Michael, calm by nature but now absolutely furious, wrote:

We ask for help and support. You have failed to do this so far, you fail to help and support us in the future. There will be no meeting. Have given you an idea of how Turia is – dependant!

Mary Gadams responded immediately that she was sorry that they would not be able to meet but perhaps ‘sometime in the future.’

And that was it.

Next Michael received an email from the RacingthePlanet owner on 9 February apologising for not being able to meet to discuss Turia’s injuries but advising him that RacingthePlanet still had Turia’s backpack, which had been given to them at the gorge where Turia was injured; where would he like it sent? The email concluded with a message wishing Turia ‘a speedy recovery’.

This email was almost the last straw for Michael. If he found the message that Mary Gadams wanted to return Turia’s backpack extremely insensitive, the last line – ‘a speedy recovery’ – was a total punch in the gut. Did these people have no idea at all? Didn’t anyone do their homework on severe burns victims and understand the fact that it would take years for Turia to live some sort of a normal life; that she would never, ever be the same again, both psychologically and physically.

Michael heard nothing more from Mary Gadams; that is until the push for a government inquiry into the event gathered momentum in late February 2012. Then, on 28 February, she sent a letter addressed to the ‘Dear Pitt Family’ regarding what she called the ‘extensive media commentary regarding the fire which seriously injured two competitors, Turia Pitt and Kate Sanderson’.

The letter set out in painstaking detail everything RacingthePlanet had done before and during the event to maintain the safety of the competitors – and presumably everyone else involved, such as staff and volunteers, although they weren’t mentioned.

However, as the subsequent inquiry found, many of the claims made in this letter – of precautions taken, communications and time lines involved in the rescue – were misleading or just plain wrong.

Michael and the Pitt family did not respond.

RacingthePlanet was to get all the real information of how Turia, Kate and the others sustained their injuries at the inquiry.

G
OING INTO THE HOSPITAL IN
K
UNUNURRA IS THE LAST THING
I remember before waking up semi-conscious in ICU at Concord Hospital. I was heavily drugged and very confused. That day when Michael first saw me in the ICU and spoke to me and I apparently twice turned my face and looked at him – I don’t remember that. I remember little about my weeks in ICU. I thought I was living in Tahiti and Michael was not only my partner but also my doctor and we had a child. Every day I’d ask the doctors or nurses what happened because I would forget. Sometimes I would get flashbacks of the fire but I couldn’t quite get a grasp of what happened.

When I first woke up with a tracheotomy, my only means of communication was to point and nod and shake my head to commands. It was beyond frustrating; it was hopeless. No one ever really knew what I wanted. My first real means of communicating was when my family eventually brought in a whiteboard and strapped a texta to my hand and I would write words on it. As bad as it was, it was an improvement, and I was able to write things like ‘pain’, ‘drink’, ‘What happened?’ Once, when I was heavily sedated, I asked if I was in a mental institution. Another time I asked if I was in prison.

After the tracheotomy was removed I was able to talk but my voice was a whisper. The first thing I asked for was a sip of Coke – my mouth was as dry as the desert. The Coke tasted so amazing I just kept asking for more and more; I was fantasising about swimming in a pool of Coke and being able to drink as much as I wanted. I then asked for some fresh juice, and more and more of that too. I drank nearly two litres. It was the first time I had consumed liquid by mouth for weeks and my body was not ready for such a large amount of fluid; so of course I spewed.

Being able to talk again meant I was able to tell my family a little of what happened; I told them about the fire and how we were trapped but in the end I didn’t speak much about it at all. I don’t think my family really understood what had happened to me. But as I was still very frail in hospital, they didn’t ask me a lot of questions. I tried to tell Genji but I just got too emotional.

Once I moved into the Burns Unit I began to realise how bad I was and I wanted to die. Michael would come in and say, ‘Aren’t you happy that you’re alive?’ And I would think,
Fuck no; I wish I was dead
.

It was hard for me because Michael and my family were all so happy that I was still here but I could not feel this at all. What did I have to live for? My feelings of wanting to die continued for a long time, even after I left hospital. The first time I felt really happy to be alive was when I took part in the Sydney City2Surf with my friends and family in August 2012.

When I had the tracheotomy in, I couldn’t speak. It was intensely painful when the nurses rolled me over to change the sheets or my dressings but I couldn’t utter a sound to let them know they were hurting me; I could only cry.

I remember once looking at the little cleaner busily mopping the floor and I would have done anything to swap places with him; I was so intensely jealous of his life. Before the fire my life was just great – a great job, a great partner, a great family. I thought about all the things Michael and I used to do in Kununurra – camping, lying in the warm night air looking up at the stars, rock climbing, jumping into waterholes – all sorts of crazy stuff. I cried a lot.

My hands were bandaged for a couple of months; even though I was still heavily sedated and no one had yet told me my fingers were gone, when I lifted my right hand with its bulky dressing where my long fingers once were, I knew deep down there was something wrong. When the doctors told me they had amputated my fingers I cried the tears of overwhelming loss.

The first time I saw my face was terrible. I had been asking and asking about my face and everyone was saying I looked a bit different; that I’d just lost my nose but the doctors would fix it up. When Michael and Mum fed me, the food would fall between my lip and teeth and I didn’t know what my lips looked like. I asked Dad to bring my iPad in and that’s when I saw my reflection – my whole face had been grafted. It wasn’t my face staring back at me. I burst into tears and cried for at least an hour – I could not stop.

I guess I had taken my good looks for granted; I used to think girls who cared about their appearance were vain so I was disappointed with myself for caring so much. I had always identified myself as a sporty, active girl who happened to have good looks as well. And there I was, bedridden with even my looks destroyed. How could I still be me?

Things like surfing and running were totally beyond my reach when I could barely walk 5 metres. After that I avoided looking in mirrors or at anything that might show my reflection. I was also very pissed off because I thought everyone had lied to me when they said it would be fine, that I just looked a bit different. Although obviously it wouldn’t be fair to be angry with them because what could they say – ‘Yeah, you look pretty fucking ugly’? Of course no one is going to say that.

In hospital I was a skinhead but my hair grew back and that helped. I avoided my reflection for a very long time – perhaps a year – until my psychologist suggested that perhaps it was time I started accepting the new Turia. Now I am comfortable with my appearance as I remind myself that it will only get better.

There were quite a few other confronting hurdles ahead of me, especially during those first few months in hospital. One of them was the first time Mum saw me struggling painfully to walk; I was taking little shuffling steps in big boots along the corridor, supported by all these people, and when Mum saw me she cried. Until then I had never seen Mum cry about what had happened to me; Mum rarely cries – I have only seen her cry a handful of times in my life. That was the first time and
only time
I had seen her cry over what had happened to me. It always makes me emotional to think about that day; if my super-positive mum was crying then – reality set in – things must be pretty dismal.

Seeing my legs for the first time was hard to handle too because I’d always had great legs. The nurse took the dressings off my legs and I remember they stank – even I could smell it. I looked at my legs and they were a bloody mess. I felt repulsed just looking at them; what would other people think if even I found them disgusting? Although my feet weren’t burnt, they were still bad – covered in scabs – and my toes were black.

Having my dressings changed every day was really painful and took hours; it wasn’t like it could be done once and it would all be over. I’d lie awake at night thinking about how I’d have to go through the whole procedure again the next day. I didn’t cope well with the pain; if it had only been once or restricted to a small part of my body I think I would’ve been fine; but it was
everywhere
and
every day
.

They plied me with different types of painkillers: I would become tolerant to one drug and they would have to change to another one. I sometimes even got the ‘green whistle’, a drug that ambulance officers used when someone was in acute pain with broken bones or something. I suspect the reason I didn’t cope well was because I wasn’t in the best mental state and hadn’t yet accepted what had happened to me.

I was grateful to the lovely nurses who tried to make it easier for me to bear. My favourite nurse was Penny Gutierrez, a beautiful woman who told me that life can deal us some rotten cards sometimes but it was what you did with the hand you had been dealt that was important. I have always remembered those words and sometimes use it in my public speeches.

I loved my surgeons too; they were always super-confident when talking to me.

A particular hurdle was trying to gain weight. When I was admitted I weighed 63 kilograms. During my five months in hospital I lost a staggering 16 kilograms. All my fat, of which I had little to begin with anyway, was long gone and my body was eating away my muscles. As much as I tried to gain weight, I couldn’t; all my food would be consumed by the healing process of my wounds. In the early months I had a nose tube put in that went straight to my stomach, feeding me high-kilojoule liquid food. I hated the nose tube – it hurt every time I twisted my head and every time I swallowed. When finally I could eat solid food, I would eat and eat and eat and I still lost weight.

The love and care Michael and Mum gave me all those months in hospital was inspiring. They never gave up urging me on and it can’t have been easy. I remember once the physios were trying to get me to walk up a single stair and Mum and Michael kept coaxing me on saying, ‘You can do it’ and ‘Well done’ and I just lost it at both of them. I said to Michael, ‘What are you cheering for – your fucking cripple of a girlfriend?’ He looked so hurt and I was pleased that I managed to hurt him.

Michael came every single day; Mum came every day for a week every second week. They brought loads of yummy food and books and good luck charms and flowers and family photos and letters from my little brothers and get well messages from everybody and T-shirts with positive slogans.

Michael was always so encouraging, talking about our future together, never failing to comment on the progress I was making or how great I was looking and how beautiful my eyes were.

As for Mum, it didn’t matter what it was, she would find something positive to say. She said I was born with a
manu
(big) nose and told me that when I was little I wanted to have a
pupa
(small) nose and now I did. About my fingers she said it was wonderful that I still had my hands and I would learn to do all sorts of things with what fingers I had left. When she brushed my hair she told me what beautiful hair I had. When she painted my toenails she said what pretty toes I had.

When she massaged my feet she reminded me that I had always been into creative visualisation with my running and now I should visualise myself differently – to call on my imagination and visualise doing all the things I used to do. Even running.