There can be no forced marches on the long road back, whatever we have lost, whether it be something tangible or intangibleâour parents, our limbs or the person closest to our heart. At the point of no return the mind and spirit adjust themselves, not callously but protectively, to going without the lost element (and going
on
without it, what's more). Spirit and mind cherish the missing element and absorb its nourishing ingredients, making us stronger, more whole and sometimes better human beings than we were before.
A few people become withdrawn and self-absorbed and remain that way; most others, as the lifter told me, end up using the past as a building block for the future rather than rejecting it as so much worthless rubble. A warped sense of humour helps. Considering the statistical certainty that the way we live is going to produce some spinally injured people every yearâgiven society's stunning array of disablers, including cars, heavy machinery, diving pools and mosh pitsâthe thought arises,
What is the ideal age at which to break your backbone?
My answer would be,
About 36
. Why? Because you're old enough to have lived one life, yet young enough to embark on another. Those who know me best will wince and refer to that warped sense of humour but, as with all humour, its deployment can have serious benefits, and the benefit here lies in âowning' the new reality, accustoming your mind to the unalterable fact.
Positive thoughts now found an hospitable dwelling in my recharged brain, where for months the sole residents had been foreboding and negativity. The strongest chain of thinking began with the recollection that, during my travelling life while still totally able-bodied, I had climbed five mountains as well as the pyramids of Meroë, Sudan.
These ascents I accomplished not with ski poles and crampons but by good old-fashioned step-after-step trudging.
Millions of others, who could do the same, haven't
, I reminded myself,
so what if I never do that again?
Pele will never again play international soccer; Dennis Lillee never bowl for Australia again; Muhammad Ali's boxing days are behind him. But their lives do not become worthless: they move on (to use that excruciating phrase). A fully accomplished life means you're dead already. Other fields remain to be conquered.
That said, my life is not a template for anyone else's (the decisions and directions in it are not even ones I would necessarily take again if I had my druthers). But I don't regret the episode that changed my life that warm March night in 1991. What is done is done. While I didn't want to be alive when I came to, and to see my parents' faces made me feel that they couldn't have been more grief-stricken if I had âsucceeded', now I see things differently. Regret is as futile as blame. Along with a Lamborghini in the drive and a jacuzzi in the bathroom, it is a luxury I cannot afford.
Survivors will know that, every time in our lives when the emotional scales have become so unbalanced that we feel things can never be normal again, time has recalibrated them and put things right. Despair is the darkest hour in the long night of the soul. If we endure it, no matter how gloomy the void, everything will resume its proper shape and colour in time. New hope always dawns. If we can wait long enough, the first rays of daylight will reach us, but, if we cannot, the night-time never ends.
Just when the relentless tide of ill fortune would finally ebb away was only one of the uncertainties I had to deal withâbut that was another lesson I needed to learn: how to handle uncertainty. Recalling that my troubles first surfaced in the form of a panic attack, I could now see that in future I must welcome uncertainty as a stimulating challenge to do better, not treat it as a threat.
Early in my reporting career, I had viewed âcreative tension' as essential to converting an ordinary job performance into one of which I could be proud. Somehow, as the years wore on, I sought more certainty (perhaps that's what people are really talking about when they refer to getting more conservative with age). With experience, I can now distinguish between hope and expectation. Part of the reason that the invasion of Kuwait hit me so hard was that I had a fixed expectation that work in Bahrain would pan out in a certain satisfying way (which it did not), and that the region would remain stable enough for daily routines to become a source of reassurance (which they did not).
Maybe I was unlucky. But what should I learn from that? Only that Sod's Law is no respecter of frontiers. Shit happens. As a good friend has recently reminded me, an inflexible attachment to plans is the royal road to disappointment and discouragement, if not worse. Travelling Eurasia, I savoured its delights in advance by plotting out a detailed itinerary, but then I would recall the lesson that facts change and plans must be flexible enough to fit the most up to date of them. The catastrophe of September 11 served to reinforce the lesson but, by then, my war on terror would be won.
Words make a universe of sense all by themselves. It was inevitable that wheelchair sports such as rugby would be rechristened âmurderball' to accommodate the Australian penchant for exaggeration. And, given the equally Australian penchant for the diminutive term, wheelchair users sound much more approachable as âwheelies'. But, to the best of my knowledge, it was one of my contemporaries on Ward 13 who came up with the brilliant idea of putting non-wheelies in their place by calling them âuprights'. It makes bipeds sound like stick-in-the-muds. If a silence lasted too long, and he sensed people's thoughts getting to them, this cheery soul would call out, âHey, out in the corridor, there goes an upright.' The upright would never get the joke, of course, which was one more reason to laugh.
By separating them from us at that stage, my fellow inmate helped buttress
our
sense of community, which was a great service to everyone there on the way to eventual reintegration into the wider community. Calling them uprights and us wheelies entrenched in my mind, at least, the naturalness of our method of getting about. They walk; I roll.
Only much later, when living in the wider community, would it occur to me that in some ways we who move about on wheels are the lucky ones. Imagine spending your life on a bicycle: it would have its drawbacks (negotiating staircases being the most obvious): but on the flat we can actually move faster than most of you uprights, whereas downhill we just speed away, you really can't keep up. Uphill, of course, is a different kettle of eels but, if we are prepared to wait long enough, someone will always, eventually, come along and give us a push.
What I went through in the Mideast and afterwards inoculated me against fearânot in all its guises or when it comes to the dread of personal rejectionâbut physical fear, certainly, and it took away some of the fear of dying. No one can say how the approach of that ultimately inescapable event will find me. But I feel that, so long as the physical pain associated with dying isn't prolonged, I will face it with more equanimity than would have been the case if this crisis hadn't thrust my head inside the lion's jaw once already.
For the most part, we shrink instinctively from the idea that death is part of life. Our society does everything to keep the day at bay, as if it were alien to the process of life rather than its culmination. Seen properly, though, being aware of death should sharpen our sense of purpose in living. Coming anywhere near to forsaking the gift of life is bound to make you treasure it more.
But I have no taste for morbidity. The Taoist philosophy of neither approaching too close to danger nor giving it too wide a berth is one I find appealing. The key to successful travel in the post-September 11 world is a realistic appraisal of danger. Avoid countries at war or degenerating into anarchy, but don't stay at home in the belief that the ceiling won't cave in.
Crisis certainly creates two kinds of opportunity: the opportunity to act, and the opportunity to reflect about life at a deeper and more rewarding level. What did I learn from my horror stretch of 1990â91? To accept that, however happy and content you are today, rough patches
do
lie ahead. We are born in crisis; we die in crisis. So it should come as no surprise if we have to undergo a few crises during the bit in between.
One clue to contentment as a non-walker is to stop chasing a cure. From long-ago lectures at teacher's college I recall that one definition of good health is being well adapted to your environment.
In the West hardly anyone needs convincing that those of us in wheelchairs are not sick. But if you're not sick, and regard your new life as one in which walking just plays no part, then the notion of a âcure' is downright illogical. My mother is not reconciled to this: she has occasionally said, and obviously clings to the hope, that one day I'll walk again. With all due respect, I couldn't give a tinker's cuss whether I do or not. Perhaps I cannot afford to waste the emotional energy necessary to invest it in a hope that may prove fruitless.
This viewpoint is one I don't extend to people who are clearly at odds with their environment, and in that sense unhealthy. If I had HIV I would be hoping, praying and agitating for an AIDS cure. But these days paraplegia probably won't kill you, provided you survive the trigger event. So wanting to walk as desperately as the late Superman Christopher Reeve did only strikes me as detracting from the enjoyment of life as wheelies find it now, and as it will quite possibly continue to be for decades.
This is not to wish failure on any of those people working towards a âcure'. For all I know, my attitude is a minority one, and anyway to restore full bodily function to the disabled is surely a creditable goal.
In mid-June I was transferred to the rehabilitation ward. This was progress but, as with all moves, it took some time to settle in. Our days were busier now: there was a physical workout at ten in the morning, followed by toileting (training the bowel, how to avoid âemergencies' through proper nutrition) and manual rehab in what I disdainfully called âthe sheltered workshop'.
I was lumbered with two hours a day of woodwork classes in the carpentry room. In vain did I tell the German immigrant pensioner who marvelled at the refusal of timber to be moulded once it was in my hands that none of this was news to me.
Long ago, at high school, an even more long-suffering woodwork teacher, Mr Eversham, gave me a mark of 49 in the subject. I recall him telling me that he could have justified giving me 51 but that might have encouraged me to think I showed some promise in the subject, and he didn't want to give me false hope.
This well-meant effort to build meaningful structure into our day was generally but not entirely pointless. Computer lessons at the Austin developed skills that have been of considerable benefit in the afterlife.
Sport was not neglected: the rehab centre had its own tennis court, and I nearly kept fit adapting my serviceable old game to the new conditions. Back in the gym, team games and developing upper-arm strength on pommel horses and a click-counter device took me all the way back to secondary school again.
The physiotherapists, whom I had first come to know early in the piece when they would spend an hour at a time âranging' my arm to ensure that muscle tone wasn't lost for good, now focused on my possible aptitude for non-wheelchair movement. After fitting calipers and hanging me bat-like from beams, they had their answer: aptitude for NWM, ânone'.
Rehabilitation was to Ward 13 as senior high is to junior: the giver of greater latitude and responsibility prior to being jettisoned into the real world âout there'. Now, for the first time, an attempt was made to build fun into our routine. One Friday night, two of the more personable female nurses (and I believe they had been chosen for just this quality) arrived in dark sunglasses, dressed up as the Blues Brothers, and screened the original cult movie, transforming the normal boring round with scenes of unbridled hilarity.
Occasionally the rehab unit would venture out en masseâonce, I recall, to a steakhouse in the neighbouring suburb of Ivanhoe. While our exploration of this alien terrain called the outside world offered us joys unknown to the Rover on Mars, I did feel typecast, vaguely sensing that if things continued in this direction the rest of my life was going to be spent exclusively among wheelies. This, I think, was the first stirring of that healthy impulse to rejoin the larger community.
In glorious late September, seven months after admission to the Austin, the long-awaited day of discharge arrived. Initially it was great to be âhome', under my parents' roof way out of town in tranquil seaside Corinella.
Although I had been adjudged too well to stay in hospital, this was still a perilous stage of my recovery. I remained on tablets to keep my moods stable, as the transition to life outside after months in an institution can be as unsettling for a hospital outpatient as it notoriously is for ex-prisoners.
October and November were months of quiet and steady recovery, but early in December the pills I was takingâadded to the lack of varied and stimulating activity in my lifeâtook their toll. Over a few days, I had a reaction to the haloperidol capsules. Supposed to keep me calm, they had precisely the opposite effect. I would threaten violence and eventually an ambulance arrived at the doorstep to return me to the Austin, accompanied by a police escort.
The drug reaction had been characterised by uncontrollable jitters, my hands and body shaking as my brain was seized by wild and sometimes hallucinatory fears. This was worse in its way than the breakdown itself, certainly more frightening for Mum and Dad to be around me. I spent a couple of weeks back on Ward 13. Sadly, it was on this second visit to the Austin that Dr Ungar, to whom I owe so much, collapsed while on his rounds one day and was moved in a coma to Ward 24, where he died just before Christmas. His glass had emptied; mine was gradually refilling.
Early in 1992, as my parents and I recognised that sepulchral Corinella was not an ideal place for someone my age to recuperate and move forward, we heard about a nursing home exclusively for residents with broken spines.