How I Rescued My Brain Read online

  The night goes by. The lights and noises are different from those at home. I sleep soundly, except when the nurse comes in to check on us and I hear low voices and rustling. When it’s my turn, she apologises and shines a pin-light torch in my eyes. It stings a little. She asks me to wriggle my toes and squeeze her hand. ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ I say. She responds kindly: ‘It won’t hurt,’ she says. ‘Grip as tightly as you can.’

  It seems that in no time at all, daylight fills up the windowpanes. I realise I’m hungry. A woman pushing a multi-level trolley brings me a tray with a small packet of cereal, stiff cold toast, and tea. It’s like aeroplane food, as if I’m going on a holiday. I enjoy the breakfast, even though it’s not what I’d have at home.

  This morning is different from yesterday. It feels as if I’ve woken from a dream. I’m sure now that I’m in hospital, and that something really has happened to me. I remember more clearly the night before I came in. I’d woken with a headache, walked to the kitchen, taken a Panadol, and gone back to bed. That’s the last memory I have before being here.

  A nurse comes in and tells me that the specialist — the serious doctor — will be doing his rounds this morning and will discuss the test results with me. I am to stay in my room until he comes. Afterwards, I can walk around. I ask for a headache tablet.

  I’m looking forward to seeing the specialist: I’m keen to know what the results say, what he thinks has happened to me. In the meantime, I enjoy getting showered, dressed, and organised. The man next to me asks what I’m in for and I tell him that I’ve lost my memory for some reason. I chat a little with the others and then look out the window. We are up high, and I peer down on oblong houses with broccoli trees in their backyards.

  The phone beside my bed rings, interrupting my reverie. It’s my psychiatrist, Doctor Banister. Anna has called him, he says. ‘What’s happened?’ he asks.

  I tell him that I can’t recall most of yesterday.

  ‘What do you think brought this on?’

  I remember I’d had a huge panic attack the day before I came to hospital, after a meeting with our barrister. He’d told me that Anna and I were going to be sued.

  Doctor Banister asks me what tests have been done. I mention the CT scan and the blood tests, and say I’m waiting to discuss the results with the specialist.

  ‘You may have had a psychogenic fugue: an episode of amnesia. But we’ll need to wait and see what the results reveal. I’ll try and come in to see you. If it’s a fugue, you could come and stay at a clinic I work for, Seaview Psychiatric Clinic, for a longer rest. I can discuss this with your doctor.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. That does sound good.

  Not long afterwards, the specialist comes in and stands by my bed, with a young female doctor this time. He looks fresh but more rushed than yesterday. He asks me how I’m feeling.

  ‘I’m woolly in the head, as if I’m not sure I’m really here,’ I say. ‘I’ve got a mild headache, too.’

  He says that the blood tests came back negative, my heart is fine, and the CT scan did not show any problems with my brain. He turns to his colleague: ‘It’s not TGA.’ He doesn’t realise that I know what this is: transient global amnesia. A brief episode of memory loss, cause unknown. I’m disappointed; it would be an interesting clinical experience to have. Thinking it might be useful, I tell him that my psychiatrist rang and thought I might have had a psychogenic fugue. He looks relieved to hear this suggestion. I mention Doctor Banister’s idea that I could go to the Seaview clinic. The specialist says he will request a review by a hospital psychiatrist in case Doctor Banister doesn’t get in to see me. He’ll order some new blood tests and a urine test. He wants me to stay for another night so that they can monitor me, and to give him time to talk with Doctor Banister. After this, if he’s satisfied, I can go to Seaview, as long as Anna takes me.

  EVERYONE HAS GONE. It’s a relief; without people asking me things, I slip back into a river of peace. But I try to remember to look at clocks, to keep track of time; it slips by quickly when I don’t.

  For the first time, I notice my mobile phone on the bedside table. If I turn it on, there will be messages, and people might want things of me. I realise how little I’ve thought about the troubles Anna and I are facing outside these walls. I’m not going to turn it on, for now. Instead I’d like to do something active. There is a library in the hospital somewhere, which I went to when Anna was in the early stages of labour several years ago. It has medical and psychology journals I don’t usually get to see. I’ll go look for it.

  I put on my shoes and walk down the corridor. Each doorway I go through feels new and vibrant, like I’m a tourist in a foreign city. I follow a direction on an overhead sign, walk a short distance, and then can’t remember what the sign said, or the direction the arrow was pointing in. The more I concentrate, the more my brain hurts. I realise I’m lost. Well, I’ll just follow my nose.

  After a time I see three of the hospital staff walking along in front of me. They are chatting and laughing, having a good time. I like their energy, so I follow them. We end up in a canteen and they sit down. It occurs to me that a coffee would be good.

  As I look around, it strikes me that everyone here is hospital staff. Almost all have lanyards with photo ID tags hanging around their necks. They favour the booths; the large open area near the windows, with tables and chairs, is sparsely populated. That’s where I’ll sit. I stand in line to order my coffee, trying to look like I do this all the time. I’m not sure I’m meant to be here.

  I sip the coffee by a window. I don’t think it’s very good, but I enjoy it. I watch the staff. They sit in their groups of colour: the blues, the turquoises, the whites. Some are also in regular clothes. They laugh and throw their arms around, telling stories over their sandwiches and hot food. It’s like a party; they’re more alive here than in the wards and corridors. Suddenly I have that feeling again: I’m not sure this is real. It’s a little unsettling, now. But I’ll act as if it is real, to be on the safe side.

  After a while, I realise I should head back for lunch. Before I left my room, I wrote down the letter and number of my ward. On my way back, the signs are easier to follow, and by asking staff for directions once or twice, I find my way ‘home’.

  A nurse tells me I can be discharged that night, once they have the paperwork done. Doctor Banister hasn’t been in to see me yet; I wonder if he will.

  No other doctors come by that afternoon.

  In the evening, Anna and our youngest daughter, Amelia, turn up. It’s lovely to see them. Amelia, who is eight, gives me her bashful smile. She’s keen to check out my bed and drink my milk from the little blue containers.

  I’m puzzled by how quickly yesterday went. Anna says we arrived at the hospital about eight in the morning and she left at four in the afternoon. She came back around six, after the hospital had called and told her that I was trying to leave. She brought with her a change of clothes and a toothbrush. Yet I have no memory of her coming back. I tell her that yesterday seemed only an hour long.

  Amelia and Anna are keen to watch the semifinal of a reality cooking show our family’s been following. We snuggle into my bed, propping ourselves up with pillows, and look at the television hanging from the ceiling.

  ‘I’ve worked out what today is,’ I say, pleased with myself. Earlier I’d seen a newspaper lying around and caught sight of the date, and I’d been rehearsing the information ever since.

  ‘What?’ Anna says.

  ‘It’s your birthday, isn’t it?’

  She nods.

  ‘Happy birthday, darling. We’ll do something when I get out.’

  She smiles faintly.

  IT’S DARK WHEN we arrive home. The house is quiet and cool. Amelia goes straight to bed. The other two kids are away. With cups of hot Ecco, Anna and I sit down at the dining-room table
.

  ‘What happened yesterday?’ I ask her.

  ‘I got up in the morning, and you were wandering around the house. You had your business jacket on — that’s the first thing I thought strange. And you asked, in a sort of dreamy monotone, “Anna, what am I supposed to be doing?” I said, “You’re taking Emma and her friend Tina to camp after breakfast.” A few minutes later, you asked me the same question. You were white and your skin was icy. I sat you down at the table with a heat pack around your neck.’

  ‘I don’t know if it was a dream,’ I say, ‘but were we in the Tarago and I … vomited? Does that make sense?’

  ‘Yes. I wanted to get you to hospital straightaway. On the road to Lismore, you let down the window and almost threw yourself out while you vomited. We were doing one hundred kilometres an hour. I grabbed your shirt. I think you would’ve ended up on the road if I hadn’t.’

  I’m amazed.

  IT’S LATE. THE only sound in the house is Anna as she goes about doing things. I settle into bed, into the silence, with the darkness closing around me. My body lets go, muscle by muscle, and sinks into the mattress.

  Then, the pieces of the puzzle begin to join and a picture emerges: I’ve finally lost it. I’ve had a mental breakdown.

  BEFORE

  1

  JUST OVER THREE years earlier, in May 2006, I had turned up to the local outdoor swimming pool on a regular Monday. I came after work each Monday and Wednesday, for the adults’ swim squad.

  The complex, comprising a fifty-metre pool and a toddler pool, plus a spectator stand, picnic tables, and a lawn, sat on the land’s edge, with only a strip of car park between it and a seawall of rocks, which spilled onto the sand. A salmon-coloured sunset had already begun. At this time of year, it would grow in size and intensity during the swimming session, and arch over us so that we could look up at it — as we always did, grateful to live in such a beautiful place.

  We were a group of varying swimming ability, having in common the desire to stay fit: a fifty–fifty mix of men and women, most over thirty years old; teachers, health professionals, businesspeople, retirees. If we didn’t do this together, the invisible string that pulled us to these sessions would be gone, and we’d lapse into our individual, lackadaisical swimming efforts.

  The session began with warm-up laps. After that, we stood in the shallow end, bantering with our coach, our faces turned up to him — trying to delay his next set of instructions, to give our bodies a break and allow our breathing to ease. We still had the hard work ahead of us. The squad lasted an hour, and we regularly did 2.5 kilometres, pushed to make times and distances beyond anything we’d achieve on our own. I liked this. And I liked being told what to do, not to have to think: a contrast to my workday.

  Twelve years earlier, at the age of thirty-six, I had started in private practice as a clinical psychologist in Sydney. It was a stark difference from being employed: no morning and afternoon tea breaks, no collegial chats or regular meetings. I was on my own, and I had to make it work financially. Making it work meant seeing one client after another, writing report after report, all day. I also wanted to prove to myself that I could do what my training and experience had prepared me for, without a superior looking over my shoulder and without the smothering bureaucracy of the health and corrective-services departments I had worked for previously.

  Private practice meant doing the unfamiliar: signing an office lease, paying for secretarial support and marketing, business networking. It also meant versatility: offering a range of psychological services, some of which drew on knowledge I had not used since my training. I put in five to six days a week getting the practice established, this schedule only easing after Anna and I had our first daughter, Ashley.

  One thing I hadn’t anticipated needing to learn was how to change mental gears: to go from a work mindset to being an ordinary bloke, a husband and a father. When I walked through the door each evening, I was still mentally and emotionally with my clients. But eventually I worked out a routine: after calling out ‘I’m home’, I’d change out of my suit and tie into casual clothes, and lie on the bed with my eyes closed for twenty minutes. After this, I was able to walk into the domestic reaches of our house as a husband and a father, the mental-health professional’s uniform left hanging in the wardrobe.

  After Ashley was born, we settled in a small country town fifteen minutes’ drive to the beach. It was two hours from Anna’s family: close but not too close. We had sought a less congested life, a place near the coast with a strong sense of community — somewhere safe to raise our daughter and the other children we hoped would come along. We were both confident that we could make a go of it. I completed locums with the local-area health service before deciding to set up again in private practice. But this time, I did it with two colleagues; I didn’t want to be on my own.

  So, as I swam in my lane that Monday evening, feeling the draw of the current from the swimmer before me, I could sense my mind unshackling from the mental fetters of the day. The physicality of swimming drew my concentration to each stroke, each breath, and to becoming synched with my body’s rhythm.

  After the session was over, we shared a few jokes to the background rhythms of the djembe drummers on the seawall before splintering off. I walked back to my car with Ian, my work colleague, catching up on news before we each headed home.

  As I drove, I had hunger in my belly. I was fatigued but buzzing, my mind unclenched. I was ready for home.

  THE NEXT MORNING, the routine began again. I was running late. Before I left the house, I pulled out the client files I would need that day. I was due to see an ex-nurse who suffered from chronic pain, sustained after an injury at her hospital. I liked working with her because managing chronic pain required addressing the mind and the body; it was an area in which relaxation therapy and hypnotherapy, methods I enjoyed using, were helpful.

  I’d also taken up neuropsychological testing again, having done little since my practice in Sydney. I liked the intellectual challenge of these complex assessments. They required less emotional involvement — something, I’d noticed recently, I was drawing away from. Today I would need to read through the extensive reports for a young man who had suffered a brain injury following a high-speed car accident, in preparation for testing him on Wednesday. I’d also be finalising a report on a social worker; she had been stabbed by a mother whose children had been taken away from her. After several unsuccessful attempts to return to work, she was now seeking financial compensation.

  When I arrived at the office, there was the usual bustle in reception. Elaine, the practice manager, was presiding over the arrival of clients and patients in her coaxing and cheerful way. In the tearoom, the kettle had already boiled for the day’s first cups of tea. This was where the three partners in our practice — Ian, general psychiatrist; Peter, child and adolescent psychologist; and me, clinical and forensic psychologist — gathered each morning.

  Tuesday was Ian’s day for seeing patients for medication and psychiatric review. His turnover was high; he would see individuals for fifteen to thirty minutes for most of the day, generating by far the most coming-and-going among the three of us. His patients ranged from the manifestly normal to the eccentric, and, sometimes, the definitely odd.

  Pete’s office was next to mine. He worked with troubled adolescents and their foster carers. Every now and then I would hear muffled voices arguing, and Pete, in his low, calm tones, soothing them.

  Although it was sunny, with the cool of the autumn nights it was cold inside my consulting room. Otherwise, everything was as usual: two green Ikea tub chairs; a glass-topped coffee table with a box of tissues and a Balinese statue; the grubby whiteboard on the wall to my left; and the writing desk and filing cabinet below the window. Our neighbouring property was a nursing home. Today, the pleading, high-pitched cry of ‘Nurse, nurse’ — it was only ever this word
— had not yet started up. It came from what I imagined was a female resident with dementia, her shrunken world just metres away. Her cries usually reached a crescendo until finally (I surmised) she got a response, and all went quiet.

  I typically saw a mix of psychotherapy clients, for one-hour sessions, and individuals for forensic assessments, which took ninety minutes. My first appointment this morning was with a woman in her late thirties.

  Rachel had a hangdog look: long black hair without sheen hung by her face, and her eyes seemed to say, ‘I don’t want to be here, doing this.’ She was applying for victim’s compensation, and had most likely told her story many times to others. I’d read through an extensive file of documents in preparation for the assessment.

  At first she was reluctant to answer my questions, but once she got going, she couldn’t seem to stop. She told me how, as a child, she’d been minded by a trusted member of her small seaside community one day a week, and each time he had sexually abused her. She had accepted it as normal. This went on for years.

  As she spoke, I imagined a blond brick building and saw a genial family man in his forties, with a ruddy face and a slight paunch. He was a friend of her uncle’s, with whom she lived, her mother having deserted her and her father dead. Rachel later learnt that her uncle was aware of the abuse and condoned it.

  I noticed sensations of disgust germinating in my body.

  She said that she was not allowed to play with other children. And although her schoolteachers had suspicions that something was not right at home, they took no action.

  Was that a pain in my heart? No, I must have been imagining it.

  She told me that she would run away from home, returning when she became hungry. The punishments — emotional and physical — administered by her uncle became progressively more gruesome. As her story became more graphic, I was drawn into her world, as if I was there with her, watching in horror. The stabs of pain in my heart became more insistent; I wasn’t imagining them. I didn’t think it was a heart attack but something else, like an emotional wounding; her words were playing with my insides like a bull tossing a matador. ‘Stop, stop!’ I wanted to shout. But I couldn’t stop her; she’d been let down by too many people in the past.