How I Rescued My Brain Read online

  By now, thirty minutes into our interview, she was enlivened, describing one incident after another; they burst forth like spray from a water main. She described more heartbreaking incidents that occurred in her teenage years. Bad luck seemed to follow her wherever she ended up.

  It was two and a half hours before we were done and she left. I had enough for my report; I wouldn’t need to see her again. As she walked out the door, I wondered how she would fare. I got the impression that she didn’t realise how heavily her past weighed upon her.

  That night, I dreamt of my three daughters going through the ordeals that Rachel had faced, and imagined other bad things happening to them. I woke in fright and sat up in bed. It’s not really happening, I told myself. You’re at home. It’s 2006. The girls are safe in bed. You’re dreaming it.

  Was Rachel’s story the worst case of childhood abuse I had come across? Maybe. But I’d heard so many bad stories over twenty years. How could I say which was the worst?

  Something hadn’t been right with me since the summer holidays in January. I hadn’t bounced back after Christmas with my usual enthusiasm for work. Now I wondered if my physical response to Rachel’s story was telling me something.

  MY REGULAR YOGA teacher, Flo, was hosting a weeklong yoga retreat in June. I decided to go. If I took some time out, I might find some answers to my malaise.

  The retreat was held in an elevated wooden house nestled in rainforest, with an airy yoga space. After the first morning’s yoga session, we all sat in a circle on the floor and spoke about why we had come. The themes were similar: stress, worry, grief, wanting to slow down, physical illness.

  Flo took us through a long hatha yoga session, after which we had two hours’ free time over lunch. In the afternoon, she guided us in a relaxation exercise that took us through every part of the body. This was yoga nidra, she told us. It was followed by a shorter hatha yoga session. In the evening, she guided us in a sitting meditation.

  This routine continued, and as the days progressed, I felt a sense of lightness, the kind I hadn’t had in a long time, as if a heavy blanket had been lifted off me. My old self began to return as I bantered with the others. The daily routine calmed me and brought my mind’s eye into my body, where I saw soreness and fatigue. When images of clients inserted themselves into my mind, I noticed how the calm scattered.

  On the fourth morning, I awoke with a clear thought: Work is making me sick. I knew that I had to stop. I needed to take a long break: recuperate, refresh, exercise, sleep — do all the things I advised my clients to do. I told the morning circle of my resolve and got nods of approval.

  On the last night of the retreat, I was woken by severe cramps. Hoping to walk the pain away, I got up and went along the gravel road, which was illuminated by moonlight. I had been getting these pains in my abdomen intermittently for almost a year, and they seemed to be getting worse, and more frequent. My GP had conducted blood tests, but they had come back normal. I’d consulted a gastroenterologist, but his investigations had revealed nothing. I’d tried to work out what triggered the cramps — certain foods or activities, alcohol — but nothing was consistent. I was healthy, medically speaking, and yet my body was saying the opposite.

  Finally, I woke one of the women and asked if she had medication for stomach cramps. She did, and with the early glow of the morning showing, I got some rest.

  Yes, I had to stop; something was not right.

  After the retreat, I began to refer on new clients. I made December the deadline to close my practice for six months.

  2

  THE NEXT MONTH, June, we took a family holiday amid the mountains in Lamington National Park, on the Queensland border — our favourite park. On the third day, after a long walk, we washed away the mud, went into the library at the guesthouse, and sat by an open fire, playing games and drinking tea, before dinner.

  Then my phone rang. It was my sister. ‘Dad’s been taken to hospital. The nurse came and found him in bed, unable to get up.’

  Dad hadn’t called us the previous Sunday evening, as he usually did. I hadn’t worried: sometimes he didn’t ‘get around to it’ because of the time it took him to complete his daily routine, or because he’d been to a meeting for some political cause he was involved with. These calls had become exasperating, what with his increasing hearing loss. We’d shout down the line, but he couldn’t decipher most of what we said. Yet just hearing our voices was reassuring for him, I thought.

  ‘Don’t cut short your holiday,’ my sister said. ‘I’ll let you know if you need to come down.’

  This was a relief. Still, I felt uneasy. Dad didn’t give much away about his health.

  By the time we got home two days later, Dad had undergone medical tests. ‘You should come quickly. The doctors don’t think he’s got long to live,’ my sister told me.

  As I flew to Sydney, I thought of how Dad’s body had, over time, shrunk around him like a prune. As a young man he had been five foot ten, but now I, at five foot eight, felt tall next to him. His knees had progressively glued up with rheumatism, becoming swollen, giving him a straight-legged gait. With two walking sticks and his body bent at the hips, he looked like a giant four-legged insect as he perambulated out of his front gate. Yet for ninety-one, his face was ridiculously boyish. Blackberry lips framed a mouth that was always ready to smile, and his olive skin was remarkably free from sun damage. The wrinkles crowding his face pointed to the warmth of his eyes. He retained a good head of grey-streaked black hair, with two wavy inlets of baldness on his forehead.

  I arrived at the massive metropolitan hospital, which had opened when I was in my twenties. Now it looked weary, as if put to more use than was promised at the opening. I walked through the entrance into a foyer. The name and number of Dad’s ward was on a piece of paper in my hand. I turned right into a wide corridor, which, like a train line, conveyed its passengers to the inner quarters of this medical city. The colour had gone from the carpet, except at the very edges, where it met the walls. There, azure could be seen: the pattern must have resembled a sparkling sea once.

  I threaded my way through couples and families, some of them almost festive. On my left were a newsagency, a bank, and a hot-food outlet that emitted warm, fatty smells. A stall burst with tight bunches of flowers and metallic, heart-shaped balloons that announced ‘It’s a boy!’ or ‘It’s a girl!’

  Then the corridor narrowed. The lighting became subdued, as in a church; I had to be getting close. The carpet went, replaced by sanitised linoleum that curved up the walls, taking away the corners. Trolleys, wheelchairs, and shiny implements grew in number. I passed a tray of bedpans and urinal bottles, sitting there as if enjoying a breather before their next assignments. On my right were vending machines hoarding sweets, drinks, and chocolates — these comfort foods absurd in the face of Dad’s approaching death.

  Most of those walking by me were uniformed staff, feet tapping as they moved quickly, looking straight ahead, their minds perhaps curling around decisions they had made or would make. There was an eruption of laughter as I passed by a nurses’ station, where nurses and doctors had congregated under a halo of lights. I was in an alien world, and my father was dying.

  ‘Dad,’ I said, as I entered his room. The top half of his bed was raised so that he was semi-reclined. He was the only one in this windowless space. There was no softness here: no jumper carelessly draped over the back of a chair, no picture crooked on the wall, no newspaper half-pushed into the top drawer. The starched bedsheet bunched like a Himalayan range around his chest. A thin cotton blanket covered his legs. The only colours were white, the gleaming grey of steel, and cream. It was an antiseptic desert.

  A cable connected Dad to a rectangular box hanging off a pole. It flashed green lines that reflected some aspect of his wellbeing. His eyelids were half-closed, his mouth had sagged, and his head appeared oversi
zed — he’d lost weight.

  At the sound of my voice his eyes opened lazily, and then he gave a half-smile. ‘Ah, Dave,’ he said in a weak, otherworldly voice. I went over, clasped his hand, and pressed my forehead against the side of his head. He looked confused rather than scared. We stayed like this for a while, and he seemed to hum with pleasure.

  I had been trained in grief counselling many years earlier, before I’d had much to mourn. We’d learnt that grief was a natural, individual process and that the most helpful thing was to avoid any predetermined ideas of how those who were grieving or dying should act. I’d seen differing reactions before: relatives who felt compelled to cheer up the dying one, offering comments such as, ‘Well, it’s a nice room, isn’t it?’ or ‘You’re looking more perky today’ — trying to keep their anxiety, their uncomfortableness, from spilling over. Dad would have seen through such behaviour even if I could have managed it, and then he’d want to comfort me.

  For the next seven days I came every day, staying at Dad’s house nearby. We often sat in a kind of stationary silence. Now and then, we talked. I was moved when Dad told me how fortunate he was to have me and my siblings, our partners, and his grandchildren. There was always an update on the environment petition he had been working on for years, and he let me know which politicians or activists had responded to his last round of letters. ‘How are Anna and the children? How’s my house?’ he’d ask.

  I didn’t say that Anna was at the ready to fly down with the kids as soon as I gave the word; that the house was a shambles, its corridors and rooms filled with the collected years of hoarded junk. Most of the community workers my siblings and I had tried to get to assist him had refused to come into the house, citing health and safety concerns. Once, we had organised a private meal service, scheduled to deliver a hot meal each day. After two deliveries, he told them that the meals were very nice but he could cook his own, thank you.

  I told him that the house was fine. Anna and the girls were well and thinking of him.

  Each day, when it felt like the sludge of my grief was going to suffocate me and the clinical feel of the room became too much, I said, ‘I’ll go now, Dad.’ He would simply smile and thank me for coming.

  DAD HAD BEEN admitted with angina. The doctors said that he was also weak from inadequate nutrition. A few days into his stay, my sister and two brothers had joined me for a meeting with the senior physician. ‘Your father has a very weak heart,’ he said. ‘It’s worn out and could give up on him at any moment. There is also something else making him sick; we don’t know what it is yet. If he ever recovers from this, he’ll need high-dependence care.’ He explained that this meant twenty-four-hour medical care: a nursing home. ‘Your father will never return home,’ was his summary statement.

  About a week later, doctors found that Dad had a cyst, and it was this that had been causing him increasing pain. They operated successfully. For several weeks it was touch-and-go, and I returned home. Eventually Dad regained his colour, and we began to think about moving him to a nursing home.

  But then Dad stopped eating. This became the new health crisis. I travelled back to the hospital, where a junior doctor spoke with me. Her inexperience was palpable, and I wondered how she would respond to the years of human suffering that lay ahead of her.

  ‘We think your father is depressed,’ she said.

  A decision was made to give Dad antidepressants.

  But for weeks there was no significant improvement: his weak heart and lack of eating stalled his recovery.

  After a month, and to our great surprise, the hospital told us he was to be discharged. How could this be? When I looked at his sunken chest, his birdlike shoulders, and his melon-sized head, I couldn’t reconcile him with the man of my youth. The father who had showed me how to use tools and make things, who could push a wheelbarrow and shovel dirt all day in the garden, his rolled sleeves revealing bulging veins. The father who, when we were very small, carried me on his shoulders, giving me instant height, and played ‘horsies’, as three of us at a time piled onto his back while he laboured on hands and knees, moving forward jerkily.

  I understood that the hospital could not let Dad take up a bed while he decided if he was going to eat. We were given two weeks to find a nursing home of our choice; otherwise, he would be deposited into the next available bed. My brother and sister found a place in an Anglican establishment. The staff appeared caring and the place looked well run, they said.

  A few days after he moved in, I visited him. His room was large, and he shared it with three elderly men. The one opposite him had no legs and lay in his bed unmoving, now and then vocalising incomprehensible sounds. Dad said that he could joke with the man diagonally opposite him, but, lowering his head, murmured that the next man along was a ‘sourpuss’ and wanted the air-conditioning up too high all the time. By Dad’s bed was a large window with a view of an expansive, tree-lined park where mothers pushed prams, and joggers, cyclists, and dogs all paraded.

  Now that he couldn’t go out, the world had come to him. I arranged for him to have ‘pocket money’ so that he could buy the little extras he wanted. The tables had turned.

  Dad started eating, began to write his letters again, and charmed the staff. I went back to my normal life, uneasy about how long this period of equanimity would last.

  THE AFTERNOON I returned home, I made my way to the beach: I needed to settle, and to regain perspective. I walked along the foreshore. European backpackers played hacky sack in small groups, while others knocked around a soccer ball, creating a carnival atmosphere. The surf lifted my mood.

  But the bay also offered its own moods. The beach was exposed to the northerly wind, which was at its most blustery in spring. It should have brought warmth from the tropics, but at this time of year, when the sea was at its coldest, it whipped off the water, turning it cold. It bullied the ocean swell, which hissed up in green walls of defiance, foam fuming from its peaks. It screeched onto the beach, throwing sand into the faces of the few determined souls that strode along, clothes flapping, their heads lowered in submission. It swept over the fence of the open-air swimming pool, sucking the warmth from the water. The children in the after-school swimming squads, when finally released from their chlorinated chamber, stood around the pool’s edge like shivering penguins, their towels draped around their shoulders.

  The seabirds that scouted from the sky, looking for schools of baitfish, didn’t like this wind: they couldn’t spot prey in these conditions. But the majestic Norfolk Island pines between the swimming pool and the surf club, with their crinkly trunks and symmetrical branches, danced. Energised, their limbs resonated with the bluster.

  After spring waned, the northerly reappeared at brief intervals in summer, this time as a hot, sticky wind. It pushed Portuguese man o’ war, or bluebottles, onto the beach. Sometimes swimmers would notice these opaque, air-filled bubbles floating on the water, with long, iridescent threads of poison hanging below, and most knew to avoid them. But when stung — and it often happened — adults groaned and washed the invisible barbs off their red welts under the freshwater showers; kids screamed in fright as much as in pain, and rushed towards their parents.

  For most of the year, the giant prism of the cape at the southernmost point of the bay headed off the southerly ocean swells. But in winter, the massive swells rumbled around the corner, growling into the bay with big-muscled bravado.

  The surfers loved them.

  The mighty tubes, spray spitting from their glassy peaks, became impregnated with black, stick-like figures on surfboards, and then collapsed like thunder. Tailfins shot into the air while bodies flayed and star-jumped into the water.

  Somehow, the shifting moods of the bay always soothed or elevated my own. I never understood quite how this worked, but it seemed that in the bay’s enormity, with the crescent of green that clung to its foreshore, I was always a
ccommodated.

  MY GRADUAL WITHDRAWAL from work was a relief. By that August, I was only coming into my practice once a month, to see a handful of long-term clients. But the nights were penetrated by bad dreams, and it took me up to an hour to get to sleep. The more I let go of work, the more I unravelled.

  I brought my old cricket bat into the bedroom, resting it by the bed, within arm’s reach. Although I’d never heard of anything bad happening in our neighbourhood, I feared that we might experience a home invasion. I especially feared for the safety of the girls and Anna. Anna said that I was overreacting.

  The kids’ noise and demands had become irritating. It was okay when they didn’t squabble, but they were ten, seven, and five — squabbles were inevitable. Sometimes I wished they’d go away. Anna prodded me to do things, and I wasn’t sure if she was being bossy or I was being slack. My energy for gardening disappeared — the weeds and wilting plants taunted me. I felt uncomfortable in crowds and didn’t like confined spaces. Other than my swimming, most things required too much effort. On weekends I sat for long periods on the verandah, reading the newspaper. I was drawn to articles about murders, disasters, and neglect of children, even as I was repulsed by the stories.

  Our family attended Nippers, a surf-lifesaving program for children, on Sunday mornings. But I was frustrated when the girls held back, fearful of going in the waves. I didn’t remember being afraid of the waves when I was young.

  What was happening to me? I was prickly, yet as fragile as porcelain. What I perceived as aggressive words from others frightened me. Watching the news, I had begun to cry at pictures showing human or animal distress, and even at sentimental, good-news stories. I had an idea I’d seen too much human suffering, especially trauma. But I wasn’t sure if that was the whole story. Images of Dad’s near-death and what might happen next sloshed around in my mind.