Confinement (1957-1958)
Richard is dreaming of the diving suit encasing his body as he harvests the vivid sea life under Sydney Harbour. He pulls on the line to get someone to bring him up with his haul of abalone.
And then he wakes. Sun streams into the tidy white bedroom of his Aunt Molly, head nurse at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. Richard is staying here during a break between his Merchant Marine service and re-entering the Royal Australian Navy.
He feels hot, very hot. All week he had felt like he was coming down with the flu, lethargic and heavy, but hoped a good night’s sleep would throw it off. He’d taken time to buy supplies in town and helped a woman struggling with many packages.
Richard feels thirsty. So thirsty. Aunt Molly has left a glass of water under the lamp on the white bedside table. Richard reaches out for the glass.
Nothing happens. Perhaps he isn’t fully awake? He tries again. His hand does not obey his mind.
‘This is crazy! I’m getting up…’
Zero.
His diver training cuts in. Don’t panic. Breathe. Think.
‘Moll…call an ambulance.’ he croaks.
‘This is going to be an adventure,’ he thinks as his eyes roll back into his head. Aunt Molly, the battle-hardened nurse, knows as they shut him into the ambulance. Polio. It looks bad. Not my Richard, my beautiful nephew.
~
The bumpy ambulance ride is excruciating for his inflamed limbs. Its wailing siren sears into his brain. Breathing eludes him. He’s barely conscious when he arrives at the Northfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, half an hour away.
‘Get him into an iron lung,’ demands the stern paramedic.
Sunday lunch is not a great time to swing into action at any hospital. The polio epidemic which had raged through Adelaide since the mid-1930s seems mostly over. The last case was four months ago. Most of the population are getting vaccinated against this paralysing virus.
The age-bracket for the immunisations is up to 18-year-olds, not quite to Richard’s 20. Not that he would have had it. Like many young men of any age, he is proud of his invincible body.
Two nurses look futilely for the key to the cupboard where the iron lungs have been parked. ‘The matron is the only one with the key,’ one admits.
‘Well, bloody well call her,’ the ambulance paramedic retorts. ‘This one isn’t going to live without it. Nurse, get over here and shine a torch into his eyes to keep him awake. Talk to him. Slap him if you need. Do not let him go to sleep. I’ve got to go to my next job.’
Calls to the matron go nowhere. Maybe she is out at Sunday lunch or on a hike or visiting a friend, but she isn’t at home. She is due back at 4pm.
A doctor is summoned and tries a lumbar puncture, horrific needles punching Richard’s spine with little success. By 2pm, Richard’s breathing is very laboured and staff are in panic mode.
Richard’s fever stays at 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Damage is happening as the polio virus eats through the nervous system in his spine which links his brain to his muscles. With each hour, it also begins to shut down his lungs.
‘Stay with me,’ pleads the young nurse, watching the minutes tick away. Richard’s head lolls. He is fading.
On the tick of 4pm, in walks the ward’s matron, perfectly white starched uniform, watch hanging down from her ample bosom, head decked with the distinctive matron’s hat. ‘What’s this? Why didn’t I know?’
A long hard look at the prostrate young man convinces her to rifle through her ring of keys. Summoning the second nurse, she races to the door where the vital equipment is mothballed.
‘Help me,’ she commands as they push aside the mops and supplies littering the front of this mostly disused cupboard. They roll a coffin-looking box on wheels over to a power source near Richard, so the motor at the end can operate bellows that suck air in and out.
The young nurse has never seen it in action. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘I’ll deal with this,’ says matron crisply. She opens the lid, quickly puts a fresh sheet on the mattress and nods, ‘Now, quick smart!’
The three women, long abandoned by the ambulance driver, use its stretcher sheet to lift Richard into the iron lung. Any touching of his limbs would further inflame affected nerves in his fevered state. ‘Now, close it’.
As the lid closes, the bellows begin their tireless work. Richard’s head, bathed in sweat, is positioned on the headrest. ‘Bring cold compresses.’ The matron has decades of experience with this disease. ‘We need to cool him’.
Oh, that sweet ability to breathe, once the hum of the machine starts up. Richard floats in and out of awareness. He is surprised he isn’t panicking. He can see another chap in an iron lung a few beds down from him in the large ward full of empty, neatly wrapped single beds.
His training kicks in once he realises the iron lung feels like being in a diving suit he wore in the Navy.
For two weeks, Richard is very sick, mostly sleeping. He dreads the twice daily ‘exercises’ where his arms and legs are bent and moved around. Each bend brings excruciating pain. There is no word for pain this intense, which he thinks akin to childbirth contractions.
Every move drives the pain of red-hot needles into his body. A doctor explains that polio inflames all of the nervous system, so they are stretching the nerve ends to stop his muscles clamping together.
Bevies of white-coated doctors mumble about him just out of his direct hearing. ‘Crippled...no hope…humour him’. What is happening?
In his fever, he is back in a cyclone off Mackay, wind shrieking like a banshee, the heavy ship loaded with molasses tossed around like a cork on the wild waves. The ship settles in the eerie green glow at the eye of the storm, as if he only imagined the storm. Calm, too calm. Easy to think the worst is over.
The waves begin again, their merciless pounding over the bow. Working to secure the ship, Richard has never been so afraid he would die, as it lists far to the horizon.
Richard’s parents, Morrie and Gwen, have driven down from the farm at Finniss to see him in Ward A-5, the dreaded ‘isolation’ ward. Morrie carries a letter that has just arrived for Richard. The embossed seal opens to the news that Richard’s application to join the Navy has been accepted, carrying a starting date to take up his commission in two weeks.
Morrie gazes at his son in the iron lung. ‘Well, Commander, it looks like that’s it for your life on ships. No pension for you, I’m afraid’.
His parents are the only visitors allowed, plus Aunt Molly, as she is well-known in medical circles. The Infectious Diseases Hospital is there for the purpose of isolation and quarantine. No one else ever visits.
Dr Cooling takes one look at this handsome young fellow and guesses there might be a few females who have been exposed to the virus. ‘Molly,’ he says on the side, ‘you’ll have to chase up any girls he’s been seeing and tell them. Make sure they took precautions.’
To her credit, Molly doesn’t mention this to her sister Gwen, Richard’s mum. She rifles through his things at her house and tries to remember the families he has mentioned.
In his fever, Richard feels captive in a medieval prison where extreme torture is being meted out on his joints. ‘It is for your own good,’ is one phrase that bores into his soul. Very much used to living life on his own terms, he seems to be subject to ongoing surveillance day and night, control mechanisms he cannot change.
The pain of the treatment, aptly called ‘manipulation’ to his mind, makes him feel like a lump of biology on which they are experimenting. They call him ‘patient’, something he does not feel.
The fever abates over three weeks and his limbs become less painful as the infectious polio virus begins to diminish. When he sends thoughts of moving to his limbs, nothing works. The otherwise fit twenty-year-old exists in a surreal, dark night of the soul.
They feed him through a tube in his nose. He tries to laugh when well-meaning nurses in pink uniforms ask him to think about his future. There would be no ‘cure’ for this degree of damage.
Once his fever is down, the physios fit open plasters on his legs and feet so that his limbs will not become deformed, even though they are withering. No one asks if he wants treatment or will accept it. To Richard, these infringements verge on psychological violence in the name of ‘helping’.
‘Therapy’ feels like ‘the rape’.
To make matters worse, they seem to want him to tug his forelock, metaphorically, and say ‘thank you’ each time they do something to him. He will not grovel with meek gratefulness for someone simply doing their job.
Time stretches out without hope, without life. Gazing up, only a crack on the ceiling to look at, he hears the bellows that keep both young men alive.Sensing that he is now left without a body that moves, Richard vows, I will keep my sense of self as a worthwhile person, not merely a ‘patient’ waiting for someone to help. I’ll give it a bloody good shot.