Chapter 5 (abridged)
A Year Terminal
2002/2003 was the year from hell,
yet as with so many of the bad things that have been outlined in this book
there were also moments of positivity that I can never forget.
One of the strange effects of being
“dead” for twenty minutes was that the brain damage caused from lack of oxygen
manifested itself in some strange ways that are still making themselves known
to me to this current day. For the first three months my right arm and shoulder
were paralysed and would simply hang at my side. However when something
substantial was placed in my hand such as a ball my arm would come to “life”
and work. At the time it was a mystery to both my physio who just plain called
me weird and the clinical neuropsychologist who couldn’t figure it out.
I later found out that whilst the
brain does not repair damaged tissue it does have the ability to find other
“pathways” to get the message out to other parts of the body. In my case to
simply move my arm. After 3 months I regained movement in my arm with out
having to have something in my hand.
Unfortunately as I indicated
earlier there were and are other effects from hypoxic brain injury. For the
first few years my well known ability to pull statistics out of the air whether
they are movie box offices, music chart performances or sporting results was
virtually left untouched. As the years have passed my ability to access these
things has grown slower and slower to the point where I started to notice it
was affecting my performance as an on-air anchor and analyst on my beloved
sports radio show.
I also found out pretty much
immediately during my recovery that I had what was simply called a “tracking”
problem. Put simply if I am in a conversation sometimes if I stray too far away
from the point I was trying to make I will not be able to get back “on point”
as I cannot remember where I was in the conversation. The bad thing about this
is I will often realise this is occurring while I am talking and know that I
cannot dig myself out of that situation. As you might imagine this is
absolutely terrifying if I am on the air and in the middle of an interview.
Luckily it has only happened a couple of times on-air and I managed to hide it
well. More on that later.
I spent the first two months of my
recovery in Townsville at my mother’s place waiting for the go ahead to drive
again.
My employer in Brisbane for want of a better phrase pretty much abandoned me. The boss didn't bother to keep in touch and my company car was taken from me as soon as i arrived back in Brisbane after i flew in. a person's quality of character is most at test when times are bad. unfortunately to this day i am yet to receive a call to see how i am going.
I was able to get home to Brisbane
just in time to see my beloved Springwood Football Club make the grand final in
both grades. We won both premierships in 2002 and after having been manager of
those teams for a number of years and held committee positions and the
vice-presidency of the club it meant everything to see the boys have a great
year.
That day was also a day I will
never forget due to the actions of an exceptional young man by the name of
Mitchell Cameron. The Springwood Football Club reserves had won the Grand
Final. The final siren had just sounded and the boys were in ecstasy
celebrating a great win. As they started to make their way over to our supporters,
some of the players led by Mitchell came over towards where I was sitting. I
had been sitting next to Mitchell’s mother Linda and my dear friend Stewart
Manning’s wife Kelly.
Bear in mind at this stage I wasn’t
doing so well. Despite the weather that day being fine and a little warm in the
sun I was rugged up like it was a winter’s day. My skin was grey and cold due
to lack of heart function and circulation. To say I looked like “death” that
day was an understatement and the truth was I wasn’t well but I didn’t want to
miss the boys playing in a grand final. There was a realistic probability it
would be my last.
Mitchell and the boys ran over and
jumped the fence. Naturally I thought he was coming to celebrate with his
mother but to my surprise he stopped in front of me and grabbed my face. He
looked into my eyes and said “we did it for you yogi!” Yogi was a nickname
given to me by Neville Shaw and Andy Colenso who were both ex Collingwood
Football Club players who had become involved with Springwood a few years
earlier. Never had the nickname meant more to me than at that moment as
Mitchell hugged out the little breath I had in my lungs at the time. For the
first time since Rosa the nurse at Townsville General Hospital said those
perfect words to me while I was having my second major heart attack I
completely broke down in tears.
I looked at his mother with tears
streaming down my face and all I could say was “he’s a good boy Linda he’s a
good boy”.
After the heart attacks I was in a
period of medical limbo through the rest of 2002. For some inexplicable reason
that baffled my GP and pretty much every medical professional that I spoke to
at the time my file seemed to have been put on the backburner at Logan Hospital,
a hospital with a rightfully at the time poor reputation between Brisbane and the Gold Coast.
What could not be understood was
why someone as young as me with two major heart attacks in my history and a
heart function that was steadily heading down hill did not seem to have major
red flags all over my files. I later found out that after a couple of months of
procrastination that the doctors involved simply had no idea, got scared and
finally wrote a letter to the Queensland Heart Failure Unit at The Prince
Charles Hospital in Brisbane. Needless to say this should have been done from
day one.
With my health fading I was finally
asked to come into the Queensland Heart Failure and Transplant Unit. From the
moment I arrived I new there was something very different about this place
compared to other hospitals. After the genuine fear that I felt at having to
deal with Logan Hospital and their procrastination over my case The Prince
Charles Hospital in Brisbane was a revelation. There were minimal waits for outpatients’
appointments, staff were fully accessible to answer questions and a general
feeling of safety and comfort existed that I had never experienced in a public
hospital before. Unfortunately at the time of writing (May 2015) I no longer
necessarily feel this way.
November 2002 was a very different
time however and under the leadership of Dr Andrew Galbraith the Heart Failure
and Transplant Unit always felt like a safe place to be even with the
occasional hiccup when certain medical professionals would have an extreme
attack of arrogance and ego.
From the moment I was admitted both
Dr Andrew Galbraith and Dr Deborah Meyers could see I was in big trouble.
After a number of tests it was
decided to have an angiogram. As it was a standard cardiac procedure involving
the placement of a cardiac catheter into the right Femoral artery and I already
had two stents placed in my blocked arteries from the initial heart attacks I
wasn’t worried. It is a routine procedure after all done under local
anaesthetic.
I had the procedure a couple of
days before Christmas and was told I could go home for Christmas but would need
to come back on New Years Eve for more tests and procedures. At this stage I
had had a Super Ventricular Tachycardia attack during a procedure and peaked at
263 beats per minute before the defibrillator zapped me back into rhythm. My
pulmonary blood pressure was also high which meant we were looking at a
probable heart and double lung transplant. An easier operation for the surgeon
to perform than a straight heart transplant but also with a 20 percent higher
mortality rate for the patient. Let’s face it a heart and both your lungs is a
big chunk of your body to go pulling out and replacing. Thankfully my pulmonary
pressures came down enough over the next few months for me to just scrape in
for a heart transplant.
But I digress, as it turns out the
Angiogram that I had around Christmas 2002 did not heal. Turns out my right
femoral artery was slowly bleeding and my right inner thigh was turning black
over a period of a few days. If it wasn’t fixed immediately I would lose my
right leg. My right leg had copped an awful lot that year.
I was placed in the hands of Dr
Richard Slaughter and yes that really is his name. The hospital had just got
its hands on a new full colour ultrasound machine that I was told was full of
bells and whistles. Whatever that meant. It was decided to try something
different. Rather than put me under the knife again and have vascular surgery
on the artery it was decided to try a different procedure.
I would in a reclining position
under local anaesthetic have a blood clotting fluid injected next to the
opening in the artery. The syringe would be guided deep into my leg with this
new ultrasound machine. As I sat there prone for all the students standing around
to see we all had our fingers crossed that this would work. After the procedure
we had to wait until the next morning for a scan to show that the bleeding had
stopped. Thank goodness it worked and it was a hell of a way to bring in new
year 2003.
2003 was to be the most eventful
year of all as it was the year I received the transplant.
In January not long after going
home from hospital I was staying at my friend Stewart’s house in Brisbane and
started to get some chest pain. I took my letter of medical stuff explaining
everything including medications to him as he was doing stuff in another room.
I explained it was just in case as I was in a little pain. I went back out to
watch some television. David Gilmour in concert was playing on the TV. I always
thought Pink Floyd was supposed to be relaxing but it didn’t help this time. I
calmly picked up the phone and called the ambulance. As they arrived Stew came
out of his room with one of those WTF! Looks on his face. One of the ambos took
a look at my letter and said “you’re special aren’t you”. She then asked if she
could get a copy for a case study she was doing. It wasn’t the last time I
would be asked this.
So off to hospital I went. Yep you
guessed it Logan Hospital. This time I met a good young doctor. Lets call him
Anton. Anton decided to take an interest in my case and spent quite a bit more
time with me than what I have experienced in my many frequents trips to
accident and emergency. Anton ordered all the usual tests including troponin
levels which usually indicate heart attack or not. Turns out I was having a
third heart attack this one minor. After going through my history he came back
and we had a wonderfully frank conversation where he basically confirmed I was
cactus and would need at least a heart transplant. This was something that his
superiors could not figure out. I also found out later on in the year that the
cardiac doctors were talking heart transplant as early as just after the
initial heart attacks in Townsville.
Unfortunately the procrastination
and refusal at Logan Hospital to make a decision and contact the heart failure
unit at Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbane could have been fatal. Every
medical professional I spoke to at the time was mystified at the lack of
decision making. Thank goodness there are good doctors out there that actually
care. Young Anton was one of them.
Thankfully I was transported to
Prince Charles Hospital and after a heap of tests almost all involving some
form of being cut open plus the usual bucket of blood it was decided to put me
on the heart transplant waiting list as my pulmonary blood pressures had
reduced enough for me not to need a set of lungs as well.
So I eventually went home and spent
the next few months fading away with many visits to hospital to get things back
in balance while my body was slowly dying. A number of the drugs were knocking
me around terribly and I managed to somehow get every side effect imaginable.
The ones I hated the most were the ones that sent my blood pressure through the
floor. Wanting to faint 5 minutes after you take a drug is no fun. It’s even
less fun when you try to convince a young arrogant fool masquerading as a
doctor to stop insisting you take it when there are other drugs that can be
used as an alternative.
A few weeks before my heart
transplant I was seriously fading. The hospital trips became more frequent to
“tune me up” and it was obvious the end was getting closer. My skin was getting
greyer and I was now looking at “organising my affairs”.
One Saturday morning after coming
off the air I was feeling even worse than normal as I was carrying an awful lot
of fluid. I rang the hospital from the radio station car park and was advised
to take a higher dosage of Frusemide which is a commonly used diuretic or “fluid
tablet” in cardiac medicine. By Monday
morning I was feeling odd. I was scheduled to go into Prince Charles hospital
for a heart failure clinic appointment that morning anyway.
I drove down the Gateway motorway
in Brisbane
which is the main freeway in that city bypassing a lot of the urban sprawl to
the west to connect with the Gold Coast.
I started to get very bright vision
almost to the point of being snow-blind so I pulled over had some sprays of my
nitrolingual spray to ease my angina pain which by this stage was a many times
daily affair and took a few minutes to settle down. I was about to call an
ambulance but thank goodness I settled down and got rolling again towards the
hospital. A good thing too as I have no idea what would have happened to my car
anyway.
I finally arrived at Prince Charles
Hospital and started to make my way through “breezes”
the hospital’s café. At the front door were a number of nurses I had come to
know quite well. They were manning a stall checking peoples blood pressure for
a heart health promotion. They took one look at me and told me to sit down.
They immediately called for a wheelchair and were on the phone to the heart
failure unit. It was decided to take me straight to clinic and they could
assess me there. I was fading rapidly.
They asked me to stand up to check
my weight but I couldn’t, I was stuck. There was little pain, just my legs
refusing to do what my brain was telling them to do. The truth was I was dying
right in front of their eyes.
My kidneys had decided to
completely stop working and I was fading away by the minute. Rather than carry
on with the clinic they tried to get blood out of me so I was wheeled to the
vampires room. By this stage I was in real trouble. There was little pain just
a worsening feeling of being ill. I was writhing in the chair at this stage as
I had dried right out. My kidneys were in total failure and I just asked the
blood collector to punch me in the jaw. Just hit me hard in the jaw and knock
me out I said. It was the worst feeling I had ever felt. I can deal with
agonising pain it comes with the territory but this was different. I was
literally dying in front of them and they had to do something.
I was rushed upstairs to the ward
and they managed to get an I.V. drip into me and pumped a heap of saline into
me as fast as they could. Luckily this process got everything kick started
again thank goodness and a couple of hours later after being rehydrated everything
was working again. Wasn’t relishing the thought of dialysis on top of
everything else I was going through.
Later that night my American
cardiologist Deborah Meyers came in to see how I was doing. Now to say Deborah
was a lovely sight for sore eyes was an understatement. She wasn’t hard to look
at at all. I was half asleep when I felt gentle hands slowly rubbing over my
stomach and chest. Needless to say I awoke with a smile on my face as she
pinched the skin on the back of hand as well. Turned out this was a perfectly
normal medical test to see how dry my skin still was. She was trying to see if
I was fully hydrated back to normal. Ah well the silly dreams of the sick and
infirmed.
Jokes aside this huge incident was
an obvious example that the end was near as my organs started to find it harder
and harder to do their jobs. I was dying at a more rapid rate and if a donor
heart wasn’t fount soon it was all over.
There were other incidents and a
couple of false alarms over the coming weeks and then one night in June the
call came. I cannot put the date in this book due to anonymity laws here in
Queensland, Australia and this is made worse by my on air public profile.
Every one of my plans for a lift to
the hospital fell through that night. It was uncanny so I jumped in the car and
bolted to the Prince
Charles Hospital
observing the speed limit of course (wink). Adrenaline somehow allowed me to
lift a heavy bag out of my car and almost run into accident and emergency only
to find that everyone that I wanted to be there plus one I didn’t had turned
up. A lot of words were spoken and tears were shed while I was being prepped
for surgery. There was bright red blood everywhere as my wrists were tapped
like kegs only somebody forgot to let the local anaesthetic work first. I was
like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre only it was real blood and boy did it contrast
on the perfectly white sheets.
At this point I asked everyone to
leave the room so I could talk to my friend Stewart. I could see the look on
his face was one of fear. Was this the last time we would talk. The probability
was high. I gave him my will and told him a couple of things I wanted organised
if I didn’t make it as well as delivery of a letter to my ex fiancé the
contents of which aren’t important now.
I told him that I loved him like
the brother I never had, we hugged and called the nurses back in.
The moment had arrived…………………..
