Chapter 4
Illness and Death
July 2001 was no fun. There were no
health problems at that stage that I was aware of other that the fact that I
was a ticking time bomb like so many in our community. Lets face it nobody goes
to their doctor and asks for an angiogram just to see how the plumbing is
going. There needs to be a reason.
I was doing morning calls out
Goodna way (a suburb of Brisbane,
Australia) and
had just finished calling on Civic Video Goodna when I took a call in my car.
My boss was on the phone and said he had the national sales manager and the
managing director with him and we needed to catch up immediately. At that stage
Paramount Home Entertainment was still working out its expenses after splitting
the long standing partnership with Universal Studios known as Cinema
International Corporation (CIC-Video).
Unfortunately I was being made
redundant. It was a tribute to my standing both in the company but also in the
industry that I was given a number of weeks to say my goodbyes to my clients on
what was a farewell tour of sorts. As much as I was grateful to be treated with
so much respect as so many before me in the industry hadn’t, I was shattered.
This was my dream job. I loved it and I had excelled in it. Indeed I had grown
up in this branch of the entertainment industry.
As far as payouts were concerned the company did only what
it was legally obliged to
do. It was an interesting exercise in what a company will do
to cut costs. Despite
being the top performing rep for most of my time in the company
and the car being
only recently purchased my expenses were huge. I was told
that I had similar
expenses to the managing director of the company which I
guess wasn’t that crazy to
hear given the size of my territory and the fact that I
actually got around and
physically saw almost all of it.
I travelled through country Queensland,
northern New South Wales and had quite a
few Brisbane
city accounts at that stage as well. In the early years of my career I also
covered the Northern
Territory from Tennant Creek north as well. All this
was done
by road. My yearly mileage could be anything from ninety
thousand kilometres to in
excess of one hundred and twenty
thousand kilometres depending on the year.
So I had to come to terms with it pretty
quickly as I needed another job. Like most I had a mortgage to pay and all the
usual bills so it needed to be quick. Luckily for me I finished with Paramount
Pictures and pretty much started straight away with a company called One Stop
Interactive.
One Stop Interactive were basically
resellers of electronic goods, computer games, consoles and peripherals. The
territory was basically the whole country and I was continually on the road. I
quite literally went to almost every city, town and hamlet in Queensland,
New South Wales and Victoria
with the occasional pop over the border into South Australia. I was doing what I truly
loved. I was constantly on the road. The hours were long, the mileage was huge
and I loved it. It was hard sometimes dangerous work but I thrived and as
always I achieved the results.
After gradually coming to grips
with the computer and gaming products after nearly two decades of memorizing
the Paramount Pictures and Universal Studios catalogues I was very comfortable
in my new role. Then September 11 2001 and the events of that day in New York happened.
Like most people in Australia I
arrived at work the next morning after being up all night watching television
and at one stage I thought the screen would go to fuzz and we would then see
the Australian equivalent to the emergency broadcast system. What had happened
was unimaginable in its scale and the first thing I thought was if they were
prepared to hit the Pentagon and there were rumours through the night that
Washington DC was to be hit then our joint facilities at Pine Gap and North
West Cape would be targets. Assuming this was some crazy precursor to world war
3.
Once it was established pretty
quickly they were terrorist attacks and the missiles weren’t coming it was back
to life as usual. I had a Retravision Victoria and Tasmania
trade show to travel to in Melbourne for Friday
14th and Saturday 15th so I needed to fly out of Brisbane on Thursday 13th
September. I could not have picked a worse time to jump on a plane.
Thursday September 13 2001 was also
the morning that Ansett Australia folded. Being a peak hour morning flight I
decided to get to Brisbane
Airport a couple of hours
early so I could have breakfast ahead of what was going to be a huge day. I was
booked on a Virgin flight to Melbourne
and after I had parked my car I went to the departure counter to check in only
to find a football stadium’s worth of people walking around angry and lost as
the staff of QANTAS, Jetstar and Virgin tried to help them out as Ansett was
grounded. It was obvious I was not going to get checked in time to go have
breakfast. It was not a good start to the trip as I was already spooked about
flying due to the events in New York
City.
When we finally boarded our flight I
sat in row 1 which on most Australian domestic flights is a sought after row
because it usually means at least business class. In the case of Virgin it was
a full economy plane so just the normal size seats but it did have extra leg
room being next to the door so I was pretty chuffed. As we taxied onto the
runway to take off the stewardess sat in front of us in the “jump seat”. She
smiled at me and the young lady sitting next to me who was clearly nervous
flying. As I reassured her, the stewardess reached up to a compartment above her
and grabbed a newspaper. This was not the smartest of moves as she didn’t look
at what was on the front page which was facing me and my fellow passenger.
You guessed it, a photo of the
second plane going into one of the towers. I looked left and saw the young lady
was staring at the page and I could feel this was going to be a problem so I discretely coughed to get the stewardesses attention and pointed at the page
with my eyes. She immediately turned the paper around and was embarrassed and
shocked at what she had been showing us for the past couple of minutes and very
sheepishly put the paper away. Then we calmed my fellow passenger and the rest
of the flight went well.
I arrived in Melbourne and got things organised for Friday
and managed to get a ticket to see my beloved Richmond Tigers play the Carlton
Blues in an Australian Football League Semi Final for the Saturday via a friend
of my boss at the time. Despite having been to State of Origin
Rugby League matches in Brisbane,
being at the Melbourne Cricket Ground that day with 84,000 fans of two of the
most bitter rivals in sport was extraordinary. The way everyone in the stadium
went completely silent to honour the dead from the terrorist attacks earlier in
the week was matched only by the annual ANZAC Day tribute at the same venue.
Australia really is the greatest
country on earth. We are a free nation with some of the greatest attractions on
earth. You get sick we treat you with the best doctors in the world. You fall
on your face financially we give you a hand up. You go to war and you are our
friend we will be the first country by your side no matter how small our
population. What other nation of only 19 million at the time could have pulled
off the greatest Olympics ever in 2000.
After the flight home to Brisbane from hell due to
the roughest turbulence I had experienced on a domestic flight I made it very
clear to my boss that I was happy to go anywhere he wanted me to, but I was
driving there. After the events of the previous week despite being an
experienced and regular flier I was completely rattled. To this day it still
affects me at take off and I much prefer to drive twenty hours to a destination
than fly two hours.
Things were going well in the new
job and my radio show was travelling beautifully on the Saturday morning
timeslot. As we entered the new year of 2002 I suspected things were going to
just get better and better. I was in a new job that I was thriving in and had
been able to spend Christmas with mum in my hometown of Townsville while at the
same time I was able to reconcile my high school sweetheart Dianne with one of
her best friends after they had stopped talking after a financial issue. I was
doing alright for the start of a new year.
One weekend late in January 2002 I
had stepped down a grade in cricket and agreed to help a team of young players
out. I wasn’t keen on captaining but I did take on the mentor/coaching role on
the field and was loving it. The players respected my role and my experience
and I was enjoying being appreciated. Things had been going really well. I was
scoring runs and my last bowling spell was 4 for 20 odd when our other bowlers
were getting hit around the field. I went home that night very proud of myself
and happy in the fact that even in my thirties I could still show the young
ones how to do it. That night was one of the hottest summer nights on record in
South East Queensland and I was freezing to the point of pulling out a doona
and yet I still could not stop shaking. I didn’t know what was happening.
The next day was a Sunday and I was
a mess. My right leg was starting to go red and the pain was increasing. I got
through the night and went straight to the doctor the next morning. He sent me
home with some drugs and said if it started to get worse call an ambulance.
Well you guessed it. It got worse
By the next morning I called my
doctor and said we needed to do the ambulance thing and I would like to go to Sunnybank Private Hospital as at the time I had private
health insurance. My doctor organised the transport so I wouldn’t be taken to
another hospital by mistake. By this stage my right leg was red, swollen and in
absolute agony. Turns out it was a very serious cellulitis infection the whole
back of my leg starting to ulcerate. It was so creepy it looked like my calf
was being eaten from the inside out. I was in hospital on all sorts of
intravenous medication for a bit over a week. The recovery took a good two
months and I was left with a huge “birth mark” on the back of my right leg to this
day.
After recovering from the infection
I started to get back out on the road again doing what I loved best. I was
effectively on the road for about 3 months straight only getting home halfway
through the trip to take care of the usual things like paying bills etc. This
trip effectively saw me travel through all of country New
South Wales, Victoria and I even
popped into Mount Gambier in South
Australia for a quick day trip.
After this trip I commenced what
was to be a month long trip throughout Queensland.
A couple of weeks into the trip I was feeling exhausted. I had been incredibly
tired during the previous few months and had fallen asleep whilst I was being
shown around the Gippsland region of Victoria
by a couple of dear friends. I had also commented to friends back home that I
was working myself into the ground at the time and I needed to do something
about it. At the time I was working huge hours, driving serious distances,
managing a football team at home and also somehow putting together a Saturday morning
sports radio programme in Brisbane.
Even though I was loving every minute of it, in anyone’s language it was
probably too much to continue doing long term.
Up to this point it had been
enjoyable to catch up with many of my old clients from the movie days as they
also carried computer games and consoles and that gave me a big head start in
building up new clientele for this business. Things were going well and on
Friday July 5 2002 I had the following week’s worth of calls in Far North
Queensland organised. Whilst I worked on the Saturday morning I had the rest of
the weekend to spend in my hometown of Townsville and most importantly to spend
that time with my Mum.
Sunday morning July 7 2002 I woke
up to mum leaving in an ambulance to head to Townsville General Hospital
with a heart scare. I couldn’t travel in with her as my stepfather Harry was in
the second stage of Alzheimer’s and was getting childlike when under stress so
I needed to look after him. Later in the
morning he was happy watching the TV so I thought I would take the opportunity
to get a nap in before getting ready for the trip north on Monday morning.
Around 2pm I woke up on mums
waterbed with massive pain in my back between my shoulder blades. At first I
thought my back just didn’t like the waterbed but very quickly I found out
something more serious was happening. I started to feel a pain that was like a
blunt object being slowly forced through my spine and into the front of my
chest. I picked up the phone and called triple zero (the Australian Emergency
call number).
The person who answered started to
ask a heap of questions so I cut them off as I could see I needed to get to the
end of the very long hallway and unlock the front door. Harry was frozen and
scared. He did not know what to do so I had to make sure he was looked after as
well. I told the operator that this was not a crank call as they had been there
that morning to pick my mum up and I had to leave the phone to open the front
door. I said “I think I’m having a heart attack please hurry up!”
The ambulance arrived in minutes
and the paramedics did their thing getting me into the vehicle. I told them
about Harry and they got on the radio and made sure there were people around
there quick to look after him. I started to go in and out of consciousness and
have difficulty remembering what happened on the trip to the hospital so some
of the rest of this chapter is from medical reports and what close friends told
me afterwards.
I was wheeled through the emergency
room doors at around 2:20pm and immediately went into cardiac arrest. The
paramedics immediately jumped on top of me and proceeded to administer CPR
while the medical staff proceeded to get ready to do what they needed to do. The
cardiologist on call that weekend was brought in and the doctors in emergency
proceeded to work on resuscitating me. The report says that I was dead for 20
minutes and it took 12 to 14 zaps at 350 joules and brilliant CPR to bring me
back. This was evident afterwards with my chest bruised and quite burnt from the whacks on the chest and the electric shocks. I would never be more happy to be beaten up.
Apparently I would normally have
been called dead at 10 minutes as the general rule of thumb was brain damage
usually occurring at 4 minutes and brain death at 10 minutes. Apparently they
kept going as I was young at 33 years of age and there were still signs of
brain activity. At the time the medical team reckon after 20 minutes they
stopped zapping me and I came back after that. They could not figure out how I
was alive in such a hot tropical climate and so long with my heart stopped.
They stabilised me and proceeded to
wheel me into the cardiac catheter suite so they could unblock my arteries and
stent the blocked vessels. They then placed me in an induced coma and gave me
an epidural so I wouldn’t move around in my sleep so to speak. This was done as
I had devices implanted near my heart via my femoral arteries to give my body
“a rest”. During the first night a close
family friend called my ex fiancé as I had been calling for her in my periods
of delirium and advised her as to what had happened and that I wasn’t expected
to make it through the night. The reaction from her was to tell him thank you
for telling her "I need to get to work now".
After a couple of days I made a
miraculous recovery and finally regained consciousness. At this stage nobody
knew how bad the brain damage would be. I had been dead for 20 minutes. So the
first thing I was asked was where I was. I answered by saying I was at the
“brand spanking new Townsville
General Hospital”
in a strange voice which concerned everyone at the time. As they talked to me
more they realised I was high as a kite on the morphine in my drip. To say I
was a modern medical miracle was the understatement of the year. Good people
and science performed the real miracle. There was brain damage as we would
realise later on but I was alive and functional and that is what mattered.
During my 3 or so days in cardiac
intensive care word had gotten around my old clients, workmates and peers in
the movie game. I started to receive faxes and phone calls from various people
in the industry despite me not having worked in the industry for roughly a
year. The faxes started to make the nurses wonder who I was as they were all
coming through with various studio letter heads. Paramount, Fox, Roadshow, Disney etc. were
making the nurses start to ask questions so a friend decided to have some fun
while I was out of it so to speak and told them that I was Tom Cruise’s
manager. Of course given that I was mostly unconscious during that time I had
no idea and was in no position to stop the silliness. It was a source of
great mirth later on.
By Friday 12 2002 I was moved to
the general ward. A miraculous recovery by any standards. As usual the nursing
staff were the usual combination of wonderful caring people, some there for the
paycheck and a tiny number who simply shouldn’t be in the job as they are
dangerous and just don’t care and don’t want to be there. Thankfully most of
the time one gets the wonderful caring ones.
At 5 days post cardiac arrest the
hypoxic brain injury was starting to show its symptoms. I had been so weak up
to this point that the simple things in daily life were being done for me but
now that I was regaining some strength I was noticing that my right arm and
shoulder would not move. Before I had a chance to investigate, the worst thing
that could happen, happened.
That evening I unfortunately had
a couple of nurses who simply shouldn’t be in the job rostered on that night.
Thankfully there were really good ones there to balance it out so I did my best
to direct any questions or concerns to the good and caring ones. I started to
feel pain that was almost identical to the heart attack pain I felt on Sunday.
I pressed the button and waited and nothing happened all the while the pain
getting worse. I knew something serious was happening so at this point I walked
out to the nurses station in agony and told them what was happening. One of the
nasty ones fobbed me off and told me to go back to bed. I stood up to her and
said no and that I am having another heart attack. If the issue wasn’t as
important as it was I would have taken further action against her at a later
date but I had more important things to worry about, like staying alive.
One of the lovely nurses could see
I was I serious trouble and I was feeling completely abandoned by the very
people who were supposed to be caring for me. She took me back to my bed and
promised she would do an ECG on me straight away. This would tell us straight
away if something serious was happening. She hooked me up to the machine while
one of the smartarse nasty ones stood there with a smirk on her face. If looks
could kill at this point the look I gave her would have her quite rightly lying
in a pool of blood on the floor. The machine went to work and did its reading.
The piece of paper came out and everyone went deathly silent. I said I’m having
another heart attack aren’t I? The lovely nurse who did the ECG confirmed this
while the nasty one just stood there with a very sheepish look on her face.
The pain was getting worse and the good nurses
went into action making calls, giving me the necessary medications to give me
the best chance of survival. I was lucky that I was in Townsville because it
was the only public hospital north of Brisbane
with a cardiac catheter suite. My heart was already badly damaged from the
first heart attack 5 days earlier. It turns out that when they went in and unblocked the arteries on the Sunday they had missed some blockages at the back
of my heart. The blockages were now causing another major heart attack.
As I was being wheeled to the
catheter suite the pain was getting even worse and I was fully aware of what
was happening to me. I was truly terrified and scared that I would die this
time. Mum had been by my side throughout this but she had her own medical
issues and I was scared of what would happen to her when she found out I was
having another major heart attack.
I started to cry as I felt it was
all over. The poor treatment by the nasty nurses had outweighed the wonderful
work by the good ones in my mind. I was scared if they had anything to do with
my treatment it was all over for me. I was terrified and my body had been
through so much that week but all of a sudden a nurse named Rosa said that she
wouldn’t let me die and that nothing like that would happen to me, “not on my
watch”.
Rosa’s
words were the absolute perfect thing she could have said at the perfect time.
I went completely calm and all of a sudden I was ready for whatever happened
next.
Once I awoke, first of all I was
happy to be alive and secondly I started to realise almost immediately that my
life was now changed irrevocably. It seemed that it hadn’t sunk in after the
first heart attack but leading up to the second attack and afterwards it was
hitting home that my life working as incredibly hard as I used to was no more.
For the next couple of months my
recovery was simply getting well enough to be independent and do the things in
life that I used to take for granted. The paralysis in my right arm and
shoulder was weird but my main concern was finding it harder and harder to
breath along with angina pain in my chest. Not having any idea of my future was
scary in itself. I found out later that the doctors that were treating me in
Townsville had already decided in their own minds that I would need a heart
transplant.
During these couple of months in
Townsville I still managed to do my radio programme contributions by phone to Brisbane. My partners in
crime David and Nathan Kelly and the man who started it with me David Simmons
did a sterling job while I was away. I had no idea that something that I only
considered a hobby that I did on Saturday mornings would become such an
important part of my life. My high school sweetheart Dianne had played an
important role during this period by contacting old school friends and advising
them what had happened and it was good to see these people as they visited
after not having seen some since high school.
My boss at the time traveled to
Townsville to meet up and pick up the company car which was disappointing as I
was more than capable of driving it home when given the go ahead and nobody
else was going to be using it. I suppose at that stage I should have realised
what was coming as far as my employment was concerned.
I knew in my own mind I was a
strong person and could handle anything that life threw at me and goodness
knows it threw plenty at me growing up. Now I was in for the battle of my life.
I was entering end stage heart failure.
I was dying.
