Baby Lost Page 7

  I’d been discharged from Royal Melbourne with various letters (so much paperwork, getting hit by a car!), including one confirming that I had an appointment with the orthopaedic surgeon who had operated on my knee. That and my hoped-for discharge date were the only goalposts I could work towards at that moment.

  I was so sick of rehab that the thought of an excursion, even if it involved more doctors, was vaguely appealing. Mum came with me, holding my hand in the back of the ambulance. Cars and traffic still terrified me, but the hovercraft delusion was holding up reasonably well. The ambulance driver was friendly, and I felt more like a well-treated parcel than an injured person by the time he delivered Mum and me to the patient transport lounge at Royal Melbourne. Appointment letter in hand, we followed coloured lines painted on the lino floor to find the right lift, the right floor, and eventually the right waiting room.

  I sat in it with Mum and a variety of recently operated-on people, while the doctors and hospital staff moved around us. ‘I am a patient,’ I thought. ‘This is what we do: we wait patiently, we move slowly.’ I had a moment of horror when I recognised one of the surgeons. He’d been in the same year as me at college but studying medicine. I’d felt a tiny bit of pride on getting to Royal Melbourne without a major freak-out, despite the horror I still felt at cars, but suddenly I imagined how he might have seen me—as another patient on crutches, dressed in loud colours, or maybe just as a fairly standard knee injury. Thankfully, it wasn’t he who called out my name, but another young surgeon, with a dapper suit and piles of curly hair.

  Before he would see me, the surgeon sent in a nurse to undo the staples that had held my skin together. She spent some time hunting around in drawers and cupboards until she emerged triumphant with what looked like a giant pair of plastic preschool scissors with the tips bent in sinister-looking ways. She angled a spotlight at my knee and, one by one, removed the staples, leaving little red dots either side of the thick pink scar that curved around my kneecap. I asked Mum to take photos. They came out more theatrically than I expected, a rubber-gloved hand hanging in the spotlight above my newly unstapled knee.

  The nurse piled the staples in a yellow plastic kidney dish. I eyed them off and had visions of taking them to a jeweller, and asking them to make a short chain from all these wonky ‘W’s—maybe enough for a bracelet? They’d held me together for nearly three weeks. I wasn’t sure I was ready to let them go.

  ‘Is it okay if I keep the staples?’ I asked the nurse.

  She wrinkled her nose slightly and smiled. For her, they were medical waste.

  ‘I don’t think so, but I can ask for you.’

  She bustled out, and Mum and I sat there, waiting for the doctor.

  I engaged in a short thought experiment, based on a popular reality TV show that I used to call ‘my life’. It involved not catastrophic injuries, grief and prodding by medical professionals but standing up in front of my contracts law class, talking to them about implied duties of good faith. How to bring colour and movement to the crucial High Court case of Hospital Products v United States Surgical Corporation? Why not show them some photos of my knee, with thirty-three surgical staples, just like the kind the defendant had promised to distribute on behalf of the US manufacturer but decided to repackage as his own product? There was something macabre about this thought, about plucking a teachable moment from the wreckage that the accident had wrought on our lives. At the same time, I felt ruthless. The accident took so much from us, why couldn’t I take a little back?

  Suddenly, the surgeon was there, in his slim-tailored suit, the fabric creasing expensively around his own highly operational knees as he sat down on the swivel chair and riffled through my file. My leg was laid out on the bench, the velcro straps of the brace undone around it, but I had to swing it down so I could turn and face him.

  ‘There wasn’t a scan from before the surgery, was there?’ he asked, without introducing himself.

  ‘No, no … I don’t think so.’

  ‘Okay then; well, let’s have a look.’

  He briefly examined my knee, made a quick note and pronounced he shouldn’t need to see me again.

  ‘And you shouldn’t need that brace anymore,’ he added.

  ‘But, um, will I be able to bend it again?’ I queried.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course—the physio will help you with that.’

  And that was it.

  As I gathered my crutches and bags and returned to the waiting room, I felt a little like Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz. ‘You mean all I needed to do all along was click my heels together and say, “There’s no place like home”?’

  It was somewhere in another queue—after we’d taken a wrong turn down another winding corridor—that I wept. The lino changed colour here. Corridors of one building joined to an older building, with old-fashioned skirting boards. It was as though the new hospital had swallowed the old one whole.

  I’d circled this day on the calendar. It had pulled me forward as some kind of marker, some way to differentiate one babyless week from another. I’d started the day chipper. This was a step on my way out of rehab, on my way home. I’d dressed smartly, felt like I was carrying off the pretence of being a normal, capable adult. Once these staples were out, I had reasoned, I would be able to have a bath or go for a swim. In rehab I had been able to put myself together each morning—piece new outfits together from my new ‘Crippled but Quirky’ collection and propel myself out into the thin simulacrum of the world that was rehab’s public spaces. And today we had braved vehicular transport, and navigated the long corridors of the Royal Melbourne Hospital to find the very dapper orthopaedic surgeon who granted me permission to bend.

  I’d wanted the staples out, but the thought of bending, of walking unaided, of returning to this noisy, busy world that was so sharp with reminders of our loss, felt exhausting. My carefully gathered energy had brought me this far, but the lino corridors defeated me. I crumpled and wept. Mum held my hand, gathered me in a little, and then we went and found a wheelchair. We asked for directions, found another waiting room, and made it through the last appointment with the trauma consultant on the promise of a cuppa. I was relieved when Mum navigated us back to the caf. She went to buy the tea, and I looked around and realised that just over there was where we’d sat and drunk coffee after Z’s funeral; and there, just down that corridor, not 20 metres away, was the room where I’d pulled that small, solid box onto my lap and kissed her cold face.

  Part II

  RE-ENTRY

  9

  Zombieland

  Coming ‘home’ to our new house on Bayliss Street in the flat expanses of Melbourne’s northern suburbs, nothing was familiar. In a matter of weeks, we had lost our home, our city, our jobs, our baby daughter and all our plans and hopes for her. We’d also lost our car, each of us had experienced significant physical injury, and our surviving children had lost their school and contact with their friends and extended family. No wonder I felt like an alien, as I crutched my way around our new neighbourhood. And if I, who was originally a Melbourne person and had all my family and old friends here, felt like an alien, how much more alien did Rima and the girls feel?

  While I was in rehab, they had been staying at my dad and stepmum’s place. Mum was living in her mobile home, which was parked in their driveway, and my brother Jeremy was sleeping in the rumpus room. It was like some extreme blended-family in-law reality TV challenge. Not only did they have to live with one another, grieve and recover, but my parents also needed to ferry Rima and the girls around to numerous medical appointments, visit me in rehab, and help us get ready to move into the Bayliss Street house.

  Rima’s day surgery to insert a metal plate into her hand was helpfully scheduled for the same day as surgery for Jackie’s broken nose. Dad and my stepmum, Deb, arranged for my brother to drop Rima off at hospital on his way to a job, while they stayed with Jackie. Concerned that Rima would wake up from the anaesthetic alone and with no transport, I
rang my friend Bins, who answered the phone at 7 a.m. and rushed out of bed to be there, Diet Coke in hand, when Rima woke up. As soon as Rima was released from post-op recovery, Bins ferried her over to my rehab hospital, both of them in good spirits. Rima, still dozy from the anaesthetic, fell asleep on my bed, and, mistaking her for me, the nurses tried to give her my painkillers.

  In rehab, I was taking more and more photos; fewer of my bruises, and more of my face. I couldn’t quite recognise this face. Something had changed. I pored over my face in the photos of me holding Zainab the morning she was born. The puffiness and blood-red hair were now gone, but when I looked in the mirror, my eyes had not returned to normal. There was a weariness, a knowledge, there that I didn’t have before. I felt haunted—my body had been the scene of a death. I had carried death within me and birthed her. I needed to catch what traces remained on my face of the moment when her small soul flickered out from within my living one. How did her soul escape my body? Where did she go, and how much of my own soul did she take with her? Scrolling through the photos on Rima’s camera, I saw something. Two shots where I had accidentally held the button down and closed my eyes. I flicked back and forth. Eyes open, eyes closed. Eyes open, eyes closed. Like an old-fashioned doll that you tilt to make her blink, lifelike but lifeless, blinking in disbelief. The image jumped slightly. This was not real life, just a photographic trick.

  I’d never found horror movies to be up my alley but I now felt an empathy for the zombies, dazed and numbed by death. They don’t know what has happened, and are still trying to work it out. Something terrible befell them, but they’re still here, moving and apparently alive. Every now and then, I would wonder if I hadn’t also died in the accident; that this was some dream or neural flicker.

  After my clothes had been cut from me in emergency, and I’d spent my ICU days in half-undone hospital gowns, being able to wear proper clothes was re-humanising. The act of choosing my outfits became a ritual. I couldn’t wear the same things I’d worn before—my post-partum body still couldn’t fit into my non-maternity clothes—but I couldn’t bring myself to wear the same maternity outfits that I’d worn only a few weeks ago. Instead, I tied scarves or soft fabric belts around my hair, like Alice bands; I put bright colours together, Frida-style. My mum lent me clothes from her eclectic wardrobe. I sought out big jewellery. I wore big red plastic earrings made from recycled monkeys in a barrel, my aqua scarf around my head, a soft grey shirt dress tied with the hot pink belt from my bathrobe. With make-up, I reclaimed my face from grief and the hospital environment.

  Mum sallied forth with my absurdist shopping lists:

  • doorstop

  • bra

  • underwear (high waisted)

  • sticky tape or glue

  • Where the Wild Things Are

  • coloured textas or pencils

  • more fruit

  • Charlize Theron

  I needed high-waisted underpants that wouldn’t irritate my caesar scar; bras that were soft-cupped, but not maternity bras. Nanna underwear, it turns out, is the gentlest. Mum found bras for me that were designed for women undergoing breast cancer treatment. As I dressed, I felt solidarity for those women, sent them my love.

  If I was demanding of family members, I was positively bolshie with the nursing staff. In retuning to this baby-like state, I had realised that it matters a lot how gently (or otherwise) caregivers provided their care. When you are dependent on others, small things can upset your routines, and familiar ways of doing things are inordinately comforting. I’d gone from a public teaching hospital with high nurse–patient ratios to a private suburban rehab centre with low ratios. Many other patients here were elderly and for them this was probably a step on the way into a nursing home. The night nurse often told me off for staying up late, and one night, without asking, she turned the lights out when I was awake and writing. I was outraged, and asked my mum to bring in a small lamp so that I had my own light source.

  I’d been given a mattress with an extra-soft section at the foot, designed to avoid heel pressure sores for elderly people with paper-thin skin. But it meant that the weight of my foot pulled at my broken knee. When an ordinary mattress wasn’t forthcoming after a few days, I picked up my bedding and napped on the floor; much more comfortable. I awoke to the nurse manager freaking out. Incident reports had to be filed, I got a stern talking to, and a new mattress arrived that afternoon.

  The police officer handling our case had visited me in hospital once. He was an older bloke—small but wiry, and with an unironic moustache. ‘Were you wearing a seatbelt?’ he’d asked in an accusing tone.

  My hand shot up to my chest, and the bruises that the seatbelt had left. ‘Yes; yes, I was.’

  When he returned to see me again in rehab, I was in bed. I asked when we might be able to do my police statement. I wanted it done before I was discharged, so we could start a new chapter in our new home with, at least, our part in the criminal investigation resolved. His preference was to do it once I was at home, so that we’d be uninterrupted. He was testy. ‘I’ve already got people on my case, complaining about keeping him in custody over a week because he’s an Indian student.’

  His remark got my lawyer hackles up—the driver who caused our accident had to answer for his actions, not for his cultural heritage. But I wasn’t going to engage in that debate with the police officer in front of me; we just needed to sort out how this interview was going to happen. I asked what information he’d need, so I could make notes, and he spat back, ‘You should know, you’re a lawyer.’ We went back and forth, and suddenly he was yelling, telling me that we’d do this interview on his terms, not mine. I agreed—anything to get him out of my space. I was shaken, and hot with shame.

  The friends who were renting our new house had arranged to vacate it a few days early. Our furniture was already there, waiting for us in the shed, but neither Rima nor I were physically able to move it. So I put the call out on Facebook, and suddenly we had a schedule of helpers, assembling furniture, moving beds, stocking our fridge. Moving day coincided with my second-last day in rehab, so that I would have a properly assembled bed to come home to the next day.

  While friends shifted our furniture, Jeremy sat with me in an interview room at the rehab hospital for my police interview, this time with the head of the collisions unit. After the incident with the leading officer on our case, I’d called and requested that someone else interview me. Jeremy sat with me and listened, giving a silent hand squeeze when I needed it.

  On my last night in rehab, I stayed up late writing, despite the night nurse making firm and sensible suggestions about getting some sleep. The light from the small lamp Mum had brought in for me bounced off the mirrored frame around Z’s picture, sending small spirals and leaves across the wall.

  Thursday, 14 January 2010

  Oh, my little one. I wanted to be setting up our house to be babysafe, not Zimmer-frame safe. I wanted your cot in our lovely front bedroom, where the bay window lets the light in, not physiotherapy equipment to help me lift my poor leg and reach for things. I was sick of rehab, and delighted at the thought of being in our own space, but I was also terrified of leaving my bubble and re-entering ‘real life’ without a Haloumi in my belly or a baby in my arms.

  The next morning, my dad and stepmum came to take me home. I sat in the back of the car, my sore leg lying across the bench seat. The traffic made me nervous. All these death-machines, pacing in our midst like semi-tamed tigers, and everyone but me oblivious to their teeth and claws. I held on, and we made tense little jokes about hovercrafts. When we arrived, Dad helped me out of the car, giving me my crutches so I could meet Rima on the threshold, with tears and an embrace.

  I sat on a chair in the garden—our garden—in the northern sun, and our little dog, Eddie, leapt up onto my lap. Big dog Atari would have leapt up too, were it not for Rima protecting me from his enthusiasm. The dogs and cat had spent a much longer holiday than expected at the kenne
ls where we’d dropped them off just before Christmas. In the sterile, shiny hospital space, I had missed their abundant furriness, and their wordless, boundless affection.

  That first day at home was razor sharp. It was so perfect in every way except one. Here was the room we’d dreamt of, but where was the cot? Here was the garden I’d always wanted, but no small feet to take their first steps on the grass. It felt like a grisly nursery rhyme from an era when death was mundane enough to feature in children’s games: ‘down will fall baby, cradle and all.’ When friends came to help with the unpacking, weariness hit me and I slunk back into bed to hide and weep. I’d always been relentlessly sociable, but now I prioritised my own need for quiet. I couldn’t explain this and I couldn’t make it nice.

  When I started unpacking, I found the jumper I’d worn on the day of the accident. Unlike all the other clothes I’d worn that day, it hadn’t become bloodstained or been cut up, because I’d taken it off before we got in the car. I held it up to my body and looked in the mirror. The jumper was slack and flabby from where my big, taut belly had been. This, I told my weeping self, this is proper crazy-lady grief. A small, mean voice in my head wanted to call it histrionics, to slap myself out of it, but this grief was bigger and more elemental than anything I could put into words.

  That night was the first since the accident that Rima and I could sleep in one bed together. Unlike the surreal one in ICU when she’d slept on two chairs pushed together beside my bed, we could embrace properly. We held onto one another, shipwreck survivors in a salty ocean of tears.