Chapter 4 — Thursday

Why Thursday? A childhood accident, repeated anaesthesia, fear of not waking, and the nurse whose reassurance stayed with me.

The Branch

There are memories from childhood that retain peculiar details.

Not necessarily the details somebody else would consider important.

A day of the week.

The position of a branch.

The colour of a hand.

A newspaper held up by a nurse.

One of those memories begins with some trees being felled.

I was watching from nearby with Johnny Lachlan.

We had been told to get out of the way and sit somewhere safe, among the branches of one of the trees that had already been brought down.

I found a branch perhaps two or three feet from the ground and used it as a seat.

The branch broke.

I fell backwards.

Instinctively I put my arm behind me to stop the fall.

I broke my elbow.

Hospital

I finished up in the local hospital.

My father was at church.

One of the details that has stayed with me is that nobody was going to interrupt him to tell him that John was in trouble.

Religion had its order of priorities.

I was taken to hospital without him.

The local doctor was Charles Hosking.

His weekend drinking was well known around the town, as I remember it. I was later given to understand that he was still badly affected from the weekend when he treated me that Sunday.

I cannot independently reconstruct his condition now.

What I can reconstruct is what happened to me.

Waking Up

I was given an anaesthetic.

Then there is a gap.

A long one.

My recollection is that it took almost two days before I properly woke.

When I did, my left arm was suspended from a pole.

There was a strap holding it up.

My hand was black.

There was black and purple bruising extending across my chest.

I was in considerable pain.

There were sandbags being used around the arm.

I did not understand what had happened while I was unconscious.

I only knew what I woke into.

Eventually the plaster was cut off.

The doctor wanted another attempt.

So I was anaesthetised again.

Again

The second anaesthetic produced another long absence.

My recollection is that I remained asleep for about a day and a half.

Again there was difficulty waking me.

Again, when consciousness returned, my arm was suspended.

Again there was pain.

For a child, the medical details mattered much less than the pattern.

They put me to sleep.

I disappeared.

And I did not know when I would come back.

The doctor wanted to try again.

This time my mother refused.

Melbourne

Arrangements were made to take me to Melbourne.

My father travelled with me.

I remember the doctor there as Peter Williams, although after so many years I would want to confirm the precise professional details from records if they still exist.

There was also a nurse whose name I remember as Nurse Wong.

She became the person I remember most clearly from that part of the experience.

I told her what had happened.

I told her that I was frightened of being given another anaesthetic.

That fear was no longer abstract.

Twice I had been put to sleep.

Twice I had apparently remained unconscious for vastly longer than anyone had expected.

I was terrified that if they put me under again I might not wake up.

Nurse Wong

Nurse Wong listened.

She told me she would be there.

She reassured me that she would make sure I woke up properly.

I believed her.

That mattered enough for me to agree to the procedure.

There are moments in childhood when an adult makes a promise and the whole world temporarily rests on whether that promise can be trusted.

For me, this was one of them.

Before the anaesthetic she showed me the day's newspaper.

It was Thursday.

What Day Is It?

When I woke, one of the first things I asked Nurse Wong was what day it was.

She said:

Thursday.

I panicked.

My immediate conclusion was that I had been unconscious for a week.

The previous two experiences had taught me that going to sleep under anaesthetic could mean disappearing for a very long time.

So when she said Thursday, my mind supplied the explanation.

It must be the next Thursday.

I had lost a week.

It took Nurse Wong a little while to realise what I was thinking.

Then she laughed.

Not at my fear.

At the misunderstanding.

She showed me the newspaper again.

The same Thursday.

I had been asleep for perhaps twenty minutes.

I remember that taking some time to register.

Twenty minutes.

Not two days.

Not a day and a half.

Not a week.

Twenty minutes.

The Meaning of Thursday

It is strange what memory chooses to preserve.

I cannot reconstruct every medical conversation.

I cannot tell you exactly what drugs were used during each anaesthetic.

I cannot reproduce the clinical reasoning behind each attempt to set the elbow.

But I remember Thursday.

I remember the newspaper.

I remember asking what day it was.

I remember the terror of believing that an entire week had disappeared.

And I remember Nurse Wong understanding what had frightened me.

That is one of the differences between a medical record and a childhood memory.

A record might tell us the procedure.

It might tell us the anaesthetic.

It might document the fracture.

It might contain observations made by doctors and nurses.

But the event I carried forward was partly contained in one question:

What day is it?

My Mother's Refusal

Looking back, another part of the story has become more significant.

My mother eventually said no.

After two attempts locally, after the prolonged periods in which I did not wake as expected, the local doctor wanted another attempt.

She refused.

That refusal changed what happened next.

I was sent to Melbourne.

I encountered different people.

And among them was Nurse Wong.

I do not want to reconstruct my mother's motives more precisely than I can remember them.

But the action itself is clear in my memory.

Enough.

Not again.

Adults and Authority

As a child, hospitals were places in which adults made decisions.

Doctors knew things I did not.

Parents decided things.

Nurses carried out instructions.

A child could be moved, anaesthetised, plastered, suspended, transported and treated while understanding very little of the larger process.

That does not mean those adults were all the same.

This memory contains several very different forms of authority.

There was the authority of the local doctor.

There was my mother's refusal.

There was the medical team in Melbourne.

And there was Nurse Wong, whose authority with me came from something quite different.

She earned trust.

She told me she would be there.

Then, when I woke, she was there.

Burwood Road

Afterwards I stayed for a time with my uncle Stan.

My memory places his business, J.C. Henry's Fine Furniture, on Burwood Road in Hawthorn.

That location connects this childhood hospital episode with other parts of the family history.

My brother Robert later went there in connection with an apprenticeship.

His story and mine intersect in ways that become much more difficult, including the shooting and what followed it.

Those events deserve their own space.

They should not be squeezed into the story of my elbow merely because memory places some of the same people and locations close together.

That is another discipline this book requires.

Association is not chronology.

A remembered connection may be important without belonging in the same chapter.

What the Child Knew

The child in this story did not know about anaesthetic reactions.

He did not have a theory of medical error.

He was not making judgments about professional standards.

He knew something much simpler.

His arm was broken.

He had been put to sleep.

He had been very difficult to wake.

It had happened twice.

He was frightened of it happening again.

Then one adult listened to that fear and dealt with the child who actually had it.

That is what I remember.

Looking Back

From the distance of old age, I could turn the episode into many different stories.

It could become a story about country medicine.

It could become a story about anaesthesia.

It could become another story about institutional power.

There may be records that would allow some of those questions to be examined properly.

But before any of those interpretations came the experience itself.

A boy fell backwards from a branch.

He broke his elbow.

He woke after an operation frightened and badly bruised.

He disappeared under anaesthetic again.

His mother eventually refused another attempt.

He was taken to Melbourne.

A nurse promised she would be there when he woke.

He opened his eyes.

He asked what day it was.

She said Thursday.

And for one terrible moment he thought he had lost an entire week.

Then she showed him the newspaper.

It was still Thursday.