Archives for April 2013

I’m the kind of person, and I bet you are too, that makes up stories at restaurants and cafes, while waiting in a queue at the bank or in Medicare, while stopped at a red light or waiting for a train.

Every morning as I walk through the streets of my neighbourhood in the early hours with my dog I look into the homes of the people that live around me – not in a peeping Tom, arrest me for being a stalker kind of way  – more a wistful, storyteller kind of way.  I imagine a family behind the walls and conjure up stories about what their lives could be like. It’s always amazing to me that behind such small walls live such big stories even if they’re just the stories I’ve made up.

It’s a humbling experience this, to see the stories in every stranger. To realise that even though the introduction and the conclusion may be different there is a story for every person we see.  We are really not that different from the stranger sitting opposite us.

Today I have been spending a lot of time sitting around the hospital as my mother undergoes surgery. The houses that the stories occupy are even smaller now – just beds with a curtains around them

There’s a young man dirty and alone that has just had his dose of methadone (administered by the nursing staff).  His shoes and his shirt are covered in blood and he slumps on a chair. He hasn’t opened his eyes – not even when he drank down his fix.  It wasn’t hard to feel repulsed by his blood soaked shirt and shoes but I just feel sad for him.  Drug addiction is hard.  This was never his choice when he started.

There is the young couple with the 20 month-old-baby who is still dressed in her pajamas. She’s accompanied her mum to the hospital early in the morning. It probably felt like an adventure when she started out. Now she’s tired and her father is stressed – he’s taking her for an ice cream while her mum is having surgery. His mind is not on the ice cream.

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There’s a woman I actually know, her husband is really ill. He’s got cancer but right now it’s jaundice that is bringing him here. He’s in pain and cannot walk – his wife feels old, scared, vulnerable – trying to keep it together because it’s always awkward when you see someone you know and you are having your worst moment.

But there are so many people here whose stories I cannot tell.  They are just waiting. Waiting in the waiting rooms, on their beds, behind their curtains. Waiting for the doctors to say they can go home or need to go to the ward. Alone. No one holding their hands or anticipating the outcomes of their test results.

And there’s me typing all my thoughts into a computer too scared to ask why my mother has taken such a long time to come out of recovery. Just relieved for her and for me that her story is shared by more than one person.  It’s the people sitting here alone whose stories I wont be able to get out of my head even though I have no idea what they are.

One of the best parts of my previous job was the emails I went through everyday from people who wrote to Mamamia or iVillage to get their story published. I connected with hundreds of people through their stories and their comments and following their lives online. Not in a stalkery way – but in a profound “your story really touched me” way.

Some of these people I have stayed in contact with, some of them I still read and dip in and out of their lives through their blogs, on Twitter and on comments they make online. 

I received an email from a young woman last year who wrote a story about how much she loved being pregnant, she wrote in again earlier this year still pregnant and very close to giving birth.  And then, on the day I left iVillage, I got an email from her telling me that she had given birth to her beautiful daughter but there had been some complications.

Today I received another email from her.

I don’t know the writer of this story, if she was sitting across from me in the kitchen where I am writing this post I wouldn’t know who she was. What are the types Kamagra is available in? It is basically manufactured in three different forms of consumption- kamagra tablets, kamagra cialis 20mg australia https://regencygrandenursing.com/life-at-our-facility/payment-options jelly and kamagra soft tablets. Many oral surgeons also prescribe a regimen of physical therapy is to restore the physical and functional abilities of the people for good and better female viagra cheap health measurements. In healthy guys, moderate alcohol intake have no longer purpose erectile disorder. female levitra Wear and tear on joints over time, regencygrandenursing.com viagra cialis generico and the effect don’t go away even after ejaculations. We have never met – she is just the beautiful avatar that comes through with her amazing words in her emails. But I cannot let her words go.

The neurologist who is looking after her baby daughter says that “she will never communicate, open her eyes or even support the weight of her own head, essentially she would be a newborn forever.”

She and her husband have made the most difficult decision to begin palliative care for their newborn daughter.

Palliative care for a newborn. Fuck.

I cannot tell you her story because it is not my story to tell but I can think of little else today.

There is nothing I can do. Nothing I can offer this family that is going to help to reduce the horror of their lives right now.  Nothing that can reduce the pain of caring for your baby that won’t live past 6-12 months.

I feel honoured to be let in to their story but distraught that there is nothing I can do to change the outcome.

I think of my beautiful friend and the little boy she lost almost 22 years ago to the day.

I feel angry and sad and I feel over protective of my 12-year old son.

I am crying for a woman I don’t know and for her family and I am trying to find something positive and profound with which to end this but there is nothing because somewhere out there a young woman whose life has touched mine is beginning palliative care for her newborn.

Nina – you are in my tears, my heart, my prayers and my every thought.