Category Archives: Steve

Dr Douglas and the runaway rabbits

Spring continues to go bonkers, endlessly sending out shoots and growing giant green leaves. This is what I wrote last week at Varuna. Unhinged, unpolished … it’s the beginning of some sort of memoir-ish thing written as a series of short meditations on my various affected body parts. I’m starting with the Pouch of Douglas. This is one down; nine other body parts to go.

Illustration by William Hogarth, 1726. Retrieved from http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/aug2009.html on 23/10/14.

The Pouch of Douglas

The Pouch of Douglas is a small area in the female human body between the uterus and the rectum. It has a name and a shape but the essence of it, the point of it, is that it is a piece of nothing. It is a negative space. It is the empty air in a cup or a bottle. We don’t have a word for that territory; we let the vessel speak for it. The Pouch of Douglas has a name, a border, but no land. The territory of the Pouch of Douglas is infinitesimal, because when all is well the surrounding organs slide against each other like two slugs in a mating dance. The pouch of Douglas, like the pouch of a mother kangaroo or a coin purse, can expand to accommodate growing or multiplying things.
The pouch takes its name from the first man to explore and name this piece of true terra nullius. At the time, other men were planting flags in distant places on the globe; Dr Douglas worked closer to home in Scotland and England. He worked as a man-midwife, wrote treatises and held public dissections in his own house. Here is the uterus, the fallopian tube, the ovary and vagina. And here – can you see it? This is my own discovery. I have named it after myself. Ah, there is the bell for afternoon tea.

In 1726, a woman by the name of Mary Toft, who lived in Surrey, announced that she had given birth to baby rabbits. Her local doctor was astonished and ran off to let everyone know. She had been in normal labour, he said, with regular contractions. And then appeared the baby rabbits. The woman enjoyed her celebrity. But Dr Douglas smelled a rat. “A woman giving birth to a rabbit is as likely as a rabbit giving birth to a human child”, he said. He went to see her himself, to put an end to the nonsense. He examined her and declared her a fraud. Afterwards, William Hogarth made an etching of Dr Douglas standing at Mary Toft’s bedside, gesticulating, with the rabbit children running off in all directions, unmasked and embarrassed.
Rabbits came to Australia with the first fleet. Like currency lads and lasses, they grew healthy on fresh air and good eating. They eloped into the bush and ate the crops that were planted for them and built burrows in the new estates that opened up as far as the eye could see. Australia’s emblem bore the Kangaroo and Emu, but the continent was in fact governed by rabbits. The anti-rabbit wars, when they came, were conventional and chemical; mass slaughter and hand to hand combat. By the time I could walk and talk, I knew that rabbits had to be caught and killed. Even the family cat could do its bit. “Go and catch a rabby, Ginge,” my mother urged the big hard tom cat that went with the dairy farm my parents worked for a while.

That was in the south of Western Australia, where it was green and lush and muddy. That’s where my sister and I had the job of herding calves. We always stopped to examine the hot pats of manure. We noted that some were sloppy, some firm. We wore plastic galoshes. Dad was always hosing out the stalls where the cows had been. Mum grew tomatoes at the back door of the weatherboard soldier’s settlement cottage that we rented from the farmer. My parents had come from Queensland on a working holiday that was already stretching out towards a year. I started school at a one-room schoolhouse, where I open and shut my mouth pretending to chant the times table with my peers. Older children carried me around like a baby. We weren’t on that dairy farm for long. Winter was coming and these Queenslanders were drawn north, following the sun.
I believed in the Easter bunny. We were surrounded by rabbits, so the idea of a large one carrying chocolate eggs wasn’t too much of a stretch. I also had hard evidence. Before we left the dairy farm, Mum and Dad and my little sister and I were sitting together when we heard an interesting thump and scamper. “I think that was the Easter bunny,” said Dad. “Go and have a look in your room.” There, on the bed we shared with pillows at either end, where my feet would sometimes reach a cold wet patch that was my sister’s wee, were chocolate Easter eggs.

Carnarvon

Carnarvon was a place where red earth met white beach sand to create pinkish sand dunes sparsely covered in acacia scrub. There were utes piled high with kangaroo carcasses. There was the pub where Wilson Tuckey smacked an Aboriginal patron with coaxial cable and got fined forty dollars for assault. There was a NASA tracking station on the red sand dune just out of town, getting ready for the Moon Landing. And there were rabbits. We had a grey cat that dragged home a partly disemboweled rabbit. The rabbit was long, as long as the cat.

Running wild

My partner Steve walks over land near Bathurst, in New South Wales, that was box gum then eaten-out farmland and now a land care reserve. He stops at likely spots and takes co-ordinates with his pocket GPS. These are rabbit burrows. Rabbits eat the delicate native grasses being coaxed back onto the land. Someone else will come by, later, to gas the burrows. The rabbits will lie there, dead, under the ground. We go walking with our black Labrador, Bertie. Bertie is getting old and pretends not to see rabbits, because he can’t be bothered to give chase. Kangaroos stand stock-still as we approach. The full, hanging pouch with just the joey’s legs sticking out.

There’s something in my own pouch. Cells are multiplying, well-fed and happy, burrowing down in new estates. They’re going wild, like rabbits.

Nothing is a magnet for something

Dr Douglas named his pouch of nothing. Nothing is like a magnet for something. Nothing is a big blank page with a pencil beside it. Nothing can be a blessed relief. There is nothing there. I slide on my conveyor belt into the big white donut machine. The warmth of radioactive fluid is strange at the back of the neck and around the bladder. “Breathe in and hold.” Pause. “You may now breathe normally.” At this point I have never heard of Dr Douglas or Mary Toft or her baby rabbits. They belong to the new country on the other side of the donut.

Why did it occur to Mary Toft that she might gather baby rabbits and put them up herself? The vagina is an empty tube. It calls for something to go up it, into it. Perhaps she was bored, and she had an empty space to fill. And then she spied a baby rabbit.

“I’m bored,” I used to whine, back in the dairy farm days. “What can I do?” I would be told to go and find something for myself, and stop whining.

I took a hair from my head and asked Mum for a glass jar with a lid. I put the hair in the jar. I was thinking that this was the hair of today and today would not go on for ever, but I would always have this hair. I could trap a hair’s worth of time. The hair did not look impressive in the glass jar. In fact, it looked like an empty jar with a hair caught in it by mistake.

Was Mary’s first baby rabbit already dead, or did her attempt to birth it kill it? Did she practice on a series of rabbits, perfecting her fraudulent labour groans, the use of muscles for expulsion, before calling her local doctor?

There’s that name, Mary. And another highly unusual birth. I’m doodling, now, into the empty page.

Nothing asks for something. From nothing comes all of creation. We can’t seem to leave nothing alone.

The radiologist’s report described a five centimetre tumour in the Pouch of Douglas. And another bigger tumour, in another spot. I couldn’t listen to this. I let my friend Dawn, who had insisted on coming with me, take notes. Tell that other person that looks and sounds like me but is not me because that person belongs to another dimension. I need to stay here in my glass jar of time, in my ignorance, with other people opening and shutting their mouths like goldfish.

Gnashing teeth

The night before last I dreamed that Steve and I were talking to a woman, a stranger. She was about our age. She suddenly said she was miserable because no-one would marry her. Steve immediately offered to marry her. He said it the way he’d offer to help someone move bricks around to the side of the house.
As soon as he said these words, he was gone from me. He had shifted over, just like that. He’d made the offer, and now he had to follow through. I spent the rest of the dream wailing and gnashing my teeth.

Rabbits gnash their teeth at every meal with a wide side to side movement. Their teeth grow continuously through their lifetimes, to make up for the erosion.

You can know something, but if you don’t give it any words, it subsides into the mud. You can continue paddling about on the clear water above. You might even peer down through the clear water, to the bottom, but it’s just brown or gravelly down there, with water weeds growing out of it and tiny darting fish. So you continue paddling.

About a year before I started to feel unwell, I heard the word “cancer”, loud and clear, as I got out of bed. Just that one word, no more. “Silly”, I answered, and went on to do morning things. The word got short shrift. It shrank back and didn’t bother me again.
At night, though, I started downloading hospital books – one click of the Kindle – one after another. I read memoirs of doctors and nurses on the night shift, of surgeons performing the most delicate manoeuvres on aneurisms, of surgeons becoming ill themselves. I watched hospital shows on television. No fiction – they had to be the real thing. The more extreme the surgery, the better. I loved it when they cut holes in skulls to take out tumours, or transplanted livers.
I started to take long afternoon naps. In the middle of the day I would walk from my study to the kitchen for a cup of tea, only to be seduced by the sofa with its softness, its inviting rugs and cushions. I’d lie down gratefully and sleep. I began to do this even before lunch. I decided that this was the way I was grieving my father, who had died not long before. I was standing beside him, licking an ice-cream, and he was standing there in a striped shirt, holding a giant fish. Its nose was on his foot so it wouldn’t drag in the dirt, and his toes were curled up to keep it there. He held it by the narrow point just under the tail. The tail reached above my head. I was five years old, and we hadn’t been in Carnarvon for long. The black and white photo sits on a shelf beside the sofa. I gave myself permission to have the naps.
All this time, I was paddling furiously. I was teaching and marking and writing and I was editing a documentary. I’d spring up from my nap and land back at the screen, back at the keyboard.

All the cells in my body knew something, but they couldn’t reach my mind. “There’s no use trying to tell her,” they told each other. “She doesn’t listen.”

The wanted rabbit

Pongo the black and white rabbit was astonished when a giant cabbage appeared in front of him. He circled it a few times, wondering where to start. It was a round, tight cabbage. A rabbit has prehensile, grasping lips and strong incisors. A rabbit chews like a camel, with the bottom jaw going back and forth sideways.
Pongo is a wanted rabbit. He lives with his sister Mimi, a grey rabbit, and cousin Hester, a large, handsome hare. They live near the Bathurst railway station, a few streets away from us. When Mimi took ill, lying paralysed and hopeless on the floor, my friend Helen spent hours feeding her through an eyedropper and spent a ridiculous amount of money at the vet. Gradually, Mimi began to move again. She began to drag her body around. She’d tip sideways and be unable to get up. She’d be set gently back on her wobbly feet.
Mimi and I took ill at about the same time. We’re both still here. Our days are numbered, of course. We just don’t know how many numbers, how many days.

In the meantime, we continue to chew the many-layered cabbage of life. It is vast. It will be unfinished.

Rabbit victory

Ginge moves stealthily through grass, his belly close to the ground. He gives his hindquarters a tiny shake, springs through the air, brings down his prey. He closes his jaw around the neck, drags his prize home.

The boy sets off on foot, dragging a wooden crate on wheels taken from a baby’s pram. In the crate, a pile of steel-jawed rabbit traps. He pulls the jaws apart; they go as wide as they can go. In the dark, a rabbit sets foot on the lightly buried steel plate. The jaws slam shut, breaking leg and sinew. The rabbit screams. In the morning, the boy returns. The rabbit, exhausted, barely struggles. He pulls and twists the neck until it snaps. The rabbit’s soul ascends through the leaves of the gum tree into clear blue sky.

Back home, the boy skins and guts his rabbits in movements that are becoming fluid, habitual. The skins come off like gloves, all of a piece. He stretches them along the wire fence to sell to hatters. He carries the pink muscled rabbits, arms and legs stretched as if caught in the act of flying, in a damp hessian bag through the streets of Surry Hills and Redfern, shouting Rabbitoh! Rabbitoh!

The South Sydney football team was named after these men and boys, the rabbiters.

We settle in before the large screen. We don’t know who will win, the rabbits or the bulldogs. I still can’t follow a game of rugby league. It’s all about pumping thighs and tries. Red pumping blood andgreen, green grass, lit by electric light.
Victory. After 43 years, victory at last.

They taste it at Redfern Oval, then gorge. Weeks later, they’re still partying. Deb and I, walking down Pitt Street, hear chanting, slightly dangerous, coming from above. A Scottish voice behind us says, “There’s those fuckin’ Rabbitohs” – not disapprovingly. Partying Rabbitohs have become a feature of the streets of Sydney. They’re like Corellas, cockatoos of the desert plains, appearing unexpectedly in city trees, shrieking.
Ginge stands at the back door, offering up his rabbit. “Good boy Ginge! Thank you very much. But you have it, Ginge.” Ginge drags it behind the woodpile. The flesh is soft and bloody.
Rabbits are multiplying. Rabbits need lebensraum. Some must leave the Pouch of Douglas for opportunities elsewhere. It’s dark and wet and they can’t see where they’re going. They’re like baby kangaroos, blind and pink-skinned, groping their way towards the teats inside the pouch. Only this journey is in reverse. They must burrow upwards, as if towards the light, but there is no light, only another soft place to grow. They slip between organs, like a finger. They make room for themselves.
I can’t bear to look at it myself, but Dawn is reading aloud from the radiologist’s report. Steve is also unready to look at it himself. Dawn is our guide, like Virgil, into the first circle. After this she’ll go back to Canberra, back to her work as a nurse, and we will have to pick our way through this ourselves.
There is another tumour between stomach and liver, and it is eleven centimetres wide. It is not round with a definite skin, like an orange. It is more like a rabbit burrow, with a main room and corridors leading off it. It’s pushed the stomach right over to the left. It’s taken up residence. It’s a giant cuckoo in a small nest. It is growing rich on my blood supply.
I’m indisputably fading, now. My red blood cell count has plunged. My face is as white as a sheet. I’m bundled into a bed at Bathurst hospital, where they give me two bags of blood. I feel better immediately. Suddenly, I don’t feel ill at all. There are four women in the ward. One is ninety years old, estranged from all her children. There is nobody to bring her things.
Helen, mistress of rabbits, brings giant sunflowers. More flowers bank up. Vases have to be found.
I’m transferred straight from Bathurst to Westmead in Sydney. I sit in the passenger seat beside the driver, because I really don’t need the stretcher out the back. I’m perfectly ambulant, perfectly able to hoist myself up, click my own seatbelt. The nurse sits on a little chair behind my seat. She’s just a voice all the way down. I’m taken into the bowels of Westmead Hospital and fed a brown mushy casserole.
My sister, Deb, appears with an armful of new pajamas. She has written my name in felt pen on the tags at the neck, just as she does on her children’s clothes. Mum and Max are there too, and Steve. They are all gathered around my bed. Max is eight. He’s doing a crossword. He’s bored. I remember being six, a child at my grandfather’s hospital bed. We’d driven across the continent, Carnarvon to Brisbane, sleeping in the car, setting off at first light. Poppy was thin and smiling, telling stories. I picture him in a felt hat, but that can’t be right. He was in hospital.
A little while later, he died. Dad told me this, as we stood down near the road at the front of the small green fibro house that went with his job at Jolly’s Tyre Service. “Did you cry?” I asked. I looked up at his face. If he had cried, there was no sign of it now.

The fleece

We are like the girl in the rhyme
calling where o where,
hands deep in the fleece of ourselves,
wanting someone
with verbena-scented hair
and fine-boned wrists
to lift us up, the whole of us
containable, not yet broken.

– Maya Janson, Murmur & Crush

My hand is deep in the fleece of my life. My sheep are dirty cream or light brown, never white. In the angled light of the late afternoon, they are golden.

We took the ferry to Stradbroke Island and discreetly sprinkled his ashes here and there. Mum and Dad met on the beach here. They would forever have beach sand between their toes. I stood knee deep in the water holding the big plastic container in my hands. It was light grey or blue, with a lid that was very hard to get off. It was a purely functional vessel, of the kind that might contain fertiliser or snail pellets at a hardware store. Despite all our sprinklings, the container was still heavy. The coffin was in there too, diluting and adding weight to his ashes. We would have to stop sprinkling and start pouring, if we were to get this job done. The ashes rolled in the shallow water of Moreton Bay.

The drawbridge came down and we drove into the maw of the Argo, one down but not broken, and returned across the water.

The elephant’s tears

Elephants have excellent memories and they cry real salty tears. When one dies, the others grieve. Earlier this month, a story about Raju the Indian elephant went viral. Raju had been kept in chains, wearing spikes that dug into his legs when he tried to move. He was starving, eating bits of paper and plastic in desperation. When a team of animal welfare activists came to rescue him, he seemed to cry in relief. I read about Raju in the last days of my treatments for cancer, and identified with his story of suffering and release from suffering.

Steve (right) with fellow Australian ranger Holly North in Tanzania, 2012.

Steve (right) with fellow Australian ranger Holly North in Tanzania, 2012.

Tomorrow evening, my partner Steve is going to be talking about the welfare of elephants, gorillas and other magnificent, endangered animals at the monthly Green Drinks get-together here in Bathurst. Steve’s a member of the Protected Area Workers Association (PAWA). One of PAWA’s projects is to support rangers working on the dangerous frontlines between national parks and poachers. PAWA also supports the work of Sean Willmore and the Thin Green Line Foundation, which was featured on Australian Story a couple of weeks ago. So, if you’re in Bathurst and you’d like to get along, it’s at Rahamim at 34 Busby Street, Bathurst, on Friday July 25 2014 at 5.30pm, phone 6332 9950. (Note: The drinks themselves are not green, but offerings from the local Vale Creek Winery).

Meanwhile, I’m on the up and up! I’m hoping like hell this blog will stop being an illness narrative and start morphing into something else. Not sure what, exactly, but it might include further musings on crochet, craft, illness and the body … with pictures ….

Just as I sat down to write this, Helen arrived with a new hat. It’s a gorgeous felted wool number with a lining that makes it very comfy. I’m expecting to be bald for a little while yet, so thanks, Helen!

This is where I live

I’ve lived in a lot of places. Carnarvon, where red desert meets blue Indian Ocean. Prague, where white swans skate over the frozen Vltava River in winter. Bathurst, where I live now, with its rolling hills. But now, since surgery, I know that the first place I live, always, is in and through this body.

I knew the surgery had to be radical to remove my two tumours, especially the meaty one sitting between liver and stomach. Crocheting my body parts, I understood that they were threatened. Even so, the final count was shocking. Here’s the list:
* Part of stomach
* All of spleen
* Most of the tail of the pancreas
* The greater omentum
* The uterus (already skinned of its Fallopian tubes and ovaries)
* About half of the large intestine running from the top left corner down to the rectum.

The surgeons call this sort of ovarian cancer surgery “debulking”. The word “disembowelling” could be more apt.

I had a gynae oncologist working at the south end and my upper GIT specialist working up north. They worked together, flanked by their teams of apprentices and nurses, for five hours.

Afterwards, my upper GIT told me he was concerned he’d gone too far. “No, I wanted you to be radical,” I said. “There’s a difference between being radical and being a butcher,” he said. The problem for him was that even as I lay opened up on the table, nobody knew the nature of the upper tumour. It might even be benign, in which case radical action would be overdoing it. (Unlike the bottom tumor the top one was in too awkward and dangerous a position to biopsy beforehand.)

The pathology report, a few days later, revealed that the upper tumour was made of the same serous carcinoma cells as the bottom one. So it was just as well they’d gone in hard. Both surgeons said my particular presentation of cancer was highly unusual: no sign of lots of tiny tumours sprinkled through the abdomen. They said they’d been able to “get everything”.

Wow. I’d been secretly terrified of “peek and shriek”, where they open you up, sadly shake their heads and sew you up again. This is what happened with Uncle Frank in the early ’70s. The cancer had “no beginning and no end”, apparently. We don’t know if he carried the BRCA1 gene mutation, but I suspect he did.

The experience was grueling, not just for me but for my nearest and dearest. I was kept in recovery for five hours after the operation itself, and every hour I didn’t appear in the ward increased their anxiety. Eventually I did appear and I even sat up in bed chatting. I can hardly remember that now.

The next day, the pain. In my shattered state, I got myself thinking too much about how I should respond to this question asked by the nurse: “How would you rate your pain out of 10, if zero is none and 10 is the worst pain imaginable?” So I pondered the worst pain imaginable. Being burned at the stake, thrown into boiling oil … I compared these to how I was feeling. Utterly shocking, but a long way from the boiling oil. “Five?” So I suffered for about three hours, accepting it as part of the process of being gutted. Then the pain management team came round and put it differently: “Is your pain little, moderate or severe?” Severe, of course. They upped the painkillers and the day proceeded more smoothly.

Within a couple of days I was eating, sitting out of bed and walking up and down the corridor, drip stand in tow.

Then at midnight on Saturday, I had a temperature of 38. They started worrying about pneumonia. A young learner doctor (I could just about see the L on her forehead) dug around in the crook of my right arm, failing to find a vein. Something inside me began to unravel. I lost faith. Strung up on an antibiotic drip, I started feeling wretched. I was feeling queasy, which I find a worse sensation than simple pain. The next day, I started hurling. Green bilious vomit. Everywhere. Standing in the bathroom hosing myself off with the shower hose, only to get to the door and hurl again – pure misery.

And then – the magic of the thorough purge – I started feeling better.

For the next two days I cried at the drop of a hat. I cried about the miracles of life and love and body. I cried about my whole life.

At 5am Tuesday morning I opened my eyes and – I felt well! I was bathed in well being. Dawn light through the blinds. I felt a surge of creativity.

I typed into my iPhone:

“The first place is this body, made up of the descendants of ancient bacteria, fish parts. This temple, made of fish parts.”

I’m writing this on one finger on an iPad at my friend Larissa’s house in Newtown. Lisa B is here too, all the way from Brighton in the UK. And Steve, who sat in a chair next to my hospital bed all that time. We’re all watching Masterchef. Eating meatballs and pasta. I’m back in the the world again.

So, how do you live without a spleen, without half of your large intestines? The answer is that I’ve got a new body that operates differently. It’s back to the crochet hook for me, to process and absorb this difference.

It’s all about cars


For days there’s been the sound of an angry hornets nest in the distance – cars racing around Mt Panorama. When Bertie first heard it as he emerged out of the front door and stood on the path, he had a surprised, “what the -” look on his face. Quite funny. Then it became background noise for all of us. Steve was going to be there today with his trusty cameras but he’s out fighting bushfires. Bushfires ruined his Bathurst 1000 experience last year, too. (See his pics of the 2005 race here.) Karen Golland’s cat was frightened of the helicopters and came running in, “telling” Karen all about it with her expressive miaow. I slept in this morning. The buzzing sound and a headache and not sleeping much last night gave me permission to keep my eyes shut until about 10am. That’s when a pack of lads carrying beers and a Ford flag ambled down Torch Street calling to each other. One (pictured) said to another coming up the rear, “Have you got the chairs?” To which he replied: “Fuck the fucken chairs we’ve got the ground.”