Category Archives: Bathurst Community Climate Action Network

Bilby time

Bilby/Australian Geographic. Photo: Mitch Reardon.

It’s Easter again. I’ve been thinking about last Easter, when I’d just had my second chemo session, and was whiling away a bit of feeling-nasty time by Googling the medical effects of crucifixion. That searing time seems remote, now.

I’m also thinking about my friend Sue who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer around the same time as me. We went through treatment parallel with each other, in different Sydney hospitals, and finished up at around the same time. We were both sent on our way in remission. But now, just a few months later, Sue’s cancer has come back. She’s back in the chemo chair for another grueling round.

For me, it’s so far so good. Somehow I’ve managed to go from nothing to too-busy, like a tap that can’t just come out slow but is either off or at full gush.

I have been resurrected. I’ve got back into the groove of teaching, which I enjoy.

This time last year I was working on my Waste to Art entry; I’m entering again this year. This year’s theme is waste metal, and I’m back on the 1960s and ’70s ring pulls found on Mt Panorama. I’m still finding a few every time we go up there to walk Bertie. He goes hunting for Maccas scraps and I keep my eyes peeled for ring-pulls. I was going to arrange them on a flat board with little hooks, but I’ve decided to hang them in a mobile. They’ll be painted red and black on the front, with the dirt of Mt Panorama left to cling to the back. They’ll be representing carbon dioxide, one black carbon atom attached to two red oxygen atoms. I might or might not include a found toy car.

On Monday I’ll be heading out to Kandos to help Karen Golland plant pom poms on an empty block of land for Cementa. Oh, the fun! Must take hat and loads of sunscreen!

Anyway, bilbies. An Easter mascot for a country that has a complex relationship to bunnies. A country overrun by rabbits, endlessly working to eradicate them. Better to find a different symbol of fertility and new life. Easter bilbies are cute, almost rabbit like, make nice chocolates. But they haven’t quite taken off, have they? Supermarkets are chockers with rabbits and eggs. The Easter bilby is struggling, like so much of our native fauna.

***

I’m feeling the need to add my two cents’ worth about Belle Gibson and the Whole Pantry and the whole sorry story. I’ve done my share of 2am trawling around the Internet on the cancer trail. The trail starts straightforwardly enough on reputable support sites (like the excellent Ovarian Cancer Australia) and then goes off into personal stories (I couldn’t get enough personal stories, at one point) and then, unless you’re careful, you find yourself in the wild and woolly world of wishful thinking. YouTube is bristling with them, these advocates of what a fellow blogger calls fantasy based medicine. Over the past few days I’ve watched a series of YouTube clips – a regular video blog, or vlog – made by a woman who rejected conventional treatment for breast cancer. She described the arguments she’d had with her oncologist, who told her flatly that without aggressive treatment, she’d die. Still, this woman decided to go it alone and try to heal herself through diet. It didn’t work. To her credit, she kept vlogging as things got worse, and eventually admitted she’d gone down the wrong track. “I’m a cautionary tale,” she told her viewers. The last clip in the series was a tribute made by a friend in her honour. And then we have Belle Gibson. Penguin publishers, a variety of women’s magazines, the Apple company … all so “inspired” by the miraculous story of a diet-based recovery from cancer by a photogenic young woman that they neglect to do a bit of basic fact-checking. I’m glad Belle Gibson was eventually outed as a fraud – it appears she never had cancer at all – before her cookbook hit the shelves. I’m glad because people with cancer deserve as much reputable, responsible information as they can get.

It isn’t easy being green (or pink, teal or purple)

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I’m writing this with Australia batting against India in the background. Steve is standing behind the sofa watching, making “ooff” sounds, which is what he does when watching any sort of sport, whenever there is a significant movement.

On New Year’s Eve at Fiona Green’s place I found myself saying that this year I’d learn the rules of cricket. It’s weird when you hear yourself say something surprising. Where the hell did that come from? I can only guess it had something to do with Dad, who might have been hovering around in spirit – drinks and a big bonfire in a backyard could easily have attracted him. Dad always played and watched cricket and I always sidestepped it because to be honest it always seemed deadly boring to me. Men in white clothes standing solemnly around in the belting sun; the occasional flurry followed by more standing around. My evasion became a lifelong habit. But Steve likes to watch the cricket and when he does, there’s an echo of earlier times. And now I feel slightly bad about living through all these Australian summers and still not knowing the rules of cricket. So I’m going to give it a go. This will not be easy. I will have to fight a strong desire to immediately do something else. Like maybe arranging crockery shards by colour or size, in anticipation of one day making a mosaic table top. Or sorting old photos into albums. Rules of cricket. Why did I say that?

***

When I sat down to write this I was distracted by the cricket. What I was really going to write about to today was Purple Day! Today is international epilepsy awareness day. Epilepsy makes the brain fire off in all directions, leading to fits and seizures. My little nephew Joey succumbed just after his third birthday with a particularly nasty form of the disease, the Doose syndrome, which is resistant to medication. He was having twenty or more seizures a day. These involved sudden “drops” or “flops” to the floor. He’d be conscious again immediately, and sometimes crying because on the way down he might have hit something hard like the edge of a coffee table or a concrete birdbath. So he took to wearing a blue helmet. At the end of 2013, a few months after Dad died, things got so bad that he

Joey with Hazel the therapy dog.

ended up in Sydney Children’s hospital for a long stretch. I remember going to see him there when he was visited by Hazel the therapy dog. I also went upstairs with him and Deb for one of his brain tests. His little scalp had electrodes taped all over it. And he was well and truly over it. Sick of all this crap going on. The good news is that a few weeks later, the seizures had stopped. He got all the way through last year, his first year at school, seizure free! Did the medication combo finally hit the right spot? Had he simply grown out of it? Nobody really knows. Today, in honour of Joey, I’ve purpled up my Facebook profile picture and I’m writing these paragraphs in this blog.

***

Meanwhile, at the end of 2013, I wasn’t feeling that crash-hot myself. It turned out to be primary peritoneal cancer, a variation on ovarian cancer, explored at great length here in this blog. The awareness ribbon for this is teal. Shortly before that, Mum got in on the illness act with a spot of bowel cancer, which thankfully was removed all in one go in one operation, and she didn’t have to have chemo or any further treatments. Now, what colour is the awareness ribbon for bowel cancer? Could it be …. brown? Surely not. Must Google it. Back in a moment.

Wow. There are a lot of awareness ribbons. I guess there’s a lot to be aware of. “Use the search box to find your illness or cause”. Okay. Looks like blue or periwinkle covers the bowel. But using the search term “colon” does in fact bring up a brown ribbon! Speaking of bowel cancer, an ex boyfriend has been diagnosed with it, and is in for a long and involved treatment regime. Thinking of you (while not breaking your anonymity here!)

***

After Deb got breast cancer (pink ribbon, everyone knows that) and Joey started having seizures and Dad died of pulmonary fibrosis and Mum got bowel cancer and before I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, Deb did say, at one point, “What were we in a past life? Axe murderers?” We don’t subscribe to deserved illness theory any more than we subscribe to the deserved good fortune theory. But there are moments that make you wonder. Anyway, we’ve almost got a rainbow of ribbons, just in one family, and all just in the past few years. Before that we’d had a very good run.

***

Which brings me, finally, to the green ribbon, or should I say Greens ribbon, that I’ll be wearing on Saturday, the day of the New South Wales state election. I’m not a member, but I’m happy to support the local candidate, Tracey Carpenter, who has been running a very serious and successful campaign. It’s actually not that hard being green, if you’re able to steel yourself against the waves of warmings and extinctions, fracking and fossil fuel-burning. I’ve been doing a spot of handing out how to vote cards at the pre-polling booth in Bathurst. A couple of weeks ago I went along with Tracey when she drove up to Rylstone in the north of the Bathurst electorate to meet and greet at the annual Rylstone-Kandos show. With iPhone in hand, I spontaneously decided to record her talking about her policies, as she drove. Here it is:

Hair and coral and brains

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I’m thinking coral, I’m thinking brains. I’m thinking brain-like coral, and coral-like brains.

I’m part of the way through crocheting a brain. The small intestines I crocheted last year looked rather like brains, so now I’ve decided to deliberately make brains. This particular piece is all about the process, not the product. It is so satisfying to go round and round the knitting Nancy producing an endless stream of grey matter. I’m going to give this one to Ben Gelin. Ben Gelin is often to be seen in the Hub cafe here in Bathurst. For some reason, recently, we had a quick chat about brains, and how he’d like a new one, and I secretly decided that my new brain would be for him. Speaking of brains – it may be that I blogged about this not very long ago, and that’s why we were having the conversation and here I am repeating myself. Anyway, the French knitting has moved on, there’s more brain.

Meanwhile, the brain-like corals of the Great Barrier Reef were dealt a new blow by the forces of coal and climate change and all those making money thereby. The new Labor premier of Queensland has announced that dredging the reef for a giant coal port is both “sustainable and responsible”. So the corals will cop it from both the dredging process and, further down the line, from the carbon dioxide pollution created by the burning of the coal exported via the port. This morning I read that giant holes in the ground, thought to be the work of asteroids or aliens, were actually down to a much less exciting phenomenon: methane explosions caused by the warming of permafrost due to climate change. We humans may be smart but somehow we have no brains. We’re trashing our own living room.

As for hair … I went to the hairdresser and got myself a new hairdo. After chemo, it grew back seriously grey and I was dithering about what to do. Go with it, or attempt to re-assemble what I looked like a year ago? In the end I went for re-assemble, because I just wasn’t recognising the person in the mirror and I just didn’t feel ready to go straight from being a teenager to middle aged. Oh well, yes, I was a little older than teenage. I am in fact middle aged and in fact have grey hair. But not now. It’s been nuked. As soon as I did it, I began to regret it. I saw nothing but beautiful women with grey hair. So I am, as Anne Frank once said, a bundle of contradictions.

Snake carver almost meets his maker

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Today is overwhelmingly a marking day. I still haven’t quite finished. The last possible moment is tomorrow morning at 9am so I’m not going too badly (considering it’s not yet 6pm the day before, ahem). In between the marking – all done on the computer these days; my red pens sit idle – I’ve been having a couple of other adventures.

The first was a call-out to have a look at some snakes. They were arranged on the grass verge just outside Vi’s house opposite Centennial Park. As I approached with Bertie, I could see a cluster of people gathered around what looked like a posse of live snakes in the grass. I wondered if Bertie would react to them, but he wasn’t so easily fooled. Instead, he gamboled over to meet the people (Hi! Hi! Hi! Anything to eat?). Leif, who made the snakes, finds smooth slim branches down by the river. They remind him of local snakes. So he takes them home, carving, painting and polishing until they look extremely realistic. They’re all anatomically correct: tiger snakes, red-bellied blacks, eastern browns. I asked him if some of his snakes (he has over 50) could go on show at the 200 Plants and Animals exhibition that I’m helping to organise for BCCAN this year. He said yes, as long as we looked after them.

Vi got to know Leif when he rebuilt the brick wall at the front of her house, which, very early on in the life of Bathurst, was an inn. While he was working on the wall, Leif collapsed. Vi called the ambulance. For a while Leif was completely down for the count. They did CPR on him, pressing down on his ribs.

“I went to the other side,” said Leif, standing there with his snakes at his feet.

“What was it like?” I asked.

“It was light and warm. It wasn’t a tunnel, it was more of a rectangle. Maybe it’s because I watch a lot of TV. It was lovely. Then I heard them say, ‘He’s breathing’ and I woke up. I said, ‘Don’t wake me up, I’m having a nice dream’.”

I’m glad he came round, because his snakes will make an excellent contribution to the exhibition.

Then more marking, interspersed with attempts to make decorative cupcake toppers out of fondant icing for my Afternoon Teal on Saturday. I can see why people do whole TAFE courses to get these skills. My teal “ribbons” look disgusting. They’re lumpy and very unribbon-like. They look like a child’s efforts with Play Doh. I feel better about my fondant ovaries. I was able to use a cookie-cutter to get the basic oval shape; then it was just a matter of using food colouring marker pens (yes! there is such a thing!) to draw on the details. It’ll be interesting to see people actually eating them.

In search of brain relief

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Brain beanie/candypop creations/Etsy

I’m tired of being led by the nose by my brain. I think we’re going off in one direction, only to find we’re actually going in another, or around in circles. Or I’ll be somewhere and find that my brain has wandered off without me.

Meanwhile, and quite possibly related, my sleep patterns have gone down the toilet. I’m not getting enough when it’s dark, so I sleep for odd stretches in broad daylight.

I just read on Twitter that the human brain runs on about 12 watts. I think mine’s working on about 3 watts, but those three watts are doing enough to cause trouble. I can feel the brain cells jiggling; whether this jiggling is productive or not, I can’t yet tell.

For better or worse, today my brain has been exercised by the following:

A video about how to make fondant icing for cupcakes. This relates to a fundraising Afternoon Teal I’ll be hosting in February.
The Planning and Assessment Commission’s approval of a dirty great open cut coal mine on the Liverpool Plains, some of the most productive farming land in the country. This mine will dig up to 10 million tonnes of coal a year for 30 years. This is deeply crazy stuff. To have any hope of heading off a disastrous rise in temperature, we need to keep remaining fossil fuels in the ground. But the PAC’s report simply weighs up pros and cons as if half a century of climate science simply didn’t exist.
Interesting information, over a lunchtime chat, about some taxidermied local animals up at the big old Catholic school on the hill behind our place. The stuffed animals have been looking out of their glass cabinets at generations of uniformed schoolboys coming and going. I’m wondering if it might be possible to give these creatures a weekend outing, to participate in an exhibition of 200 plants and animals that I’m plotting …
A car that has a yarnbomb-style all-over coat made by near neighbour Steph Luke. When I took the wigs and hat she’d loaned me to get through last year’s chemo baldness, I found her in the middle of crocheting some additional touches. There are certain plans for this car. Stay tuned.
How to attach ring pulls to a sheet of translucent perspex for the coming Waste to Art exhibition. Answer: little clear hooks. There’ll be a mass of these on the translucent sheet representing carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere.

I’m still off coffee, by the way. But lots of tea. A friend suggested today that I stop drinking caffeinated tea if I want to get any sleep. This thought makes me want to curl up and not bother to go on. So probably not a great idea right now.

The squawkin' galah

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