following morning, and then Mum, Ellie and I headed off to Melbourne, listening to Love [Song] Dedications Hour on the radio. Lovely.
After many, many hours of sitting on a terribly uncomfortable bed in the emergency ward being poked, prodded, pricked and eventually cannulated, I was finally given a slightly more comfortable bed on the third floor. This floor is divided into two areas. One wing is for the little kids and babies, and the other is for the adolescents. I was amused to see that the sign on the door to the adolescents’ wing had ‘3East’ written on it, graffiti-style. It was like the hospital was trying to appear ‘cool’ to the teenage patients. I found this quite funny, in a sad way.
Anyway, so I was given a bed in a ward that already held five patients. Mum and Ellie were allowed to crash on two ridiculously soft, beige, suede couches in a small meeting room on the ward. None of us had much sleep. According to Ellie, Mum’s snoring was worse than usual. Frankly, I was surprised anyone in the wards nearby was able to sleep. Neither door nor earphones could block out the sounds of Mum snoring.
* * *
Peta Rose Margetts made her entrance into the world at 3.37am on 19 October 1992. She arrived courtesy of an emergency caesar after a twenty-one-hour labour had failed to encourage her — she was already ten days late. I was most unimpressed, as I had spent my birthday labouring, but she seemed determined that we would not share our birthdays! Peta and I did not meet until later that day. I knew she was big — five kilos exactly — and she was long, so long that someone had to bring a measuring tape in, as she was longer than the measuring board! She was huge, about the size of a three-month-old baby, with enormous hands and feet. Right from the start she was the most content child. Even before we left the hospital people were enamoured with her. She would smile at the nurses, who fought over her to give her night feeds while they let me (now a mother of five) get some rest. When the paediatrician checked her over before we left the hospital, he was amazed at her strength. At just six days old she was up on all fours with her head sticking up over the edge of the crib.
Peter and I took our last addition home to settle in with her four older sisters. They all adored her and were delighted with this very happy baby. Naomi was ten; Ellie, eight-and-a-half; Madeline, seven; and Justine, five-and-a-half — it was a crazy house full of willing helpers! Peta Rose, as everyone called her, seemed to know her place in the world. She slept through the night from ten days old and it never bothered her if I raised my voice. She was the most wonderful baby.
Peta was very transportable — she needed to be, as she had come into a busy house with school and after-school activities and sport all weekend. When she was six weeks old I visited my obstetrician for a check-up; he was enthralled. Peta stood rigidly on his knee, screaming her lungs out, tears falling down her cheeks. She looked like a mini-warrior. Even after all the babies he had seen, he thought she was extraordinary. He said she was obviously well into her development before she was born.
This pattern continued with Peta. She was always on the ninety-seventh percentile on the growth charts, and she did everything early — solid food, crawling, walking, talking. Our maternal and child welfare nurse would say, ‘I have never seen a baby with such gross motor skill development!’ My mother, a retired schoolteacher, was astounded by Peta’s vocabulary. At fourteen months she would walk around the house saying, ‘It’s disgusting.’
* * *
Thursday 20 August 2009
Somehow, we all managed to wake at an early hour and function somewhat normally. This would be a day of sitting around — literally. Thankfully, one of the educators at the hospital gave me a password for the laptop in the chest of drawers next to my bed. Despite there being blocks on nearly every social networking site you could think of, Facebook was not blocked. Hallelujah! The discovery of an abandoned room fan right next to my bed was our next blessing. The whole floor was stiflingly hot and ridiculously stuffy. The breeze from that fan was heavenly!
Eventually, at the end of the day, I was taken down to the second floor for a bone marrow aspirate and a lumbar puncture. A bone marrow aspirate, for those out of the loop, is a procedure where they insert an obscenely long needle into your hip and take a scraping of the cells in your bone marrow. This is apparently very painful, but thankfully they give you a general anaesthetic so you don’t feel a thing. A lumbar puncture involves another obscenely long needle, this time inserted into the base of your spine to extract some spinal fluid for testing. When I came out of theatre I was a bit out of it, understandably, and pretty much went straight back to sleep the moment I woke up! Thankfully, they wheeled me back to 3East on my recovery bed. It would have been quite funny if I’d had to walk!
Back on the ward, I said goodbye to Ellie and Mum, who went across the road to Ronald McDonald House for a proper night’s sleep while I went back to my dozing. However, I was soon rudely interrupted — by myself. The drugs they had given me to send me to sleep, and the lumbar puncture in general, had upset my system and I was experiencing my very first medically-induced bout of nausea and vomiting. What a joyous time. I signalled to the closest nurse that I thought I might be sick, but she was too late with the sick bag. There was watery vomit all over me, and all over the floor. Luckily, I was wearing a hospital gown, so no real harm was done to my clothes, and I needed a shower anyway. You could say that the nausea was my body’s way of telling me it was time for a shower.
* * *
Friday 21 August 2009
Today was an interesting day. The educators finally convinced me to attend ‘school’. Off one of the other small wards in 3East there was a ramp leading to an external recreation room. It looked like a big rumpus room, with a pool table, a wall of books, art on the walls and four small study alcoves next to a bunch of tables with strange, misshapen, curved sides. Attending this ‘school’ were a few students of varying ages. Some were doing remedial maths, and a few others were just about to begin some creative writing. As soon as I walked in, with my fluid pump connected to the cannula in my hand, I thought, ‘Brilliant! I haven’t done creative writing like this since primary school!’ I was really getting into the writing when a nurse came to tell me I had a ‘special visitor’. I went out, all excited, only to discover my grandmother. Without Mum or Ellie, who had deserted me to go and do something, somewhere, I spent a very uninteresting forty-five minutes or so with Grandma, who had come to see me while she waited for a bus home to Bairnsdale, after trekking to Melbourne for something related to her beloved Catholic Women’s League.
After Grandma left and Mum and Ellie had miraculously returned, we met with John Heath, who was to be my oncology doctor, in the small meeting room where Ellie and Mum had slept on the Wednesday. Because I had a drip in, one of the nurses, also called Ellie, had to come to the meeting with us. I never did like her much. She was super nice to all the other patients on the ward, but never me. She sat through the meeting with a bored frown on her face and played with her Volley shoe. I watched her and thought, ‘We’re sitting here listening to John, our nurse coordinator Jayne, and an oncology fellow discuss my diagnosis and what will happen to me, and you’re playing with your shoe. Real nice!’
On a lighter note, they told us that: yes, you will have approximately three years of treatment, and you will lose your hair, but they thought that my diagnosis of ALL (Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia) would result in my eventually being cured. Bonus!
I truly thought that meeting would never end, but we were eventually released so that I could have my very first blood transfusion. It’s a little off-putting to watch the blood slowly leaving the bag and entering my drip. As the bag empties it leaves plenty of residue behind, which, frankly, looks a little gruesome.
During this time, I was inundated with texts and phone calls from worried friends who had been told about my diagnosis. From what I can gather, there were a few tears from some of the teachers, and plenty more from my friends and classmates.
